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The first register of All Party Parliamentary Groups since the general election has just been published, and 519 of the 553 groups have vanished, leaving just 34.
What is an APPG?
All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) are self-selecting groups of MPs and Lords with an interest in a particular policy area. Most groups are supported by a secretariat, which is usually a charity, membership body or consultancy organisation.
The logic behind APPGs is to create legitimate avenues for experts and interested parties from outside Parliament to discuss policy with MPs and Lords – but unfortunately they can also be vehicles for corruption.
Our WhoFundsThem project is going to be taking a closer look at APPGs, to see which MPs are members (this information is currently not published) and a closer look at the organisations providing secretariat support. We have also updated our public APPGs spreadsheet with the new register.
So why have so many groups disappeared?
A change in rules last year meant that we saw a huge drop-off from the 800+ groups registered in March to around 450 in April, and then a steady increase to 553 by the end of May. The 28th August edition has just 34 registered groups.
Since the general election, we think are there are three factors that might be influencing the dramatic decline in registered groups:
- New officer rule – there’s a new rule that MPs are now only allowed to be an officer of a maximum of six groups.
- The reduced size of the opposition – the ‘all party’ nature of APPGs means that they must have at least one member of the official opposition as an officer. Before Parliament was dissolved for the election in May, the then Labour opposition had 206 MPs. Now, the Conservative opposition has 121 MPs. Conservative Lords are allowed to be officers of APPGs, but the APPG Chair must be an MP.
- Summer recess admin delay – in order to meet the deadline for this register, groups had to hold their new AGM to elect officers before summer recess began on 30 July. This gave them just a couple of weeks after the election, which was a hectic time, especially for the majority of MPs who were new to Parliament, and busy setting up their offices.
What next?
Given that we’ve just had one register, we can’t be sure which of these factors is having the biggest effect, but a second edition of the register should help us to understand the scale of the admin delay problem.
We expect a large number of groups will have used the summer to get established and recruit officers and members – but they will need to hold an AGM fairly soon after Parliament returns next week in order to make the new register, which should be published in about six weeks’ time.
We’ll be looking in detail at the work of these groups, and the people behind them, in our project WhoFundsThem. Please consider donating to help us do more of this work.
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
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Tl;dr: Parliament has released new data, which we’ve made available in a simple format.
As part of the new release of the register of financial interests (which we blogged about yesterday) – Parliament has released CSVs of the new edition of the register. This isn’t just a better way of getting the data from each page individually, but contains much richer information than we’ve had previously.
Earlier this year, Parliament improved its data collection for MPs’ interests – meaning it collects much more structured data for different kinds of interests than the free text data that was released previously.
This is really good news – the work put in improving the data collection is so hard to do from the outside. Lots of effort has been made to clean up data in the past, but it was just fundamentally too broken. This is a big improvement on that – and means we can focus our efforts on where we can add the most value.
We know that Parliament is looking at creating data tools to sit on top of this – but in the meantime we’ve quickly made a single Excel file – and an analysis site to explore the data. We’ve also added our IDs from TheyWorkForYou and information on the MPs party. The great thing about Parliament making more data available is how that data can then be expanded by other datasets – for instance, the data now contains Companies House IDs, which could be joined to a range of datasets.
Please email if there are tweaks that would make the spreadsheet more useful to you!
Some example queries that are possible with this (give the site a minute to load):
Whenever Parliament ups its game, we need to think about what we’re going to do to build on top of that. As part of our WhoFundsThem project, we’re working to create simple summaries of declarations of interests. In general, the register is full of data but lacking in context. What do these organisations who have donated do? What’s the top-line figure on outside income? Is this affecting how MPs behave in parliament?
These are the questions we want to answer through WhoFundsThem. If you also want to know the answer, you can donate to support our work.
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Tldr: The first financial interests register of this Parliament has been published. We’ve updated MP profiles on TheyWorkForYou, made the data available as a spreadsheet, and with our WhoFundsThem project we’re working to create easy-to-understand summaries.
Update: Even more spreadsheets – see new blog post.
When MPs do additional work for other employers or receive donations or gifts, they have to declare it in the register of members’ financial interests. On TheyWorkForYou, we republish this register and highlight changes over time. We also publish the data as an Excel spreadsheet.
At the moment, we’re gearing up to start our new project WhoFundsThem – where we’ll work with volunteers to create new analysis and summaries of MPs’ financial interests.
With that in mind, we’ve been poring through the new register. As with previous releases, the quantity and quality of entries varies drastically, and crucial context behind the entries is missing. One of the things we want to make happen with this project is improving both the rules on publication, and a higher standard of disclosure from MPs themselves.
The recent improvements to data collection mean the data we do have is now much more structured and useful. For example, Category 3 (Gifts, benefits and hospitality) and 4 (Visits outside the UK) now have clearer division between itemised expenses and total costs. However, the big problem is still inconsistency between MPs on what is being declared – both where the rules say disclosure is optional (unpaid directorships), and categories where we suspect information is missing that the rules say should be disclosed.
As the first register after the election, we were expecting almost all MPs to have declared donations received during the election. The Guide to Rules is clear that under Category 2, each MP must declare all support “for candidacy at an election for parliamentary or non-parliamentary office, which has a value of more than £1,500”. For some MPs, the list of these donations goes into five pages, but for others this section is empty. It’s *possible* that these MPs had no money behind their election campaigns (or every donor was beneath the £1500 threshold) – it just doesn’t seem very likely. We’ll be keeping track of this over future releases.
In general, the register is full of data but lacking in context. What do these organisations who have donated actually do? What’s the top-line figure on outside income? Is this affecting how MPs behave in parliament?
These are the questions we want to answer through WhoFundsThem. If you also want to know the answer, you can donate to support our work.
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My colleague Alex has already written about looking forward from this election, so here I am going to look back at the technical work that was involved for the election, and in getting all the new MPs into TheyWorkForYou.
Boundary changes
This election was the first UK Parliament election with boundary changes since 2010. Due to the long-running nature of TheyWorkForYou, which has been around now for over 20 years, this can throw up some interesting challenges. In this particular case, it turned out we were using two different JSON data lists of constituencies – both containing the same data, but one also included the other Parliaments and Assemblies, whilst the other included alternative names for some constituencies. I took the opportunity presented to merge these together and update the bits of code to use the one consolidated dataset, and then added in the 650 new constituencies to the JSON data.
Loading the new constituency data into TheyWorkForYou then threw up another historical problem – the constituency table was still using the very old Latin-1 character set encoding, rather than a more modern encoding such as UTF-8, that almost everything we have uses. This had been fine until now, with even Ynys Môn covered by that encoding, but the new constituency of Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr contained a letter that Latin-1 could not cope with, leading to a quick emergency upgrade of the table to UTF-8 (thankfully this is a backwards compatible encoding, so worked without issue).
We had already generated data of the new constituencies and loaded these into our lookup service MapIt before Christmas. Ordnance Survey more recently published the official dataset of the boundaries, which we could then import via our usual processes, though even this raised a small issue to be resolved. It turned out in the last data release OS had given the parts of two county council electoral divisions with detached parts (Lightwater, West End and Bisley and Thorpe St Andrew) different identifiers, which they had reverted in their new release, causing our import script to get a bit confused – resolved with a small manual script.
Displaying on TheyWorkForYou
In the period before the election, we knew people would be using our site as a postcode lookup, perhaps to look up their previous MP but perhaps also expecting something useful for the upcoming election, which we wanted to provide, and so we used Democracy Club’s API to show election candidates and link to their WhoCanIVoteFor and WhereDoIVote services. We also displayed your boundary changes using the new constituency data mentioned above.
TheyWorkForYou isn’t just the UK Parliament, though, it also covers the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, and the Northern Ireland Assembly, so we also had to maintain the provision of that information to people – email alerts for those bodies continued throughout as usual, and the postcode lookup kept showing people their representatives in the devolved nations.
Once the election closed, we automatically updated our messaging, and the next day switched back to our normal behaviour of taking you directly to your MP page in England, and showing you your MP and other representatives elsewhere.
We had a fun issue where some people were getting their new MP, whereas some were getting the old MP – during the period of dissolution, when there are no MPs, we have a configuration flag to enable the site to know it should return the latest result even if it’s not current (you don’t want this all the time, when e.g. an MP has resigned or died), but once new data was being loaded in, one database query was returning results in a random order; fixed by adding some sorting by descending end date.
Election result data
At the last election in 2019, we took a live feed of election results from Democracy Club, who have collected all the candidate information for their Who Can I Vote For service – which all began as the result of a mySociety project back in 2010.
Democracy Club were performing the same service this time, and gratifyingly it was quite a small change to have our 2019 code work with any 2024 changes to the source information (incidentally, there aren’t a lot of narrative doctests in our codebase, but I quite like the one in use there!).
This script would do half the job, of taking in some source data (who has been elected, and including their TheyWorkForYou identifier if they already had one due to being a previous representative of some sort) and amending our source JSON data to add the newly elected representative.
The other half is loading that source data into the TheyWorkForYou database for display on the site. Our normal loading script works fine, but looks through all the source data to see if there have been any changes to take account of. For the election, we don’t need it to do all that, so I tweaked the script to only do the minimal necessary to load in newly created information.
These two scripts were then added to a cron on our server, running every few minutes through the night. I did stay up long enough to check that the first few worked okay, before leaving it to itself from then on. I also set it up to pipe its output to our Slack channel, so people could see it operating:
This also meant as the final few trickle through, it’s popping up reminding us it’s still doing its job:
All the results (bar the one we’re still waiting for) are now committed to the repository, joining all our other open data.
Support TheyWorkForYou and our work
TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem are run by mySociety, a small UK charity. We’re a very efficient operation and do a lot with a small team; if we had bit more money, we could achieve a lot more.
We want to see a transparent, resilient democracy, with equal access to information, representation and voice for citizens. If you believe in this vision please donate today to enable greater transparency and accountability of the next government.
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Image: Moritz Kindler
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Most seats have now declared a winner (with a few recounts ongoing) and the Labour Party has won a large majority in Parliament. That will mean a change in government and big changes to what happens in Parliament in the next few years.
Understanding your new MP
New MPs have been added to TheyWorkForYou – you can find yours using the postcode search on the homepage.
With so many new MPs many of these pages are empty (for the moment). To get an alert when your new/returning MP has spoken, voted, or received a written answer: enter your postcode here.
If you’re interested in learning more about the weeks ahead, the Hansard Society have published a guide of how the start of the new Parliament will work.
Subscribe to our Democracy/Parliaments newsletter
Understanding who represents you
Over the next few weeks, we will be adding MPs’ contact details into WriteToThem where you can also see details of your local councillors and representatives in the UK’s devolved Parliaments.
We want to help people navigate this complicated system and are writing a series of guides to help individuals and campaigns ask the right questions in the right places.
The first guide is up now: Who Represents Me – explaining what all the UK’s different parliaments, governments and councils do. To hear when we release more, sign up to our mailing list.
Understanding your new constituency
For this election, the boundaries of many constituencies have changed. In some cases the change is small, but others represent big shifts in the kinds of people and places who live within the constituency.
The Local Intelligence Hub, which we’ve made with the Climate Coalition, has a range of information and stats about your new constituency. Check out the data for your constituency! We’ll be adding lots more in the following months.
We’re also publishing a big list of constituencies, and the overlap with local authorities and the old constituencies. If you need to update data about what constituencies a list of postcodes are within, we’ve made a quick tool where you can paste a list of GB postcodes into the browser, and then copy the new constituencies out.
For more complex conversions, have a look at MapIt, which can convert coordinates and postcodes into a wide range of administrative geographies.
What happens next
As MPs get settled, we will be picking up our work on WhoFundsThem, working with a group of volunteers to produce summaries of MPs’ registers of members interest, adding context and clarity to improve the transparency and understanding of MPs’ financial interests.
For more details on this, and our other plans, please sign up to our newsletter.
Support TheyWorkForYou and our work
And here’s the bit where we ask for money.
TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem are run by mySociety, a small UK charity.
We’re a very efficient operation and do a lot with a small team: at the moment TheyWorkForYou, which is used by millions of people every year, is run with the equivalent of about two people.
If we had a bit more money, we could achieve a lot more.
We want to see a transparent, resilient democracy, with equal access to information, representation and voice for citizens.
If you believe in this vision please donate today to enable greater transparency and accountability of the next government.
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There’s going to be a UK general election on 4 July. We’ve written a 10-point guide to explain how the election works.
Here’s how our tools can help you cut through the noise and find out what’s happening in your constituency:
Assess your previous MP’s activities
Parliament was dissolved on Thursday 30 May. After this point there are technically no MPs.
Instead, your former MPs just become candidates (if they’ve chosen to stand again – many haven’t).
That doesn’t stop you from looking up your previous MP’s voting record and register of interests on TheyWorkForYou, and comparing it with the way other parties’ MPs voted.
In case you missed it, we recently changed the way we calculate voting summaries to prioritise actions, not words – making our summaries even more accurate and even more useful.
Consider your new candidates in your new constituency
We’ve made some changes so that when you enter your postcode into TheyWorkForYou, you’ll be taken to a new General Election page that will give you an up-to-date list of candidates standing in your constituency.
This page links to a much more detailed breakdown from WhoCanIVoteFor, made by our friends at Democracy Club. On WhoCanIVoteFor, you can find information about your candidates’ previous attempts to run for office, any statements or election materials they’ve made, and links to their social media pages. Once you’ve looked up your postcode, bookmark that link; it’s ideal for answering people on your neighbourhood Facebook or Next Door groups who will inevitably be asking who’s standing in your area.
On TheyWorkForYou and WhoCanIVoteFor you’ll find a handy map comparing your new constituency (pink) with your old one (grey). Here’s what that looks like for me, in Leeds:
What impact will the new boundaries have on this election?
We can’t know for sure until after the election, but don’t forget you can also check out the Local Intelligence Hub for loads more info about both your old and new constituency. Just put in your postcode and you’ll find public opinion polls, candidate information, nearby campaigning groups and more. The hub is made in partnership with the Climate Coalition, so you’ll find a wealth of climate and nature data too.
This information is absolutely invaluable for when canvassers come knocking at your door and ask what your priorities are. You can hit them with stats about things like what support there is for sustainable energy or net zero in your constituency; or share your opinions on how your previous MP voted on an issue that matters to you. Maybe even give them the link – www.localintelligencehub.com – so they can explore for themselves.
Build your own clever things using our free APIs
Want to dig into the data yourself? Maybe even build your own tools using the new boundaries? For those with a little coding knowledge, we’ve made the building blocks available in a number of formats.
Mapit, our our geographical postcode lookup website has the old and new constituencies, many other geographies, and the register of members interest for the previous Parliament is available as one big spreadsheet.
Help us do more of this work
Whoever is elected, they need to understand the importance of transparency and accountability — and we’ll be making sure that happens. Please consider donating.
Header image by Element5 Digital on Unsplash
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Last night there was a vote to allow MPs to be excluded from Parliament (after a risk assessment) if arrested on suspicion of a serious offence. This vote passed by a single vote.
The problem is, looking across several sources of voting information, there’s not a good agreement on what the actual totals were. Ultimately the tellers count is authoritative, but this problem reflects the complicated way that MPs vote.
The result(?)
Source Described result Count of names votes.parliament.uk 170 Ayes, 169 Noes 169 Ayes, 169 Noes hansard.parliament.uk 170 Ayes, 169 Noes 169 Ayes, 168 Noes theyworkforyou.com
(teller result)169 Ayes, 168 Noes
170 Ayes, 169 Noes (speech with teller result)169 Ayes, 168 Noes What’s going on here?
In the voting lobby, there are two different systems going on to record votes:
- An electronic pass based voting system – run by the clerks, that feeds into votes.parliament.uk and Hansard.
- A counting system run by the tellers – a MP for each side is in each lobby, and if they agree the count, that’s the count used to make the decision.
Meanwhile, at TheyWorkForYou, we use tidied up division names created by votes.parliament.uk, but the division lists from Hansard, and add the names to get the number of people on each side.
Votes.parliament.uk will be quickest with who voted – this feeds into the Hansard list, but the two can get out of sync if one is updated but not the other.
In this case, Rebecca Harris is counted in votes.parliament.uk but not in Hansard. This could be for a few reasons, for instance she may not have been able to use the pass system for some reason but was recorded manually and added as a correction but after it was fed into Hansard. We’ve queried this with her. In any case, what the tellers counted is the authoritative result for the vote. They could also have been right – and someone else forgot/was not able to tap in who should have done.
But if the votes.parliament.uk count was right, it would mean the tellers in the Aye lobby overcounted by one. This would make it a draw, and in a draw the speaker will cast a deciding vote against the motion (as there isn’t a majority for it). When it’s down to one vote – you want to have faith the system got the right answer.
Better ways are possible
We think it should be easier for MPs to vote, and have previously recommended that:
- The House of Commons should in normal circumstances, defer votes to a standardised voting time (within ‘core hours’), where multiple votes are held in succession.
- These votes should be held through a fast electronic means – whether through terminals, voting pass systems, or apps.
- Current proxy voting schemes should be extended to personal discretion to designate a proxy – e.g. a set number of days a year a proxy vote can be allocated, no questions asked.
Electronic voting and a voting time would be bringing back good practice from the devolved Parliaments and help MPs make better use of their time than standing in division lobbies. But as well as being slow – there are clear questions to ask about the accuracy of the current approach.
How MPs vote has big impacts on how our country works – getting it right matters.
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WhoFundsThem is our new project looking to uncover the influence of money in politics. You can donate or volunteer to support this project.
Last month, we asked “What happened to all the APPGs?” because between March and April over a third of All Party Parliamentary Groups were deregistered, from 722 down to just 445. This story was covered in the Byline Times and the Parliament Matters podcast.
On Monday, we got a partial answer to our question.
The May register shows an increase of 90 groups – up to 535.
We’ve crunched the numbers, and found that 86 of the 277 groups that were removed in April have been re-registered for the May edition. We can’t know for sure why this happened, but we know that Parliamentary authorities did an audit of compliance ahead of the April register, which might have contributed to lots of groups being removed. It’s possible that these groups have since passed the necessary requirements to be re-registered in time for the May edition.
Taking into account the last three registers, we found:
- 2 groups were deregistered in May (Thrombosis and UK Shared Prosperity Fund)
- 6 new groups were registered in May (Channel 4, Midlands Engine, Neurodiversity in Defence & National Security, Rare, Genetic and Undiagnosed Conditions, Slovenia and Tajikistan)
- 14 new groups were registered in April
- 86 groups were removed in April, but re-registered in May
- 205 groups were removed in April, but haven’t re-registered
- 429 groups were present in March, April and May
Dive into the data yourself
We’ve updated our public spreadsheet with the new register and an ‘All groups’ tab that shows which groups fall into the six categories above.
What next?
We’ve launched our WhoFundsThem project which is requesting information from all APPGs (yes, our job just got a bit bigger!).
We need your help – please consider volunteering, or donating £10 to help make this work happen.
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We’ve kickstarted the WhoFundsThem project, and now we have a (tight!) timeline of work
WhoFundsThem is our new project looking to uncover the influence of money in politics. You can donate or volunteer to support this project.
On Friday, we sent our first batch of requests for information to 25 All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) as part of our WhoFundsThem work.
This is a test batch to see how well the template we’ve made works as a method for getting information back from APPGs. The new rules require them to make quite a lot of different kinds of information available, and there are 445 APPGs — so we want to ask in a way that makes sense for them, and for us.
We’re asking for this information because we think it’s important to have it openly available for the public benefit. There are loads of possible uses for it: for example, we’d like to improve the APPG membership information we include on the Local Intelligence Hub, but once the information is public, it will be available for all sorts of other projects and individuals to use.
To select the lucky 25 APPGs who would make up our test batch, we took Parliament’s A-Z list of all of the APPGs, numbered them, and then randomly generated 25 numbers. The selected APPGs were:
- Africa
- Denmark
- Japan
- Poland
- South Africa
- Tibet
- Artificial Intelligence
- Arts and Heritage
- Biodiversity in the UK Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies
- Children of Alcoholics
- Deafness
- Disability
- Ethnic Minority Business Owners
- First Do No Harm
- Future of Work
- Human-Relevant Science
- Internet, Communications and Technology
- Life Sciences
- Microplastics
- Packaging Manufacturing Industry
- Responsible Vaping
- SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) House Builders
- Sport
- Taxation
- United Nations Global Goals for Sustainable Development
On Friday, we emailed these groups a copy of the template, and informed them that as per the rules they’ve got 28 days to get back to us, making a deadline of Friday 7 June 2024. After this deadline we’ll review the feedback and responses, make any adjustments necessary, and then email the template to all of the remaining 420 APPGs. This should give us responses from every APPG by the middle of July.
Don’t forget, this is just one of the two parts of the WhoFundsThem project. While we’re waiting for APPG responses, we’ll spend the month of May recruiting volunteers, and then in June we’ll begin answering questions for the other stream of the project which looks at the Register of Members’ Financial Interests (RMFI). By mid-July, we’re hoping to have turned those answers into individual summaries for each MP. Then the right of reply process begins: MPs will have a month to respond to our summary of their financial interests.
All being well, as we send off these summaries to MPs, we’ll be able to switch back to looking at APPGs, as the returns from the second batch should be back ready for us to clean and analyse. By the end of August, we should have both clean APPG data and RFMI summaries with MP feedback. We’ll then spend some time auditing this data ready for publication in the autumn.
Well, that’s the plan at least!
If you’re interested in being one of the volunteers who will work on this exciting new project, you have until 28 May to fill in our short application form! On Tuesday evening (14th), we’re hosting a Q&A event to explain more about the project and answer any questions about volunteering. We know not everyone can give up their time, though, so if you want to support projects like these in another way, please consider financially supporting us.
Want to find out more about APPGs? I wrote a blog post last month explaining what APPGs are, how the rules changed, and the impact that change had.
As ever, if you’re interested in the work we do, make sure you’re signed up to our newsletter. Thanks!
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If you value the work mySociety and TheyWorkForYou do, please consider whether you can make a donation.
We have a good track record of making Parliament more open, provide essential tools to civil society and small charities, and with our platform a little support can go a long way. If you would like to make a larger donation to support specific work, or to match-fund other donations – please get in touch.
Our MPs in Parliament have many roles, but one of the most important is that they make decisions on the laws that govern us, and these decisions can affect every aspect of how we live our lives.
TheyWorkForYou’s voting record summaries are part of a number of different arguments about what the role of MPs is, and how Parliament should work.
As well as listing individual votes in Parliament, our voting summaries give an overview of how MPs have voted on policies that come up in multiple votes. We strongly stand by the principle of our summaries, but don’t think there’s only one way of doing it. Using a grant from the Newby Trust, we’ve been reviewing our methods and refining our approaches to voting records.
The key headline is that we’re going to sharpen the focus in our approach. The main changes are:
- We are limiting our policy summaries (with some exceptions) to votes that in some ways use Parliamentary powers (votes that are about action rather than words).
- We are experimenting with including decisions taken without a vote (“agreements”) as part of TheyWorkForYou’s policy summaries.
- We have simplified the two-tier structure (previously strong and weak votes) used to calculate scores to “scoring votes”, and “informative votes” – where the latter does not contribute to the overall headline score.
- We have stopped counting absences towards scoring for a vote (previously seen as the same as an ‘abstention’).
- We have refreshed our explanation of Parliamentary voting, added clearer explanations of why we think our summaries are important to the individual summary pages, and added and moved content around the different parts of the MP summary.
We have written a longer document explaining how these changes achieve our goals.
This change is being applied alongside a backlog of new policy lines that we’ve been reviewing with our new criteria for inclusion. While these may be big shifts in principle, in practice most existing summaries stay exactly the same. It’s a progression and simplification rather than a revolution.
To see our voting summaries for your MP, search for your postcode on TheyWorkForYou and click ‘Voting Summaries’.
What we want to achieve with our summaries
In thinking about our voting summaries, we wanted to clearly define what we’re trying to accomplish. This has led to two headline goals:
We want to present clear and accurate summaries of how individual MPs have voted, for use by the public.
- As a point of principle, it should be possible and straightforward to find out how MPs have acted on behalf of their constituents.
- The top-line display of information should be a good reflection of the data that was used to create it – balancing clarity and accuracy. We should provide options for people to learn or explore more, with the expectation that most won’t, and so the clarity of the summary matters.
- While we aspire to produce information that is also of use to people with a professional interest in Parliament, this need might be better met through other tools or summaries. For instance, while it is possible to compare different MPs through voting records, it is not the main purpose of these summaries.
In line with our general approach, we want to align with and amplify citizen perspectives of how MPs should work, as voiced by Citizens’ Assemblies (in particular the Democracy in the UK Citizens Assembly) and polling.
- Historically, we’ve seen that making the actions of MPs more visible changes their behaviour.
- We need to be conscious of the likely effects of our summaries, and ensure they reflect our values, democratic principles and approach. We want to anchor our approach in wider ideas of how our democracy works rather than our own opinions.
- We also need to be aware of when pressure on individual MPs is not the best way to achieve systemic change. As such we need to consider where our work reinforces rather than changing parliamentary systems that are hostile to MPs from groups historically excluded from Parliament (e.g. women, ethnic minorities, disabled MPs).
A longer document explaining how these changes achieve these goals can be read here.
The impact of this change
Most of the top-level summaries on the site (73%) are completely unaffected by these changes. 82% of MP ‘scores’ are either the same, or have a stronger/weaker version of the same alignment (i.e. the adjustment has not affected our assessment of whether the MP is for or against a policy). About 14% of connections between MP and policies are removed, which is a combination of removing seven policy lines that were made up entirely of votes that did not directly use Parliamentary power, and longer running policies being confined to a narrower time frame. The remaining changes are “a mix for and against” assignments becoming more clear (or the reverse), and a small group (about 120 out of 80,000) where the direction of the score has changed (i.e. where someone was voting for and is now seen as voting against – this is mostly concentrated in two policies). You can read more about this in our longer summary.
This is good because we don’t generally want these to be too sensitive to the exact formula used: the kind of broad points we’re making should be reachable no matter which method is applied. Ultimately only a small group of votes have been removed from policies, and the positions we were displaying before were mostly driven by votes that already passed the “use of powers” criteria. The goal of this process is to simplify how we work and enable clearer explanations of what we’re doing – but the general end product isn’t massively changed by adopting these new rules.
A process, not a destination
This isn’t where we stop. This update is a step in the journey.
There is a growing clarity issue that for long-serving MPs there are now quite a lot of policies — and part of our work creating summaries should be helping people find the relevant information they’re looking for.
There is also a pending question about presenting a retrospective on the current Parliament during the next election. With the technical work we’ve done, it is now much easier to explore alternate approaches to displaying this data.
We are considering how we can best do this, and how we work with others to ensure we are capturing the important issues of the last Parliament.
Making other tools available
One kind of complaint about voting summaries is that they do not provide an easy way of drawing out small differences between two MPs on how they voted. This is true – we might say two MPs voted a mixture of for and against a policy, but in practice they took opposite positions on different votes.
In our voting summaries we’ve made the decision to focus on providing information that makes sense for a constituent looking at their MP – we produce better summaries by focusing on specific kinds of users we want to make sure it works for. But for our own work as well as to support others, we want to provide a wider range of tools and information for both citizens and specialists.
Our previous approach to voting was deeply tied technically with the Public Whip (originally a companion project to TheyWorkForYou, but not run by mySociety). This means we had limited ability to take big swings in our approach: while we indirectly maintain it through the data feed, we can’t change the basic functioning of the Public Whip.
To implement the changes described above, we have internally created a Public Whip replacement (TheyWorkForYou Votes) that we’re using to update voting records, and provide new analysis tools to help us understand votes, giving us easy understanding of the parliamentary dynamics of a vote and basic analysis of the motion. In the next year, we want to talk to more people who want better tools for working with raw voting information, to help shape this tool for a public release.
Supporting our work
In our voting records work we have an approach that has public support, and we think serves an important purpose. But we don’t think this is the only or best way of creating voting summaries: we want to be able to be reactive to how Parliament is changing, and always making our coverage and approach better. We also want to work to encourage better transparency and public understanding at the source, through improving how Parliament works.
If you value the work we do, please consider whether you can support us financially. We have a good track record, and with our platform a little support can go a long way. If you would like to make a larger donation to support specific work, or to match-fund other donations, please get in touch.
In the next few weeks we will be announcing a new project involving volunteers and the register of members interests. If you’re interested in hearing more about that, please sign up to our volunteer mailing list.
