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):

• MPs with property in the US 
• Gifts from Lawn Tennis Association 
• Donations over £50,000 

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.

 

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

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

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.

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:

1. Africa
2. Denmark
3. Japan
4. Poland
5. South Africa
6. Tibet
7. Artificial Intelligence
8. Arts and Heritage
9. Biodiversity in the UK Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies
10. Children of Alcoholics
11. Deafness
12. Disability
13. Ethnic Minority Business Owners
14. First Do No Harm
15. Future of Work
16. Human-Relevant Science
17. Internet, Communications and Technology
18. Life Sciences
19. Microplastics
20. Packaging Manufacturing Industry
21. Responsible Vaping
22. SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) House Builders
23. Sport
24. Taxation
25. 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!

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.

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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.

Header image: Photo by Aaron Du on Unsplash

What happened?

Yesterday in the House of Commons, there was an SNP Opposition Day debate about a ceasefire in Gaza. This meant that the SNP had an opportunity to put forward a motion for the House to vote on.

The Labour Party’s preferred wording of a ceasefire motion replaced the SNP motion and was passed by the House of Commons based on what is known as a voice vote. 

This is when the speaker (in this case the Deputy Speaker who was in the chair) judges the result of the vote based on the volume of shouts in the chamber. As such, there is no record of how individual MPs voted.

This is not the same as saying the vote was unanimous – and listening to the recordings there is a clear ‘no’ present on both votes (the Deputy Speaker does later claim that “nobody called against it”, which is then contested).

From the Speaker’s point of view, the goal is taking a read on the decision of the House (and this may have been correct in that one side was louder, if not unopposed) – and a vote in the lobbies (division), which takes around 15 minutes, serves no purpose. 

But votes also serve the purpose of putting the opinions of individual MPs on the record, which several were frustrated to have been denied. Votes are part of the public facts about MPs’ impact in Parliament, and part of how actions are communicated to constituents. This is a factor in the democratic process that also needs balancing in these decisions. 

This decision followed a long division for a motion to sit in private – and votes that seemed clear on a voice vote may have been seen as costly in terms of time to take to a full division. In general, it is possible to have voting processes that are much faster and fairer to MPs, that would allow getting two votes on the record without taking most of an hour of parliamentary time. 

What does this mean for TheyWorkForYou?

Because there was no recorded division – the approval of the motion does not appear in the recent votes tab for MPs.

The full debate is worth a read – the general sense is of a long debate where MPs engage with a complicated situation, and reflect that the UK’s role can only be part of any solution. 

We’re in the process of updating the processes behind our voting summaries, which includes ways to include what we’re calling “agreements” (decisions without a “division”) in summaries. But issues like last night’s decision reflect that we need to take a cautionary approach – as there is clear evidence that it was not an unambiguous decision. We will publish more on this approach soon.

Why was the amendment process controversial?

As it was an SNP Opposition day, (a day when an Opposition party gets to choose the main debate) they got to propose the motion. Both Labour (another Opposition party) and the Conservative Party (Government party) proposed amendments to the motion.

The Speaker went against previous convention and allowed both a Government and Opposition amendment – which was unexpected. The motivation of this was to give most MPs a chance to vote for a motion on their preferred wording – the problem is that the amendment process is not really set up for this.

The thinking makes sense given how Opposition day voting is supposed to work: the Opposition by definition is not supposed to win because they have fewer MPs than the government.

What’s supposed to happen is that MPs debate a topic, hold a vote, and the motion is rejected. If the topic strikes closer to home, the Government will amend it to say “this is an important issue but the Government is doing a great job”, and that is the motion that is passed because the Government should have the numbers to win the vote.

Government amendments come after the vote on the main motion to respect the purpose of Opposition day debates, while reflecting the reality that the government can amend the motion and win. This sequencing allows for a vote on the pure motion on the record before the amended one wins.

The same applies for amendments from other parties or backbenchers in the Opposition – these votes should also lose, and can be put before the motion without disrupting the flow.

So what could have happened is: Labour amendment rejected (mostly by Government MPs), SNP motion rejected (mostly by Government MPs), Conservative amendment approved and adopted (mostly by Government MPs). In this scenario, most MPs have had a chance to vote for their party’s preferred wording, but this is only possible because the first few votes are rejected.

In practice what seems to have fallen apart is the government approach – exactly why is still unclear but one suggestion is not enough Government MPs wanted to vote against the Labour wording, so to avoid an internal conflict they pulled their amendment and stopped opposing other votes. 

This meant that Labour’s amendment won, it replaced the SNP motion and was passed as the main motion. 

This outcome was the opposite of the one the Speaker’s choice was intended to facilitate. The SNP (and anyone who preferred the contents of their motion) didn’t get the chance to vote on their version, and no one generated a voting record either. A ceasefire motion passed, but no individual votes were recorded for it.

The role of the Speaker

The core issue is different ideas of what the Speaker is supposed to do. 

In one reading the Speaker is supposed to be an agent to draw out the collective will of MPs, in another, the emphasis is on being non-partisan and reflecting a settled (cross-party) view of how the House of Commons operates. 

The Clerk of the House advised not to allow both amendments, but also said that this was allowed by the rules, it went against previous approaches and risked that the SNP motion wouldn’t be voted on. The Speaker didn’t do anything inherently wrong by the rulebook, but has upset the sense that he was supposed to be a speaker who “innovated” less than his predecessor John Bercow.

The virtue of deferring to the dead hand of precedent is that it shields the Speaker from the accusations of political bias. The outcome of this decision was good for Labour in that it avoided a split over the SNP vote, leading to a perception the rules were being bent in Labour’s favour. If this had threaded the needle and everyone had got the votes they wanted, this might have paid off. As it is, there’s a big question mark over whether the Speaker is trusted by MPs to be fulfilling the role. 

The argument made by Owen Thompson (SNP) was that “the purpose of an Opposition day is for our party to have the ability to put forward our business”.  In general, Labour has a lot more Opposition days, where they haven’t chosen to propose their version of the motion. One of the SNP’s few days has resulted in SNP MPs not being able to put their views on the record. 

But also if a motion would be preferred by the House it doesn’t seem undemocratic to include it. The amendment process is not meant to allow voicing opinions on three different things – but working towards a single statement that has majority support. If including more amendments changes the outcome, it is reasonable to include them on this basis. 

This gets at different ideas of what voting in Parliament is for – is it for Parliament to come together and agree a consensus view, or for political actors to signal their divergent views? Both of these are legitimate purposes for a political body – especially when the goal of the motion is signally internationally (and also domestically) what the UK political establishment’s views are. 

What does this mean for foreign policy?

There’s a view that this kind of vote is navel gazing – and what MPs yell about over here doesn’t affect things over there. But this view is too narrow and misunderstands Parliament’s role as a political institution and how that relates to international politics.

Motions can be broadly “doing something” or “saying something” motions, and this was a “saying something” motion. It doesn’t commit the government to do anything, and if it did, the government doesn’t have the power to impose a ceasefire tomorrow.

In practical terms, it doesn’t matter what the Opposition thinks except in terms of the approach it signals in a possible next government. It does matter what government MPs are thinking however, and these motions seem to have flushed out some fault lines within the Conservative Party. Even if this isn’t on the voting record, it shapes internal discussion and policy making. 

It is broadly good for the long term project of British diplomacy and coalitions with other countries where there is widespread consensus in Parliament on an action. Even partial support for bigger approaches within the governing party gives the Foreign Secretary more flexibility, and alignment with the likely next party of government similarly empowers the kind of statements and alliances that can be made. 

So the vote does nothing in itself, but helps reveal what the political lie of the land actually is, and empowers actors working within it. Just because something is partial and political doesn’t mean it’s pointless.

Political violence is shaping how representatives behave

Another running thread here is the idea of political violence impacting decisions on the parliamentary agenda. The Speaker explicitly said the decisions he made on amendments were based on conversations “about the security of Members, their families and the people involved” – where MPs were considering their personal safety in weighing up if they could oppose motions by other parties. Regardless of whether you think it would be fine if more MPs had supported the SNP motion, it’s not good that this is part of the thinking in either direction. 

This is part of a wider problem where political violence and threats of violence are collapsing political trust and openness – making politicians more suspicious of each other (seeing each other as whipping up mobs rather than engaging in politics), and less likely to give the benefit of the doubt to what may be passionate but legitimate participation of citizens in politics. 

The parliamentary rulebook cannot take the weight of this – there are arguments about the extent to which allowing individual expression is an important purpose, but it can’t take the weight of allowing individual expression for the purposes of safety. 

Here is where the recent Jo Cox Foundation report  No place in politics: tackling abuse and intimidation gives constructive steps. A key argument in the JCF report is that proportionate reactions to political violence can damage the relationship between representatives and their constituents. More safety measures and less public visibility make representatives less accessible. Its impact is not just in the one act, but the chilling effect it extends through the whole system that makes us more distant and suspicious of each other. 

Reflecting this, the report puts a lot of time into a series of very practical measures to improve policing and reporting of threats and abuse, tying together different systems of support across Parliament, parties and policing. The clearest way to take abuse and intimidation seriously is to join up support and action on the least ambiguous cases. Politicians feeling that they are safe, and that threats against them are taken seriously, helps an environment where trust and openness support a better democratic system.

Photo: UK Parliament – Central Lobby 

Give Food is an independent UK charity, founded in early 2020. They run the only national public database of UK foodbanks, and provide an up-to-date index of what goods each one is asking to be donated. 

Founder Jason Cartwright spoke to us about how Give Food makes use of TheyWorkForYou’s email alerts — and we were pleased to discover that mySociety has helped shape their offerings in other ways, too. 

Find a foodbank near you

The Give Food website performs a number of related functions, as Jason explains: “We help members of the public understand that there are foodbanks around them, then give them tools to donate the items that are needed or to take political action.”

Put in your postcode and you’ll be shown a list and a map of all the foodbanks near you. If you click on one of them, you’ll see what they need, what they already have plenty of, and where you can drop donations — or in some cases, how you can purchase goods online and have them delivered directly to the foodbank.

“We aim to help local organisations address the immediate and critical needs created by food insecurity, but the wider ultimate aim is to not exist at all, as we believe that foodbanks should not be required in our country.”

Turning alert emails into action

As this suggests, Give Food is not just a middleman between citizens and foodbanks, but also acts as a political campaigning organisation. So where do the TheyWorkForYou alerts come in? 

“We use them heavily,” says Jason, “basically to inform ourselves of what is being discussed by lawmakers around our cause.

“We’re only small, but larger charities in our field are experts at engaging the public and politicians to achieve the same aims as us, and regularly directly influence policy. 

“TheyWorkForYou alerts allow us to see, almost in real time, which of the approaches they are using are cutting through to being discussed in Parliament and national/city assemblies.

“We use the information about how conversation around our cause is going to influence how we approach our advertising, site usability and copy — all of which allows our users to maximise their political action.

“For instance, as a simple example, the current cost of living crisis, especially energy bills, is having a profound effect on foodbanks. Seeing this being discussed by politicians we were able to quickly change our advertising keywords and also reflect the current conversation in the form email our users can send to their MP.”

Open source code

It’s great to hear of such a direct connection between our output and a charity’s ability to act. And, as it turned out, the alerts aren’t the only benefit that Give Food have gained from mySociety.

One more useful function of the Give Food website is that you can sign up to receive an email when your local foodbank needs supplies. This isn’t powered by our code, but Jason tells us that it was modelled on TheyWorkForYou’s alerts system. 

Finally, there’s one more important way in which we’ve influenced Give Food: “Our code and data is all open source, and that decision was 100% influenced by mySociety’s open ethos.

“Our data is used by governments, councils, universities, supermarkets, political parties, hundreds of national & local news websites, apps, plus other charities including food banks and food bank networks themselves,” says Jason, proving that when data is set free, it can be used in a multitude of different and useful tools.

If you’re a developer and you think Give Food’s data or code might be useful to you, start on their API page. 

—

Thanks very much to Jason for talking to us: it’s a joy to discover the many and varied ways in which TheyWorkForYou alerts are helping others to make a difference.

Image: FeydHuxtable (CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Tl;dr: We’re now releasing our register of interests data as a spreadsheet.

High quality data about the external interests of our MPs and ministers is vital to identifying conflicts of interests, and discouraging politicians from having conflicts of interest in the first place.

Lack of clarity on the interests and income streams of MPs is a corruption risk. The problem with second jobs and outside interests is less that MPs might be distracted from their main job – but that when they stand in Parliament, they may be representing groups beyond their constituents, asking questions (or not asking questions) depending on their outside work.

When outside interests exist, it’s vital they are clear and transparent. The Register of Members Interests contains a list of disclosures MPs are required to make of financial interests or benefits which “others might reasonably consider to influence his or her actions or words as a Member of Parliament”. Following the Owen Patterson scandal, there was renewed interest in this data, as it was clear that there were a number of potential stories and scandals hidden in plain sight – just requiring someone to join up the data.

Building a data ecosystem

A key problem is that the data is not easy to work with. The data is released (roughly fortnightly) on the parliament.uk website as a HTML document for each MP. This process technically releases the information, but makes it hard to compare releases of the same MP over time, or to make comparisons between different MPs.

TheyWorkForYou improves on this by creating structured data from the HTML release. Using this we can highlight the changes in each release from the previous release. This is useful for journalists and campaigners in quickly understanding what has changed in each release. For instance, the change in Rishi Sunak’s register over time can be seen here.

We want to avoid people doing the same work of cleaning the data over and over. We make our version of the data available publicly, so other people can use our work to do things that we haven’t done ourselves. For instance, Open Innovations have built on top of the data we publish to link the data to other datasets and create a Register of Members’ Financial Interests Explorer.

While projects like the Tortoise/Sky News Westminster Accounts create new value in joining up datasets and cleaning the data for their own work – ultimately the new datasets they have created are only usable by those organisations. That’s their right as the people doing the work – but we think there is a bigger (and more sustainable) impact to be had in improving the data in public.

Making our data more accessible

Previously, we have published our interests data as a series of XML files, which is useful for programmers, but harder for other specialists to work with. We did some thinking with OpenDemocracy last year to explore if there were small changes we could make that would make the work we already do more useful.

As well as the XML files, we now publish an experimental spreadsheet version of all data since 2000, and the register for the current 2019 Parliament.

These sheets show the earliest and latest disclosure of an interest, and include some (very) basic NLP analysis to extract mentioned orgs from the free text and make it easier to quickly parse when scrolling.

This data can also be explored through Datasette, which can be used to query the datasets in the browser, and save the queries as links that can be shared.

For instance, the following links go to specific queries (we’re using an in-browser version for prototyping and this might take a minute to load):

• Paid visits to outside UK mentioning the UAE
• Gifts from England Lawn Tennis Club
• Declarations involving a helicopter
• Declarations new in latest release

We want to continue to improve our approach here – and welcome feedback from anyone this spreadsheet helps.

Parliament can do better data publication

A key problem run into by everyone working with the data is that it’s broken to start with. MPs fill things out in inconsistent ways that makes the overall data different to analyse without cleaning first (see both the Open Innovations and Tortoise/Sky News methodology notes). Fixing this up is a key first step towards aggregate analysis – and the easiest place to fix it is with validation when the data is collected at the start.

While work can be done to improve the data after the fact (and experiments with Generative AI have found it to be quite good at fixing inconsistent formatting), improving the initial data collection is the most effective way of improving the quality of the data. There are active moves in Parliament to fix some of these problems. Producing more information in machine readable formats, and adding methods to make sure the data is correct to start with, will make the transparency process simpler at every stage.

Similar issues apply to the register published for All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs), which should publish as “machine readable” data the range of data that the groups are formally supposed to make publicly available. APPGs are semi-official groups that MPs can form around specific interests or issues. Many of these are useful ways of having discussions, but these can also be an avenue for corruption, with outside interests supporting the group and its activities. The register includes the officers of groups and financial assistance and gifts received by the group – but not the overall membership. APPGs are separately required to disclose their wider membership on their website (or if they don’t have a website, if someone asks) but this isn’t included in the register, and so can’t be consistently scraped to produce data. While MPs are supposed to disclose benefits from groups on their individual disclosure, clearer data on what is officially “public” memberships would help ensure that there is nothing missed between these two datasets.

Separately there is a register of ministerial interests that applies to MPs who also have government positions. This is in principle more strict, requiring disclosures of relevant interests of family members, and avoiding even perceived conflicts of interest. However, in practice the information does not contain the specific financial value of gifts or benefits, just that they exist. The disclosure cycle is also longer, being published every six months rather than monthly. In practice – this means that relevant interests may not be public for a significant time after a minister is appointed (and potentially never published, if the minister has again moved on by then).

There is a lot of work that can be done from the outside to build on official data. But the more Parliament does things that it is uniquely able to do, the more we can focus on analysis and data comparisons that are best done outside.

What mySociety can do

A very basic thing we can do is beat the drum (and work with those who have been doing this for ages) for better publication of data from Parliament.

But if this happens or not, we can do work to make the data better. If it looks like Parliament’s data is unlikely to be fixed at the source, then a project of improving the data in public in a way that multiple projects could then build on would be useful. But if the data gets better, then we can better spend our time doing more work on top of this data. This might include joining up the official data with other datasets (including those of the UK’s other Parliaments and Assemblies) to draw out connections and better analysis.

But our work here isn’t just about producing good data – it’s about displaying it in a way that’s useful and understandable by people. Chris Bryant MP (former Chair of the Standards Committee) has argued that Parliament’s own display of the history of registers should match what’s provided by TheyWorkForYou. If Parliament improved its own display to the public of registers of members’ interests this would be fantastic news – and we in turn would need to think about if there are new approaches that would be useful on top of that.

One approach we are thinking about would be to find out what people wanted to know the answers to about their MPs interests, and then using volunteers to answer a set of common questions. This is the kind of editorialising that Parliament itself would find much harder to do – while providing something different from aggregate analysis of the data all together. This is something we could do with the data as it exists, but is something where better data would let us create new tools so volunteers could answer more complicated questions.

Making MPs’ interests clearer and easier to understand is key to spotting conflicts of interest and keeping politicians accountable. We hope our new spreadsheet version of the data helps make the work we’re already doing more useful and accessible – while we think about the road we want to take in future to improve TheyWorkForYou and the project of a transparent democracy.

Image: Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash.

…this is mySociety’s 20th anniversary Impact Report!

This has been a very special year – mySociety’s 20th anniversary.

So we haven’t just put together our usual review of the past twelve months: this Impact Report is a special edition, covering our entire history since 2003.

We look back at our beginnings as a small group of determined coders, and trace our history through the changes our services have made, here in the UK and across the world.

Discover daring acts of (data) piracy, and learn which vandalised phone box sparked the idea for FixMyStreet. Find out how our “cheap and cheerful open web technology” has been instrumental in helping citizens tackle vital issues, from the climate emergency to human trafficking.

It’s quite the read. Sit back, grab a mince pie if you have one to hand…and enjoy! Access the Anniversary Impact report here (web), or enjoy the print-faithful PDF version, or plain text and epub formats.

And if you’re interested in our activity on the SocietyWorks side, don’t miss their own, just as engrossing, annual report: you can read that here.