It was with immense sadness that the mySociety team learned of the death of our much loved ex-colleague Mark Longair.

Mark first came to mySociety as a volunteer, contributing his time and coding knowledge to build scrapers and parsers that brought Scottish Parliament data into TheyWorkForYou. Knowing a good developer when we saw one, we subsequently offered him a more official position, and he was a member of our permanent staff from 2012 to 2018.

During those years, he worked on a variety of our projects, helping to build brand new codebases from scratch, and contributing to existing ones, with his commits running through Mzalendo, Pombola, PopIt, EveryPolitician and TheyWorkForYou. One way in which his legacy lives on is in the elegant code he wrote for those projects, some of which continue to make transparency more accessible in the UK and in sub-saharan Africa.

He was also a dedicated volunteer with our friends at Democracy Club, making immense contributions — both in terms of hours dedicated and care taken — to their candidates crowdsourcing platform. This is a crucial piece of infrastructure for the digital democracy sector, and one we still benefit from ourselves, most recently when integrating election candidate data to the Local Intelligence Hub. And to many, Mark is best known as the originator of the UK’s only open geographical dataset of postcode boundaries, which also continues to find its way into mySociety’s mapping projects, even to this day.

He brought a remarkable level of care both to every aspect of his work, and to the connections he forged while working here. Words which are cropping up repeatedly as colleagues recall Mark include kind, humble, intelligent, remarkable, and generous. 

This generosity extended to the ways in which he shared knowledge: his clear and considerate explanations were a hallmark of any piece of work he contributed to; these often persist as a learning opportunity for anyone who returns to the code in later years. Mark was a naturally gifted teacher, both as a peer and mentor. 

He was a deep thinker about all aspects of life, reading widely and sharing what he discovered with colleagues; and he strove, especially, to improve the joy of working life for us all, with ideas and systems to make mySociety’s remote set-up more functional, agreeable and humane.

But he was by no means always serious — or perhaps one could say, he was equally serious about having fun. Contributions to the culture of mySociety include a karaoke habit that still persists; a lasting recognition of the importance of lunchtime naps; and his impassioned recommendations of Pixar films. Mark also introduced at least one colleague to the joy of cryptic crosswords, something he was serious enough about that he was a regular contributor to the blog Fifteen Squared.

After mySociety, Mark joined mySociety alumnus Robin Houston at Flourish, turning his considerable talents towards making data into compelling visualisations that brought out the underlying stories for all to see. 

The world is poorer for his not being in it; but richer for his long-lasting contributions to coding, and to all of us who were lucky to work with him or call him a friend. Contemporaneous colleague Steve Day and Democracy Club’s Sym Roe have also written tributes.

 

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Photo: Struan Donald

We want to improve the quality of UK democracy by making more and better information about Parliament available to everyone. 

In previous updates to TheyWorkForYou, we’ve expanded the range of official sources the service pulls on: extending to cover all the UK’s parliaments, and recently bringing together all the registers of interest in one place. 

This update is about adding pipelines and data to bring in data beyond Parliament to provide richer insights into your representatives. 

What we’ve added:

• Committees and APPGs memberships
• Signatures (EDMs and Open Letters)
• Vote annotations
• Adding context to parliamentary debates
• Improved email alerts for political monitoring
• Navigation improvements to MPs profiles

You can also watch our launch webinar to learn more about how these changes fit together:

And as ever, you value the work we do, and want to help us go further – please consider making a donation to support our work. 

Committees and APPGs

An important part of how Parliament works is through the formal committee system and the informal APPGs. We wanted to improve the information we display on both of these kinds of groups. 

For Committees: we’ve pulled more information from Parliament to give extra information about the committees MPs are a part of,and to try to explain more about Parliament as part of the MP profile. 

For APPGs: there has not previously been a good central database of APPG members. We’ve set out to create this. We used a new LLM-assisted scraper to get lists of memberships off dozens of individual websites. For those without a website, we asked each APPG individually for a membership list to add to the collection. This database isn’t complete yet, but is now the best available source on APPG memberships.

Read more about this the APPG changes

Signatures

Early Day Motions are effectively an internal petition system available to MPs, where they can signal support for different issues. Including recent EDMs helps indicate which issues MPs see as important. 

But we also wanted to go beyond these motions to look at the growing trend for MPs to share joint open letters on social media instead. We have started to transcribe and store these open letters, so we can make the content more accessible, and show on MPs’ profiles the issues that concern them. 

We have separated out ‘motions to annul’ from other EDMs. The process of objecting to negative statutory instruments (which become law unless there is a vote against them) – felt worth highlighting above other proposed motions because it represents scrutiny of secondary legislation. These motions are technically called ‘prayers’ in the UK Parliament, but we use the term used in the Senedd and Scottish Parliament because it’s clearer. 

Read more about the EDM / open letter changes

Improved political monitoring

We originally created TheyWorkForYou’s email alerts to make it easier to track what your representatives have been saying in Parliament. But as well as following individual representatives, alerts can also be for phrases, and these have proven to be a vital tool that help civil society monitor what is happening in the UK’s parliaments.

To lean into this use, we’ve completely redesigned how you can create and manage complex keyword alerts, making it easier to group multiple terms, see results on the page, and manage a number of alerts across different topics.

With this, we want to make TheyWorkForYou a more powerful free tool for political monitoring —and make it easier for NGOs and grassroots organisations who cannot afford paid political monitoring to not be disadvantaged compared to those who can. We don’t think money should get you better access and want to build tools to level the playing field. 

Read more about the changes to email alerts

Vote annotations

Building on the release of our new site TheyWorkForYou Votes, we have made it easier to reach the new information we hold on voting. For recent votes in an MPs profile, we now link to our new richer analysis, and if MPs spoke in the section before the vote, we’ll also link to those speeches. 

We’re also starting to make some of the extra information we store in TheyWorkForYou Votes visible in MPs’ profiles and voting summaries, such as vote annotations and information about party instructions (whipping). TheyWorkForYou’s publication of voting records has led to more public justifications from representatives about how they vote, and we want to try and get that information back into the site. 

Currently we don’t have many examples of this while we test the system, but we will be picking a few specific votes to add more information and links to. 

Understanding parliamentary debates

We want to make it easier for everyone to understand Parliament, and one way we can do that is by adding context to debates beyond the official transcripts. 

We’ve gone back to features that have been around for twenty years and made improvements. We’ve overhauled our approach to linking words and phrases to Wikipedia to ensure there are fewer false positives. 

We’ve also revived aspects of the debate annotation system and glossary systems to give us the ability to add notes to high profile debates —and will be making more use of that over the next few months. 

A new coat of paint

To hold all this new information, we’ve redesigned our MP profile pages to make it easier to find different sections, and so they work better on mobile. 

We’ve added more explanatory text to different sections, and improved the display of registers of interest to make it easier to see only the new entries (also: see all the wider data we hold on registers of interests). 

Coming up

In the coming months we’ll be releasing some more work as part of our efforts to understand and improve how component parts of UK democracy are working in practice. 

We’ve been running a new survey on WriteToThem to understand more about what people are writing to their representatives about, and we’re going to release a report talking about the patterns we’ve learned from that, and how it’s affecting our thinking. 

As part of WhoFundsThem work, we’re continuing to dig into money in politics, and have two releases coming up. One is a report about the systems of tracking election donations, and the other is our research into MPs asking parliamentary questions about areas they have a financial interest in. 

That’s it for now, and remember if you want to help us go further – please consider making a donation to support our work!

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Header image: House of Commons

You can subscribe to TheyWorkForYou’s alerts to receive email updates on representatives’ parliamentary speeches and questions — but they’re also strongly used by civil society as a parliamentary monitoring tool, letting organisations know when their topics of interest have been mentioned in debates or votes. Our alerts help the flow of information from Parliament through government and wider civil society. 

Something we’ve wanted to do for a while is make it easier to create these keyword alerts. To cover all variants of a concept or topic,  you previously needed to create a search using operators (‘cars’ + ‘vehicles’), and as a result very few people did this. 

We’ve made a new interface for email alerts. This:

• makes it easier to create more complicated alerts
• can sometimes suggest useful phrases to include
• lets you see recent hits on alerts on the website as well as your inbox.

Creating more complicated alerts

Previously, you would need to do a search for (“electric vehicle” OR “electric car”) and then convert this into an alert. You can still do it that way if you want,  but we have a new interface to make it easier to make more complete queries. 

From the alerts page, you can create a new alert, and add a list of phrases.

When you’ve made an alert, it will give you the option to see the results and any recent matches to check it’s picking up what you want, and if not,  go back and adjust the terms used. 

Suggesting useful phrases

Sometimes you might not know the term that is commonly used in Parliament. We’ve done some data-crunching to try and help out here. 

Using vector search, we’ve created a list of related terms based on common previous searches and matches in the transcripts. For instance, below a search for ‘electric vehicle’ you’ll see suggestions including ‘electric car’ and ‘ev’: other terms for the same concept that have been used in Parliament in the past.  

This is not comprehensive and is initially focused on the most common terms — but is part of our approach to incorporating benefits from machine learning tools in a sustainable way into our services.

  

Viewing and managing alerts

Another thing we have done is make it easier to manage a greater range of alerts — and see recent mentions in the browser rather than purely in emails. 

You can now see, at a glance, any hits that have happened in the previous week, in the alerts management page, and expand it to see the last mention and get a link to the latest results. 

Stay up to date

We’re always working to improve our services. Sign up our newsletter and make sure you’ve checked ‘Democracy and Parliaments’ to hear more.

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Header photo by Patrícia Nicoloso on Unsplash

This update to TheyWorkForYou voting summaries brings us up to date as of the end of September 2025 (covering Q2+Q3 2025). 

To learn more about our process for updating MPs’ voting summaries, please read our previous blog post.  We have also recently released TheyWorkForYou Votes which, as well as providing open data for anyone to use in their own online parliamentary projects, is now powering TheyWorkForYou’s voting summaries. 

This update adds 21 votes and 3 historical votes to expand new and revised policies. We have also started to bring more information we’re gathering in TheyWorkForYou Votes (vote annotations and whip reports) into the voting summary pages of TheyWorkForYou. 

Previous draft policies have been put live for:

• Border Security Bill
• Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Votes have been added to existing policies for:

• LGBT+ rights
• Minimum Detention Requirements
• EU Standards Alignment (this policy is not public yet – awaiting a review for previous relevant votes)

New policies have been created for:

• Increasing local council power over bus services
• Preventing sentencing guidelines requiring offender background reports based on race, religion, culture, or similar traits.
• Creating a new regulator for English Football
• Proscribing Palestine Action, Maniacs Murder Cult, and Russian Imperial Movement as terrorist group

Draft policies for:

• English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill
• Sentencing Bill

Have been created and will be added in the next update after the third stage (approval) vote. 

If your MP voted in any of the divisions feeding into these policies, you’ll see them on their TheyWorkForYou page in the ‘Voting summaries’ tab.

Notes

Annotations and free votes

One of the things we want to do with TheyWorkForYou Votes is gather public statements MPs make about their votes and make this accessible through TheyWorkForYou. 

We’ve completed work to flag when we’ve gathered some statements associated with a policy line, and are testing this with a few statements on the Assisted Dying Bill third reading (the annotations column in the table at the bottom). These are flagged on the MP in question’s summary page. Our next step here will be to crowdsource more statements that were made around this specific vote. 

We are also starting to experiment with recording some votes as free votes and flagging these in in the summary page. This is step one towards gathering and displaying whipping information. Currently we have only included a few votes from the current Parliament to refine the approach. 

Bus powers

When adding new policies we check whether there were any obvious votes in the last decade that should also be included. 

For a new policy around ‘increasing local council power over bus services’, we have added a retrospective scoring agreement for the 2017 Bus Services Act (which was passed without a vote, with explicit cross-party approval in the debate). 

Minimum detention requirements

Here we have adjusted the description of the policy to:

voted for/against reducing (for some kinds of offenders) the minimum detention requirement before release to *reduce pressure on prison capacity*[last bit added]

The original was framed more generally in a way that could have worked as an all-time policy description, this now includes the justification used across these votes currently covered for the change. 

Palestine Action proscription

We’ve created a new one-vote policy line for voting for/against ‘proscribing Palestine Action, Maniacs Murder Cult, and Russian Imperial Movement as terrorist groups’.

This vote passed a noteworthiness criterion for a single vote policy through not only for the continuing impact (leading to hundreds of arrests for supporting the now proscribed group), but the initial circumstances of the vote.

This was the first vote to be held on proscription of a group under the Terrorism Act, with all previous examples having been taken by unanimous agreement. While there were few votes against (which will show as a difference from the party for Labour MPs), there were also a large number of absences and some conscious abstentions from Liberal Democrat MPs (who voted both for and against, which we convert to an ‘abstain’). 

As part of our 2024 scoring changes, absences and abstentions are treated differently. MPs who abstained are recorded as voting, and will have a line for this policy. MPs who were absent will not be given a policy line for this policy (and this isn’t shown as a significant difference from the party).

LGBT+ Rights

As part of this update we’ve renamed the ‘Gay rights’ policy to ‘LGBT+ rights’. In substance this change better describes votes already included in the policy, as relevant votes have generally covered multiple groups (and this fulfils our uniqueness and cohesion criteria better than a new policy line). This wider framing provides a sharper lens on already included votes. For instance, in an already included 2024 vote on a conversion therapy ban, while the kind of conversion therapy being discussed covered multiple LGBT groups, in practice the opposition to a ban in the debate followed from opposition to trans conversion therapy specifically.

This shift lets us capture votes that represent attempts to restrict or expand the rights and status of trans people independently of other groups. In this specific case, an amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill around the definition of sex data, requiring sex at birth to be recorded in official contexts (far beyond settings where it is is practically relevant).

As part of this, we have reviewed if any previous votes should be added to an expanded definition, finding two relevant decisions that would have been appropriate under the original definition. The approval of 2019 guidance around inclusive relationship and sex education has been added as a scoring vote, and the inclusion in the census of separate questions around sexual orientation and gender identity has been added as an informative non-scoring agreement. 

Launch event

This Thursday we’ll be hosting a webinar to talk through a range of recent changes to the MP profile pages and email alerts. We’ll also share more information on our mailing list over the next few weeks. Sign up here and make sure you have ‘Democracy and Parliaments’ checked as an interest if you’d like to receive these emails.

One thing we want to take more advantage of with TheyWorkForYou is the fact that we’re not an official website — and so can pull on multiple official and unofficial sources of information to present a richer picture of how our democracy works. 

Our trajectory with voting summaries has been to focus on votes that are substantive. This means they’re generally on issues whipped by parties, and there are few differences between the voting records of MPs in the same party.

But we’d also like to make it easier for everyone to understand what differentiates MPs: the signals they give about their values and interests, and where they fall on internal arguments about policy direction. 

As such, all MPs now have a Signatures tab on their TheyWorkForYou page, which tracks Early Day Motions (EDMs), open letters, and Motions to Annul signed by the MP. 

EDMs

One form of information we want to make more use of are Early Day Motions (EDMs). These are technically ‘proposed motions’ that may be elevated to a full debate. In practice this rarely happens and they work as an internal parliamentary petition service, where MPs can propose motions and co-sign ones proposed by others. They are still useful in reflecting the interests of different MPs even if EDMs rarely lead to substantive change in themselves. 

To provide better access to this information, we’ve added EDMs to TheyWorkForYou Votes as ‘Signatures’. Here TheyWorkForYou Votes is working as a general data backend that will help power features in our own services, and makes it easier to access the data for bulk analysis. This then feeds into individual MP profiles. 

With this, we are catching up to what Parliament displays on their MP profiles (EDMs), but also building the framework to expand to the UK’s other Parliaments and to capture extra-parliamentary statements like open letters that serve a similar function. 

Open letters

Over the last few years, we’ve noticed more open letters being shared on social media, where screenshots of a list of names on official parliamentary paper are serving the purpose of  signalling in public that a grouping exists in a political argument. 

A recent example of that is the big open letter for UK recognition of a Palestinian State. This was initially posted on X as images, and we’ve transcribed it and made the list of MPs searchable. 

There are a few reasons why MPs might prefer to use these kinds of open letters rather than submitting an EDM. Social media reach means that MPs can make a full public statement without the parliamentary publishing process. A letter can be published in full without the word count restriction of a letter to a newspaper, so can pick up more names.

Similarly, open letters are free from the format restrictions and word count of EDMs (a single sentence of less than 250 words). This can be important as many letters represent a group of government MPs trying to change the government position. Being able to write more is important in referencing previous government actions, anchoring the change in agreed principles and so on,  while still being a critical signal. 

This fits with a general change in usage of EDMs. While the number of actual EDMs proposed per year  have remained roughly the same, overall signatures have dropped by almost half since 2015 (33k to 15k), and far fewer petitions get a large number of signatures. The average number of signatures per EDM has dropped from 27 to 12. Some of this activity has moved to the new social open letter format. 

There are also some disadvantages to open letters. Publishing via screenshots means it’s not very accessible or searchable — a problem if one reason for signing is to signal to constituents.  If an open letter is important, people want to sign after the fact. EDMs have a mechanism for that, while for open letters you might get “here’s another page of names in another tweet” or social media posts saying “I support this too” —  but not in the same place as the original. 

For our purposes, it also means there’s collection work to be done finding the letters in the first place, and transcribing the images into text. We’ve got some good technical processes on the latter; and we’ve opened a form here where people can tell us about them. But it’s more work than just plugging into Parliament’s feed, which is what we do for data elsewhere on TheyWorkForYou. 

Looking at open letters is a shift towards including more extra-parliamentary activity — but reflects the need for parliamentary monitoring sites to react to changes in how parliaments and representatives behave, and think creatively about how to make use of new sources of information. 

Motions to Annul

Motions to annul are technically a form of EDM, but we’ve separated them out because we see them as something worth highlighting in their own right. 

To take a few steps back, when Parliament passes laws (primary legislation), it fairly commonly gives the government authority to make additional orders/regulations (secondary legislation) that fill in specific details in laws without the full parliamentary process. 

Secondary legislation still needs to be approved by Parliament – and this happens in two ways depending on how the law was written. Either the regulations need to be approved in a vote to become law (positive procedure), or they need to not be voted against within 40 days (negative procedure). 

Most legislation (around 75%) is passed through the negative process, and in practice the power to object is used very rarely (the last successful Commons objection was in 1979).

The mechanism is to make a Motion to Annul (for historical reasons called a ‘prayer’) through the EDM process. There is no threshold at which this is promoted to a vote and the government controls the Commons agenda. It is more likely if the motion is tabled by the Leader of the Opposition, or as the number of signatures goes up.

Come to our event

Join us on Thursday 23 October for a webinar on our new features, plans for the site, and our vision of a more open Parliament. 

Even if rarely successful,  these represent engagement with the legislative scrutiny process, which we felt was worth highlighting, and we separate these out in the signatures page from other EDMs. 

If you’ve ever wondered what your MP is interested in outside of their party alignment, a good place to look is All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs). These groups bring MPs and Peers from different parties together around shared policy interests. 

There’s a real range of causes, of size, and of activity. The groups don’t have formal powers, but they can be influential spaces for discussion and collaboration. This also makes them key sites for lobbying, and for money to enter Parliament. For all of these reasons, as part of our WhoFundsThem work looking into MPs’ financial interests, we’ve been digging deeper into APPGs. 

Alongside our regular output that makes it easier to compare each APPG register to the previous one, there’s now a big new update on TheyWorkForYou allowing you to browse your MP’s memberships for the first time.

Getting the lists

There is no central list of memberships of APPGs. The official Parliament register lists the four officers of each group, but not the wider membership list (each group must have at least 20 members to be constituted). Some APPGs have websites where they publish these lists, but others don’t have public membership lists at all.

Two things have changed in the last few years that made it practically possible to put together a (mostly) comprehensive membership list. 

The big one is that the rules changed so that APPGs need to either publish a membership list on their website or provide it on request. 

The second is that LLM technologies have made more flexible scrapers viable, meaning we can more easily extract membership lists published in lots of different forms on lots of different websites. 

We’ll write up the scraper in a technical blog post,  but by scraping the available websites and requesting the membership lists from the remaining groups, we’ve brought all of this information into one place. 

Theory vs practice

From our previous experiment asking APPGs for information, we knew there was a big gap between the rules that technically everyone has signed off on, and what APPG secretariats understood in practice. This is part of a wider problem where Parliament in principle has rules that in practice are just not strongly enforced. 

For this round we have done the minimal possible request: just asking for membership lists, rather than the wider range of documents we had published previously, and only when both our automated process and volunteers couldn’t find one. Despite this being a relatively clear rule, 94/236 groups didn’t respond to our request for a membership list. 

We also encountered a few groups who did not want to disclose full membership lists for security reasons due to the topic of their group being sensitive, while others were concerned that publishing names could lead to MPs being flooded with unhelpful lobbying. 

We’re sensitive to security concerns and don’t want to strongly argue the point given the small number affected (compared to the much larger number who just didn’t reply), but also there is currently no exemption in the APPG rules for security reasons. If Parliament wants this to be the case, the rules need to be updated to specify the conditions for this exemption from wider transparency.

We will be writing to the Parliamentary Commissioner to report this reasonably high level of non-compliance with transparency requirements of the APPG rules. 

What we discovered

Using the scraper, supported by volunteers’ work, we found memberships for 205 groups online. 

We contacted the remaining groups by email to ask for their membership lists. 140 gave us their membership information, two were in touch but declined to give their lists, and 94 did not respond.

Of the groups we have data for, we found:

• 615 MPs (94%) belong to at least one APPG. Only 35 MPs don’t take part in any at all. This list largely maps onto government ministers, who are not permitted to be a member of an APPG.
• On average, MPs are members of around 10 APPGs.
• Half of MPs are in at least 8 groups, and some are far more active: one MP is listed as belonging to 63 APPGs.

You can view and download the full dataset. 

We also discovered some interesting features about APPGs’ wider memberships  — and that the definition of membership varies between groups. The Guide to Rules states “A member is one who has asked to be on the group’s Membership List” but interpretations of this varied quite extensively. This was especially true about “non-parliamentary membership” (people and organisations affiliated with the APPG, who can be charged for memberships).  Some groups noted that this would include mailing lists with hundreds of individuals so would not share them, while others sent lists of ‘donors’, not all of whom were previously public as they did not meet Parliament’s £1,500 declaration threshold. 

Why it matters

APPG memberships can show what issues MPs care about, and where they might be working across party lines. This matters because of transparency; it’s useful for constituents to know where their MP is spending time and building networks, but also for relationship-building. We think this information can be key to foster common ground both between MPs themselves and between MPs and constituents. 

Explore for yourself

Find your MP’s page on TheyWorkForYou.com or to see their APPG memberships or download the whole dataset. You can also browse this data on the Local Intelligence Hub. Over time, we will make this available on a page per APPG. 

While you’re there, you may spot a few more new features. Join Alex and I on Thursday 23 October for a chatty catch-up on new features, plans for the site, and our vision of a more open Parliament. 

Note: If you are an MP, or on their staff, and our entry is either missing or has incorrect information, you can report issues on this form. 

Photo by Jani Kaasinen on Unsplash

We have completed our quarterly update to the TheyWorkForYou voting summaries and they’re now complete as of the end of March 2025.

We’ve added 20 votes to TheyWorkForYou’s voting summaries, covering the first three months of 2025. We’ve also added several votes from the 2019-2024 parliament retrospectively when creating a voting policy in a new area. 

To learn more about our process, please read our previous blog post.  We have also recently released TheyWorkForYou Votes which, as well as providing open data for anyone to use in their own online parliamentary projects,  is  powering TheyWorkForYou’s voting summaries. 

This update has added new votes to existing policies:

• Climate change
• Low carbon electricity generation
• Smoking bans
• Increased capital gains tax
• Windfall oil and gas tax
• Employment rights
• Assisted dying (see note below)

We have also added four new policy lines:

• Renters’ rights
• Charge VAT on private school fees
• More powers to investigate welfare fraud, including requiring banks to monitor accounts of welfare recipients
• Nationalising teacher pay and the curriculum for academies, tightening child protection duties, free breakfast clubs (Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill). More about this below.

And behind the scenes, we’ve created four policy lines aren’t currently live, but could be used if and when we add historic or future votes on these topics:

• Greater alignment of UK product standards/measures with EU standards 
• Speeding up nationwide infrastructure consents and opposing local veto powers over large energy schemes 
• Draft border security bill policy
• Measures to encourage purchase and use of electric vehicles

Notes

Assisted dying

In our previous blog post we flagged that we might treat the third reading of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill differently, outside our normal process. This policy has been updated ahead of when it would appear in our normal review. 

We are now scoring based on the third reading rather than the second reading. Normally, there is almost no difference between these so we include both to cover people who are absent from one. 

But when people change their minds (which is more likely on a free vote), we should prefer the later vote (otherwise we create ‘voted for and against’ lines when the final one is clearer and more meaningful). 

As 58% rather than 62% are now in favour of the motion within the Labour Party, it no longer counts as a significant break from the party for those who voted in the minority. 

We also as a result of this have:

• We have amended some of our copy on significant differences and the whip to provide more recognition that significant differences between an MP and a party can emerge in a free vote. There was a fair comment from an MP that previously it could be inferred that this vote was whipped from the two bits of text close together (which is the opposite of the complaint we were trying to avoid here, that the summary implies there is no whip).
• added a new ‘tended to vote for/against’ label to better describe situations where a party is very split (these are rare, but worth having the language for). 
• added the full percentage of the alignment score for the (few) policies that fall between 35-65% policy alignment – to give a bit more information on the direction of the lean. 

Votes covering multiple topics

The TheyWorkForYou voting summary model works best when over time there are a range of votes on essentially the same principle. Assisted dying is a good example of this. 

Where the model struggles more is when a vote covers multiple principles. Sometimes you get a big vote that is clearly about one thing,  but often a bill does a range of stuff (A, B, C). 

You can do a few things here. You can say it mostly does one thing (other items less notable). You can also create a range of policies (voted for A, voted for B, voted for C) to reflect what happened. But if you then take this in isolation, it loses that context of “this was a vote against A as well as against B”.

Ideally, if there’s a simple thing, we should use that — but when it can’t be squeezed down to something simple (and especially when the line of opposition critique is not necessarily the main thing the bill does) we should try and reflect that in the simplest way possible. 

We’ve recently added the ability to view the voting records only for the tenure of specific governments. This gives us a bit more flexibility to add policies without being crowded by old votes,and lets us include policies that are very time specific and unlikely to be updated.

So for some votes, the policy description will effectively cover only that bill. For example:

[x] voted for nationalising teacher pay and the curriculum for academies, tightening child-protection duties, free breakfast clubs (Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill).

Ideally these would be the exception rather than the rule, but we have to reflect what is actually happening in Parliament, while trying to be both clear and accurate in how we present it. 

Electric vehicles

We created this policy because The Motor Vehicles (Driving Licences) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2025 flagged that there had been a run of relevant legislation on this issue. 

The Draft Vehicle Emissions Trading Schemes Order 2023 is included retrospectively.  We have also included an agreement for the approval of the ‘Public Charge Point Regulations 2023’. 

Finance bills over the last five years have been relevant to this,creating incentives for building  charging infrastructure through an 100% first year allowance, and renewing this each year. But then you also run into the 2024 Finance Act, which as well as extending this, started charging vehicle excise duty (VED) for zero emission vehicles (so could logically be counted as both encouraging and discouraging purchase and use of electric vehicles ). 

By the ‘cohesion’ element of our criteria we want to avoid too much use of votes on many items (like finance bills) in policies on a single item. In this case, we do not want the policy to be mostly about votes on finance bills given it is the same measure being extended multiple times. As such, we are including the initial 2021 introduction of the policy only. Other finance bills are included as informative votes that do not contribute to scoring. 

We have not included an agreement for ‘Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021’ for technical reasons (it was approved in a run of Statutory Instruments that have not been picked up well by our agreement detector). This is a candidate for inclusion when adding the policy in future. 

Gambling and agreements

A note on something we’re choosing not to include at this stage — but we’re open to feedback. 

The Gambling Levy Regulations 2025 was a statutory agreement adopted by agreement with no opposition (but when it was discussed in committee there was opposition). 

There are few options on how we could treat this. If it was a division, we would likely create a new policy on a gambling levy and assign it as a scoring vote (we could also extend our existing gambling regulation policy). 

However, as it’s taken by agreement (with no individual votes), there are a few possible approaches. There’s an “it’s not a vote” view, which means the summaries should stay focused on votes which have a common interpretation (if not reflecting the MP’s personal views, at least demonstrating that they did show up and vote for/against something). 

But then there’s the “impact is what matters” view, which is that it’s perfectly correct to include decisions like this on all MPs’ voting summaries as a record of impact (and to exclude it is to systematically miss points of consensus). That people might or might not support it in their hearts is interesting to understand, but ultimately irrelevant. 

Here is what we said in our 2024 review about the trade-off:

In general, our starting point should be accurately describing what is currently happening. “Agreements” are a large part of the current picture of how Parliamentary power works. We want to include decisions without a vote as a way power is exercised, while being accurate in what that reflects about individual MPs, and with an eye on making a point about the scale and lack of scrutiny of secondary legislation.

As such, we are starting cautiously. We have built technical approaches that let us include references to agreements in scoring and informative roles in a policy. We are applying this in a limited sense retrospectively, and will apply the same criteria used for vote inclusion to agreements moving forward – but may for the moment prefer not to include for borderline cases.

We have previously included agreements as components in policies that mostly contain votes (although depending on an MP’s tenure, agreements might make up more of their score).  The caution here is that this would be a one item policy, and so a step beyond how we’ve used it before (where it supplemented other votes).  As such, we are leaving this one in a draft policy for the moment, and might revisit on either future votes, or in an end of parliament retrospective. 

Greater UK/EU alignment

This is a draft policy to capture the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill. We have not made it live because logically there are some votes in the last five years that should also be included in this, and we have not had time for a comprehensive review. 

Anything we’ve missed?

We have a reporting form to highlight votes that should be added/are incorrectly in a policy, or a substantial policy line we are missing. We review responses for urgent problems, and otherwise these comments feed into the periodic updates.

What else we’ve been working on

We recently released TheyWorkForYou Votes, the backend we use to power the voting summaries for public use. You can watch our launch event for more about the wider context of the work. 

We’re continuing to do work around MPs’ financial interests: you can learn more on our WhoFundsThem page. 

Support our work

We create the voting summaries because we think it’s important to keep track of (and make more visible) decisions made by our elected representatives. We take doing getting this right seriously, and want to give creating the summaries the time they deserve.

If you value the work we do around voting records and would like to support our work, please consider donating. 

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Image: Engin Akyurt

Today we’re launching TheyWorkForYou Votes – our new vote information platform. 

Our goal with this service is to create and support better analysis of decisions taken in the UK’s Parliaments. We want this service to both be directly helpful to the general public, and indirectly by providing new tools and data to specialists.

We ran an online event to talk about the new site and the context of this work that you can watch on the event page.

If you like our work, and want to see us go further – please consider donating to support mySociety and TheyWorkForYou.

What’s new in this site

Vote analysis

For each vote we show:

• Breakdowns for and against the motion by party/government/opposition. 
• A searchable voting list with party alignment – how far off an individual MPs vote is from the average position of their party.
• Which of eight common ‘parliamentary dynamics’ the vote falls into – reflecting who was proposing, divisions among opposition parties, and levels of participation. 

Here is an example of this for the approval vote of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill.

We calculate this daily for all new votes we know about, but for House of Commons votes this will be calculated and published within minutes of the vote being published on the Commons Votes site.

Motions and legislation tags

The day after a vote, we automatically link up decisions with the motion that is being voted on. From this we can link deeper into debates, and add extra explainers for common types of motions.

We also automatically tag votes that seem like they’re related to the same bill to make it easier to find amendments or significant stages of the bill (because of naming variations, sometimes some are missed). 

Here’s an example of that for the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill.

 

Divisions and agreements

For the House of Commons and Scottish Parliament, we extract from the official record references to decisions made without a vote (“on the nod”) and create ‘Agreements’ from these, linking to the related motion. 

We do this to create a canonical reference for agreements. When a high profile issue may be passed without a vote, it can be hard for people to find. By extracting these from the official record, we show more of how the parliamentary process works, can tag them as being part of the process of passing legislation, and include them in voting summaries (in rare cases). 

Here is an example of an amendment made to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill that was accepted without a vote.

Voting summaries by time period

TheyWorkForYou Votes now powers our voting summaries – where we group related votes together to show a record on TheyWorkForYou. 

Building on last year’s change to how we approach scoring and vote inclusion, our new technical approach gives us more flexibility in calculating voting summaries for different time periods. We now show voting records in TheyWorkForYou by ‘all time’ but also by the different government tenures since 1997. 

By creating a view for the current Parliament, we can make recent decisions easier to discover and include, while reflecting that the implications of votes can be long running, and the record is not reset at each election. 

The voting summaries are currently updated up to the end of 2024 – we will do an update covering the first part of 2025 in early June. 

Annotations and whip reports

An impact of TheyWorkForYou has been more public explanations by representatives of how they’ve voted.

We want to start recording this, to make them more accessible to people viewing their representatives’ voting records.

Divisions, agreements, and votes by individual representatives can be annotated with additional information or a link. We can also record information about party voting instructions (the whip). 

Initially, we will be testing this out on specific votes, but our plan is to make this directly available to representatives to annotate their own votes, and have this information feed through to TheyWorkForYou. 

A hub of voting information

Over time, we will make more of the information in this platform more directly accessible on TheyWorkForYou to reach our wider audience. 

But our goal is generally to raise the standard and ease of analysis of parliamentary data for everyone. We make all our data available not just through an API, but as bulk downloads that make it easy for researchers and analysts to get the benefit of the work we’re doing to join up different data sources. 

Support our work

Through TheyWorkForYou and our wider democracy work, we take a practical approach to improving politics in the UK. Over the last two decades we’ve shone  light on UK democracy by tracking MPs’ votes, publishing registers of interests, and sending email alerts—making sure those in power know the public is watching. Because we don’t have paywalls – charities, community groups, and everyday citizens can access unbiased political information without cost.

To keep the service running and continue to innovate and adapt to changing times, TheyWorkForYou relies on supporters. A monthly contribution of £5 (or what you can afford) helps cover core costs, safeguards its independence, and lets the team keep innovating for a fairer, more transparent political system.

If you support us and our work, please consider making a one-off or monthly donation.

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Header image: photo by Christian Boragine on Unsplash

Here’s an update on some upcoming TheyWorkForYou projects, and how you can help us make them better. 

TheyWorkForYou has also joined Bluesky – so follow us there!

Come to the launch of TheyWorkForYou Votes

TheyWorkForYou Votes is mySociety’s new platform that provides more information than ever about how MPs (and other elected representatives) have voted. 

Join us for our launch event at 12pm Monday 19 May to cover both why we publish votes, and what you can get out of the new platform.

Crowdsource APPG information

We’re working to create a list of APPG memberships, but to do that we need to double check we’ve identified the APPGs that don’t have a website (so we can ask for the information directly, using Parliament’s rules). 

Here’s more information about that, and what we’ve learned about changes to the APPG register. 

Crowdsource MPs’ views on the Assisted Dying vote 

This Friday (17 May) the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill may have votes on its report stage (accepting/rejecting amendments made by committee), and its approval stage (third reading). If it passes approval, it will go to the House of Lords. If time runs out, amendment votes and the approval vote may move to another week. 

One of the things we want to do with our new TheyWorkForYou Votes sites is to collect when MPs give extra explanations or justifications of how they vote — and this is especially important in free votes such as this one, where parties do not instruct their MPs how to vote. 

If you see an MP making a post or public statement about their planned or actual vote on the overall bill, please add links to this spreadsheet. 

Follow us on Bluesky

TheyWorkForYou is now on BlueSky, where we’ll be posting about new data, analysis, and how to get the most out of TheyWorkForYou.  After the launch next week, we’ll be posting links to House of Commons vote analysis as they happen. 

While we’re talking about Bluesky, we’ve also added links from MPs’ pages on TheyWorkForYou to their Bluesky accounts (based on a list that PoliticsHome has put together).

If you use Bluesky, you can help us by following and raising the profile of our work. 

Donate

Through TheyWorkForYou and our wider democracy work, we take a practical approach to improving politics in the UK, looking for opportunities to make things better through putting the work in — and where we don’t need to ask permission to succeed.

But to make this happen we need money and support to investigate problems and understand how we can best make a difference. We want to do more to improve the data that exists, and help support new volunteer projects to build better data and services.

If you support us and our work, please consider making a one-off or monthly donation. It makes a difference.

Header image: Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

TheyWorkForYou Votes is mySociety’s new platform that provides more information than ever about how MPs (and other elected representatives) have voted. 

It’s launching on Monday 19th May, and we’re running an event where you can learn all about it. 

Votes in the UK’s Parliaments determine the laws that we all live by, and we want the information about who voted for what to be as accurate, easy to use and easy to understand as possible.

Whether you’re a data whizz who wants to get into the details, or a citizen who wants to know whether your MP has been paying attention to your emails, we think this new service will be helpful to you. Thanks to TheyWorkForYou Votes, we’ve been able to make improvements to our own websites (like TheyWorkForYou and the Local Intelligence Hub), and also, true to our open source principles, we’re making more data available in more formats that you can use and re-use for your own clever tools! 

Join us for our launch event at 12pm Monday 19th May to cover both why we publish votes, and what you can get out of the new platform.

Register on Eventbrite now to hear from:

• Louise Crow, mySociety’s Chief Exec 
• Dr Ben Worthy, Birkbeck University
• Alex Parsons & Julia Cushion, mySociety’s democracy team

See you in a couple of weeks!

 

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Image: UK Parliament (CC BY 2.0)