The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices.

We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take longer to work through. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish blog posts on long running issues where deeper changes would improve how Parliament works.

Previously we’ve written about how it should be easier for MPs to vote, how giving MPs more power over the timetable helps them keep promises to voters, stand-in (or locum) MPs, citizens assemblies’ to set standards, and fixing the public ombudsman.

This week our pitch is Parliament should learn more from the devolved Parliaments on simplifying terms and procedure – with the goal of the how Parliament works being more easily understood by both the public and MPs.

Strangers and personalities

Parliament has a jargon problem, and that makes it hard for the public and MPs themselves to understand how Parliament works.

All workplaces make their own words and culture, but democratic institutions should also aim to be welcoming and accessible to the public as a whole. In Hannah White’s book Held in Contempt, she points out that it was only in 2004 that Parliament adopted the term ‘members of the public’ (e.g. ‘us’, the people they represent) to replace the previous ‘strangers’.

The guide to Parliamentary procedure (“Erskine May”) was finally opened up to free and public access in 2019, but its actual content remains written in archaic English and some sections are misleading without an understanding of the period in which it was written. For example, the rule on MPs not using each other’s names is explained as avoiding “personality”, which is an old term for “personal insult” rather than a belief that MPs should talk robotically.

The problem isn’t just a historical legacy. In 2012, MPs renamed Parliament’s famous clock tower the ‘Elizabeth Tower’. This has led to changes in how the building and its history are described on the Parliament website, reflecting the new 150 year history of ‘Elizabeth Tower and Big Ben’. The exception is the part of Parliament with the keenest eye on clear communication with the public: the gift shop. This beacon of clarity continues to describe the tower, primarily and correctly, as Big Ben.

From this, we suggest a ‘Big Ben’ rule: the publicly accessible and understood term should be the official term. Parliamentary trivia is for the tour guides, and no one should need to know it to understand how Parliament works.

The UK’s newer Parliaments use different ways of working. MSPs in Scotland and MSs in Wales address each other by name, talk about stages of legislation (rather than ‘readings’), and instead of accumulated jargon (Hansard, Erskine May), use terms like ‘The Record’ and ‘Parliamentary rules and guidance’.

This is not just about being legible to the outside world, but about clearer working within Parliament. MPs having a lack of clarity over complicated procedures makes it harder for them to do their job. Amendments to legislation are often presented as impenetrable lists of text being deleted and modified in other legislation, rather than a clear “track changes” that makes it clear to MPs what the effect of the change is (the US House of Representatives has made progress on an approach to this). Making how Parliament works clearer makes it a more effective institution.

What can mySociety and TheyWorkForYou do?

While the best approach is to fix problems at the source, TheyWorkForYou has some capacity to adopt this approach in the language it uses itself. For instance, because this is a change already provided by the Hansard data, the convention of not referring to MPs by name is already broken in TheyWorkForYou. We could introduce more annotations that undo ways MPs are required to make themselves unclear.

Additionally, we can provide extra analysis and search over documents like the Parliamentary rules and guidance to make it a more understandable guide to the public and MPs.

If you’d like to support us in trying to fix problems from the outside, we can always do more with more funding – one-off or standing donations are appreciated.

Image: Huy Phan on Unsplash.

The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices.

We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take longer to work through. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish blog posts on long running issues where deeper changes would improve how Parliament works.

Previously we’ve written about how it should be easier for MPs to vote, how giving MPs more power over the timetable helps them keep promises to voters, stand-in (or locum) MPs, and using citizens assemblies’ to set standards.

This week our pitch is that Parliament should make all the casework passing through MPs offices more efficient by completing previously abandoned reform of the Ombudsman system.

Systems for dealing with things that don’t work

Part of an efficient layered democracy is helping people who feel let down by public services to raise their issues in the right place. Currently in the UK, too many complaints go through MPs to be referred back to local councillors, and the network of different complaints processes and ombudsmans* is confusing and difficult to access.

An Ombudsman is an independent official who investigates and resolves complaints from the public. Another term for ombudsman is ‘public advocate’ and in the UK system, hundreds of MPs and thousands of staff are engaged in helping constituents resolve problems dealing with government departments or agencies (and post-privatisation, the same services being delivered by private organisations). The intervention of an MP can lead to extra external and internal scrutiny and changed outcomes for the people who raised a complaint.

There are different schools of thought about how to improve this situation. Some see this as a core part of the post-war MP’s job, with an MP as a vital bridge between citizens and the technocratic state, which should be better supported with more resources. Others see this kind of advocacy as being a distraction from the national legislating duties of an MP, and believe that more of this should fall to local councillors (or more fundamentally, that things should just work without intervention).

Both these perspectives could find common ground in the idea that better systems can both ease the workload and increase the systematic effectiveness of complaints made.

Fix the ombudsman

Following years of reports recommending a change, in 2016 there was significant progress made on proposals to merge several ombudsmen together to create the Public Services Ombudsman – with the goal of reducing complexity to the citizen, and modernising the structure.

Functionally, this meant removing the “MP filter” from complaints made to the Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman. Currently PHSO has to turn away complainants who have not gone through their MP for non-health complaints, but can just accept health-related complaints (no one thinks this makes sense). The proposed reform also gave it a new role in improving complaint handling and promoting good practice through issuing recommendations.

Despite getting as far as a draft bill, this process has now stalled, and the PAC Committee in 2023 said that “it is disappointing that the Government has again failed to recognise the importance and urgency of sector-wide ombudsman reform. The current arrangements are outdated and needlessly complex and prevent the public from effective access to justice in cases of wrongdoing.” The PHSO continues to call for itself to be replaced, and points out the efficiency savings of replacing it. This is an area where the basic problem is agreed and the details hammered out: what is missing is Parliamentary time. But a little investment now can lead to both improved outcomes and lower costs.

A more efficient ombudsman would become a vital complement to MPs’ current work. The existing public service ombudsmans for Wales and Scotland both process comparatively few pieces of casework compared to MPs, and the mailbag volume isn’t diminishing any time soon. But the goal of the ombudsman isn’t to fix 1,000 problems individually – instead we want it to make one recommendation that fixes 10,000 problems that haven’t happened yet. Completing this oven-ready reform is vital to lighten MPs’ workload and improve public services (and people’s lives) by turning complaints into long-term solutions.

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*Because I’ve had such fun writing this footnote before: there’s no settled gender neutral pluralisation of Ombudsman. The original Swedish term (ombudsmän) is gender-neutral, and it’s fine to apply English rules and assumptions once something has become an English word (ombudsmen, or ombudspersons). Alternative approaches include shorting to ‘Ombuds’. The International Ombudsman Institute sidesteps the problem by referring to multiple ‘ombudsman institutions’, which also reflects that the idea is often localised using a term that is more descriptive in the local language (public advocate, etc). It’s not the main reason, but if we keep merging ombudsmans, it does help avoid this problem.

Image: Sear Greyson on Unsplash.

The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices.

We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take longer to work through. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish blog posts on long running issues where deeper changes would improve how Parliament works.

Previously we’ve written about how it should be easier for MPs to vote, how giving MPs more power over the timetable helps them keep promises to voters, and stand-in (or locum) MPs.

This week our pitch is that Parliament should commission a Citizens’ Assembly to write a job role for MPs and consider how Parliament, MPs and MP support staff should relate to each other.

A unique role

We think that being an MP should be a more normal and understandable job — and that creating more clarity and structure around the role is good for both MPs and their constituents.

The role of ‘Member of Parliament’ is, for legal and historical reasons, odd. MPs are appointed by 650 elections to 650 separate positions, with a legal status similar to being self-employed. There is no formal connection between an MPs employment and their party, and at the same time no formal idea that they’re supposed to be independent of their party.

While the devolved Parliaments have a requirement that representatives should ‘be accessible to the people of the areas for which they have been elected to serve and to represent their interests conscientiously’, there is no such rule for MPs. This gives a great amount of freedom to MPs, but is in its own way, a trap. In the absence of a clear direction on what they should be doing, it is easy for MPs to be squeezed between party leadership and constituent demands. A clearly defined job role helps evaluate and manage conflicting pressure, and defines the support necessary for the role.

The premise of TheyWorkForYou is in the name — representatives should, in a meaningful way, be understood to be working on behalf of their constituents as a whole, and society in general. But it’s also true that if we’re collectively MPs’ bosses, there are not the structures in place for us to be good employers. If we want to come to a clearer settlement on this, we need a constructive dialogue that goes further than infrequent elections and public polling. We need to meaningfully engage citizens in thought and deliberation about how we can have the best system of representation possible.

Setting standards

We need a way of involving a wider group of people in setting the standards and expectations for what an MP does. One way of doing this would be a Citizens’ Assembly, that brings together a diverse group of people from every part of the country and different ways of life. UCL Constitution Unit’s Democracy in the UK assembly provides a number of useful directions about ethical standards set by MPs (with solid support for a stronger code of conduct); we can go further down this route to explore different ideas of what MPs are supposed to be doing, and give them support to do so.

As a basic task an assembly could be used to define a job description for MPs. What evidence we have suggests this is unlikely to be hugely prescriptive (there is recognition that MPs need to slide between multiple modes of representation) but would be informative about how that better defined role can be supported – and a wider set of questions about the MPs’ role that we could clarify at the same time. Involve have argued that a citizens assembly should play an important part in setting the roles and standards for MPs’ behaviour, and potentially as part of the way that MPs are judged. Introducing deliberative democracy into this process helps fix processes where MPs both set and mark their own homework (seeing deliberation as part of the anti-corruption toolkit rather than a replacement for MPs).

Creating a new conversation

There are wider questions where there are different schools of thought on how Parliament should work. Having citizens weigh in on the balance would help advance arguments and unlock reforms. How much should the government control Parliament? How should MPs fit into that? What is the appropriate scope of casework? What should MPs be spending their time on? How do we make sure they have the resources they need to do that? How can we provide decent working conditions to the representatives and their staff who work on our behalf?

This last point is especially important. While the MP is the only office holder, they have a wider staff to help them support their work. While thousands of people are collectively employed by MPs, they are all employed by individual MPs in small groups. This makes it difficult to impossible for MPs’ staff to raise bullying or abuse issues. Staff groups have proposed staff should be employed centrally, rather than by MPs, but this was rejected by a Speaker’s Conference.

This is a dispute it’d be useful for MPs’ employers collectively to weigh in on. The Democracy in the UK assembly found strong support for the idea that “In the workplace MPs should be subject to the same sanctions as other employees regarding the treatment of staff. Bullying or harassment should not be tolerated.” A Citizens’ Assembly focused on the job role and structures of support would provide direction from the level above MPs on appropriate structures to both be supported and support their staff.

Healthier democratic conversations

For MPs who feel constrained, this is a forum to make the case on how they could be supported to do their job better. For those MPs who use the idea that they are accountable to “the electorate” as a justification that there should be almost no restrictions on their behaviour, citizens’ assemblies are a vital guide to the kinds of standards that citizens will and won’t accept from their representatives.

From our point of view, this would help clarify the approach TheyWorkForYou should take in holding MPs to account — but this would also be helpful as a reset in democratic relations. This debate is often put in “public versus elite” framings that lead to a number of unhelpful attitudes. Views from “the public” of what MPs should do are framed as incoherent and uneducated, in a way that elite discussion almost becomes resentful of the idea that the public are part of the discussion at all.

The ghost of the public is used to justify both underinvestment in democracy, and detachment from the idea the public have anything useful to say on the subject. At the same time, the public has no actual power here. Reforms stall, not because they are popular or not, but because of opposition from those who already have power.

Creating structures to meaningfully involve citizens in this discussion provides a way out of this problem, and could lead to a more constructive discussion on the relationship between citizens and representatives.

Image: Deniz Fuchidzhiev on Unsplash.

The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices.

We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take longer to work through. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish blog posts on long running issues where deeper changes would improve how Parliament works.

Previously we’ve written about how it should be easier for MPs to vote, and how giving MPs more power over the timetable ultimately helps them keep promises to voters.

Today we’re publishing our research into Stand-in (or ‘locum’) MPs. This is the idea that when MPs have a substantial period of absence (e.g. parental or long-term sickness) there should be a process to appoint someone who can temporarily fulfil the duties of an MP.

The need here is to find an approach that starts with the fact that MPs are people, and we need to be able to handle prolonged absence well —both for constituent representation and the wellbeing of MPs.

The idea of replacing absent representatives with stand-in MPs is (if not universal) certainly something that happens in other Parliaments. Generally these are in Parliaments elected by party-list proportional representation, and there is a good ‘next person’ on the list to appoint. We need an approach that works for the candidate-based system we use in the UK.

Our pitch is creating a new role with speaking rights in Parliament, while voting continues to be handled by proxy vote (over an extended period). But other approaches are possible, and what’s important at this point is trying to draw out objections and views, and trying to find ways forward.

The research is consciously not comprehensive, but we’ve sign-posted what we think the next set of questions is, and how it’s possible to get more answers.

You can read the report online.

For feedback, please email me at alex.parsons@mysociety.org.

Image: Yaopey Yong on Unsplash.

In our WhoFundsThem work, we want to make MPs’ financial interests much easier to understand and more transparent. One of the ways we think our work can make a difference is in highlighting processes that don’t make sense, and prodding Parliament to see what happens.

In this case, we’ve noticed an issue in how declarations of interests by MPs on Written Questions are handled — and raising this has triggered a review of the process.

We have also released a new dataset of Written Questions where an interest has been declared.

What’s the problem?

When submitting parliamentary questions, MPs should say if they have any relevant interests, and if so what they are. In the guide to submitting Written Questions online, MPs are told “If you have an interest to declare, click the box saying ‘yes’ and explain what the interest is.” Similarly, on the offline form, members are told to email the Table Office to say what the interest is.

However, only the ‘yes/no’ bit of this gets onto the Written Questions section of the Parliament website. The actual interest being disclosed is never released. The problem is this is a lower level of public disclosure than contributions to debates, where the standard is now (in theory) that it should be clear what the interest is as well as the fact that it exists. For oral questions, that interests need to be declared on the form is explicitly given as a reason there is no need for further declarations in the chamber. This would be reasonable if the information was available to be added to Hansard later – but as stands it is not.

Both in the chamber and on the form, MPs may refer to interests they have already declared, or raise something with a closer connection to the topic that doesn’t otherwise need to be disclosed. As well as financial interests, this might represent more personal interests (for instance, a health issue they have an interest in because of their own experiences).

Because we only have ‘an interest has been declared’, different types of disclosure are lumped together. This requires more work from anyone who wants to understand whether a declaration has further financial implications, or simply added context/personal background. In this case, it’s not even that the MPs are at fault: they’re disclosing information, but the process means that it’s not going anywhere.

Asking for more information

To see what would happen, we made a Freedom of Information request for this information that’s being recorded but not released.

As we mostly expected, this was withheld under the exemption that gives Parliament control over publishing its own proceedings (we can’t compel extra information to be published even if it exists). However, there was a recognition that this gap was a problem and as a result the process is being reviewed:

Nonetheless, while there is no statutory right to this information, Mr Speaker considers greater transparency would be desirable and has commissioned an urgent review of the publication policy. The review may well lead to the information you seek being provided on a non-statutory basis, but it will take a little time to carry out.

This is great news, and better future publication would help make disclosure more uniform and effective.

This response also confirmed that the current process is a bit of black hole, with it being inappropriate for officials to screen questions as a result of interests declared:

It is Members, not officials, that are responsible for deciding what to register or declare, and deciding whether or not their interests are of a sort which should prevent them asking a particular question or taking part in a debate.

As such, the disclosures MPs make as part of this process are functionally going nowhere (except as an honesty exercise for the MPs involved): they have no public visibility and no internal decisions are made as a result of information disclosed.

Why this matters

We’re interested in Written Questions because they’re both an important part of how Parliament holds the government to account, but also a potential way that MPs can use their public position for private gain.

MPs have privileged access to government information. Written Questions are both faster than Freedom of Information requests (normal reply of five days rather than 28 days), and can ask questions that might require producing new information (while FOI only applies to data and information that already exists).

In the 90s, there was a Cash for Questions scandal, and there is reason to suspect that some version of this continues. Simon Weschle found a statistical connection between a group of MPs with second jobs (especially those in the “knowledge sector”) and increased numbers of questions asked. Looking at the content of these extra questions, he found these MPs asked more questions about internal department policies and projects. While Weschle is careful to avoid suggesting impropriety by any single MP highlighted, this suggests a slightly less immediately transactional version of cash for questions. Companies that can hire MPs have the ability to extract more information about government work, that may enrich the company, even if the MP’s formal role is tangential to this work. In general, MPs should strive to avoid even the appearance that this is what is happening.

What can we do in the meantime?

We’re going to keep an eye out for changes made as a result of this review, but there’s more we can do in the meantime.

The first thing we’ve already done is make the dataset of questions with declared interests more accessible. Using the Parliament website’s Written Questions service, you can’t easily pick out just those with a declared interest. We’ve set up a process to republish Written Questions with declared interests as a spreadsheet and through a data explorer.

If we decide to start weekly summaries of interests declared in debates, we could similarly keep track of new questions with declared interests and try and reconcile them to information elsewhere. The volume is low enough we could email MPs to ask what they’ve declared if unclear.

Something we considered was categorising questions with interests disclosed as part of our crowdsource of the register of interests, but we left this off to keep the scope of the exercise manageable. However, the real issue to dig into is not the relatively small number of questions with interests disclosed (around 256 last year), but understanding whether there are interests undisclosed in the 40,000 other questions submitted.

This is too great a volume to easily crowdsource, but we’d like to explore whether we can pair the task with a machine learning approach to narrow the problem down to a smaller list of entries for manual review. As part of the current crowdsource, our volunteers are collecting information about associated companies. This might be a first step in exploring this problem.

Help us go further

This is part of our wider WhoFundsThem project – where we are building new datasets and crowdsourcing information about MPs’ financial interests to improve what we list on TheyWorkForYou.

Under pretty much every rock we turn over, we find something that needs more attention. We would like to do a lot more work like this: finding ways to apply new technology to make parliamentary monitoring more comprehensive and sustainable.

If you’d like to help us do more, please consider supporting us with a one-off or monthly donation.

Image: Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

This blog post is part of our Repowering Democracy series. We are publishing a series of short pieces of writing from mySociety staff and guest writers who are thinking about how our democracy works and are at the frontlines of trying to improve it.

This week, we’re re-publishing a blog post from Anna Powell-Smith at the Centre for Public Data, which is a new, non-partisan non-profit working for stronger public data. We’re previously worked together on recommendations to avoid fragmented public data. This blog post touches on several issues close to our hearts: Parliamentary written questions, and where there isn’t enough data to understand what’s going on.

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Data gaps are under-reported, because it’s hard to write about data that doesn’t exist.

As we’ve written about before, newspapers publish endless stories on house prices, where there’s lots of data – but few on rental costs, even though millions of people rent. That’s partly because the Office for National Statistics doesn’t collect much data on rentals.

To tackle this problem, I’ve been thinking about how to map data gaps, and make them more visible.

And I think the best way is actually to think about questions, instead of data. What are the important questions that the government can’t answer?

Obviously, ‘important’ is subjective! But one source of clearly important questions is Parliamentary written questions, which are the formal questions that MPs and peers ask the government. Where the government doesn’t have the data to answer them, it has to say so.

So this post introduces new research: a data analysis of 200,000 Parliamentary written questions, and what they tell us about the UK’s missing numbers.

Our modest goal: to find the UK’s biggest data gaps.

What we did

Building on some previous research of ours, we strapped on our coding hats 🪖, and did the following:

• First, we scraped all the written questions in Parliament from December 2019 to February 2023, from TheyWorkForYou, which gaves us about 200,000 questions.
• Next, we flagged questions asking for quantitative information, with phrases like “how many” or “how much” – which showed that about a fifth of questions wanted data, just under 40,000.
• Then we flagged questions where the government apparently said the data was “not held”, “not collected”, etc. About a quarter of quantitative questions were answered like this.

And we ended up with a dataset of around 10,000 questions where MPs apparently both (i) asked for data, and (ii) were told it was not available. So: missing numbers.

Then we spot-checked the questions to check our method. It wasn’t perfect, but it was very decent. (It helps that Parliament uses formal, consistent language.) You can download the full dataset here.

Sometimes, MPs ask about strange things, like jobs for clowns. But most are extremely serious, covering the issues that affect MP’s constituents. And overall, they tell us what MPs need to know.

Data gaps by department

Firstly, we looked at how often each government department said that data wasn’t available. (See the code.) And there were were huge differences:

• At the Department of Health & Social Care, around 40% of quantitative requests were unanswered (though we can cut them some slack, as this was during the Covid pandemic).
• At the Home Office and the Department for Work & Pensions, around a third were; at the Ministry of Justice the proportion of unanswered quantitative requests was 30%, and the Department for Education 27%.
• But the proportion was much lower at other big departments – almost all others were below 20%.

Of course, we need to be cautious here, as the numbers are approximate. Without reading each question, we can’t be sure that we’ve tagged it correctly, or if the MP was asking something impossible. It’s probably most useful to consider the differences between departments.

Given that, it’s not surprising that the health, benefits, justice and education departments would get requests for data, since they run massive operational services that affect people’s lives. (The Foreign Office, by contrast, largely seems to get asked about wine.) It’s more surprising that they seem to struggle to answer them more than other departments.

Now let’s dive into what these unanswered questions were about.

The topics with the biggest data gaps

Each question scraped has a title. We can use this to see which topics were least likely to get an answer.

Other than Covid-related topics, the major topics with the highest proportion of unanswered questions were:

1. Benefits – grouping together benefits like Universal Credit and PIP
2. Asylum, refugees and migrants
3. Child maintenance
4. Energy meters
5. Armed forces housing

This seems plausible. The DWP Select Committee has repeatedly criticised the government for the lack of visibility over the benefits system; the statistics regulator has expressed concerns about the use of asylum statistics, while the National Audit Office has noted gaps in the data available on smart meters.

We also used GPT-4 to try tagging questions, which worked quite well. We used it to tag questions to the Department of Health & Social Care. This helped us identify major clusters of unanswered questions in these areas.

In healthcare, MPs often struggled to get basic prevalence information, whether:

• the number of people diagnosed with particular conditions, like silicosis
• diagnoses broken down by characteristics, like the number of women with meningitis, or region, like autism in the East of England
• or diagnoses for particular (important) groups, like prisoners with mental health conditions.

Also, funding is a topic it’s surprisingly difficult to get information about, e.g.

• funding for particular conditions, like endometriosis, or
• funding on social care by local authority
• funding at a local level, especially per hospital, which MPs often care about.

Following on from this, hospital-level information in general often seems to be poor, e.g.:

• how many A&E visits there are per hospital
• what waiting times are per hospital.

And finally, workforce is a huge one, with topics like:

• vacancies – how many current GP vacancies are there?
• retention – how many dentists are still working 5 years after qualifying?
• skills – how many specialists are there with particular skills, like Parkinson’s nurses or motor neurone nurses?

You can see the tagged questions here – there are many more examples under each topic.

This gets really worrying when you look at the dataset over time. It’s immediately clear that MPs often ask the same thing over and over again – yet the information doesn’t seem to improve.

What next?

We think statistics producers should be monitoring Parliamentary questions, to tell them where data needs to be better. After all, MPs deserve answers to their questions, and so do we all.

If you can help us make this happen, we’d love to talk.

If you’re interested in this research – or even better, if you can fund us to do more of it! – please do get in touch.

Image: Tom Chen on Unsplash.

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 blog post is part of our Repowering Democracy series. This year we will be publishing a series of short pieces of writing from mySociety staff and guest writers who are thinking about how our democracy works and are at the frontlines of trying to improve it.

This week our senior researcher, Alex Parsons, shares data we’ve produced about new constituencies, and how we should steer the process of boundary reform towards making our politics easier to navigate.

The current set of parliamentary constituencies is being replaced for the next election. For some, the main effect is a name change, but for others the borders of constituencies will change substantially.

Boundary reviews are carried out by four separate organisations — one for each nation — who each set their own boundaries. This means that no-one officially produces a single dataset of all the new constituencies covering the whole UK.

That seems like a useful thing to have, so we’ve created it. We’ve made:

• A single Excel download and geopackage listing all 650 new constituencies.
• A series of population and overlap files between old constituencies, old LSOA (2011) and current local authorities (2023) and the new constituency.
• A postcode lookup (England, Wales, Scotland only) for postcodes to new constituencies.
• A new tab/csv download for 2025 constituencies in our:
  • Composite UK-wide Index of Multiple Deprivation
  • Composite UK-wide Rural Urban Classification (RUC)
• For Python developers, a function that uses this data to transform between old, new and local authority geographies. The same data could be used in a similar way in other languages
• UPDATE: MapIt now makes both current and future constituencies available through the API and online postcode lookup. Enter any postcode to see the new constituency.

This contains both the official GSS id, and a unique ID based on the three letter IDs for new constituencies created by Philip Brown and Alasdair Rae for their hexmap of the new constituencies. This is useful in some instances because the GSS codes are not unique to the new constituencies (some Scottish constituencies are unchanged).

Political equality means more than equal seats

There are 650 MPs in the UK Parliament, each is elected from a constituency, and each constituency only has one MP.

The main change in the new rules is reducing the tolerance for differences in the number of registered voters between constituencies, and ending the previous separate weighting of Wales. This means that some areas are affected much more than others by the change – with the number of Welsh seats reduced by eight, and Scotland losing two seats in total.

Boundary changes aren’t just a technical process, but have impacts on the results of elections. In the UK, politicians can’t directly draw boundaries, but this doesn’t mean they’re not a political choice. The boundary commissions follow the rules they are set, but what these rules are (and how often they happen) are the subject of political debate where everyone has one eye on the outcomes that different sets of rules produce. The debate about “equal size constituencies” versus boundaries that reflect “natural communities” is in part about different perceived partisan advantages of drawing lines in different ways.

Advocates of constituencies of equal size argue that this is about political equality. Now, we like political equality, but taking this argument seriously should lead you way past equal size to supporting a move to proportional representation. In practice, everyone in this debate accepts trade-offs between political equality and other factors. If we’re not going to have proportional representation, we think clear lines between different levels of government are features that should have real weight.

Effective and understandable layers of representation

We are in favour of layers of representation that are effective and easy to understand. Through postcode lookups on TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem we can explain the overlaps for a user’s own postcode, but the simpler the system the easier it is for people to understand what is happening – whether or not they visit one of our websites.

When boundaries are less complex, it’s also easier for people working inside the system to understand how the pieces fit together. Tighter requirements on populations means more constituencies will cross local authority boundaries. Using our new datasets, we can say that the number of constituencies that have more than 5% of its population in at least one other local authority has increased from 26% to 38%.

This means there are an increasing number of MPs who have a harder job than others – working with different or multiple local authorities depending on the issue at hand. Knowledge and understanding of local systems is much more complicated for these MPs, and getting problems to the right place is more challenging for their staff.

Tighter requirements also mean more frequent changes. The current timetable will lead to this process being repeated every other election, disrupting understanding of constituencies and processes of accountability.

The reason we’ve produced this data in the first place is to help organisations we are working with transform information they have about current constituencies into information that is useful for new constituencies. Institutions inside and outside the formal political system develop an understanding of the country that is disrupted by changing boundaries.

This problem also applies to the understanding MPs have of their own area – both in terms of learned understanding, and statistics and reports created to inform them. Changing boundaries means everyone has to change their understanding of what a constituency looks like. This is all bad from the point of view of effective understanding and interrelation of layered government.

Something that should be key when designing our political system is making sure that it can be understood by citizens and representatives, and supports effective communication between layers of government.

If we designed our institutions and boundaries to be easily navigated, rather than meet mathematical rules, what would that look like? Certainly there should be better alignment between different layers of government, but can we go further than that? We want better postcode data so that we can fix the problems of when the same postcode is in multiple areas, but from a public understanding point of view – why shouldn’t the line drawers respect postcode boundaries in the first place? They’re a lot more real to people than the process that produces our boundaries now.

The way we draw our boundaries is part of wider arguments about the different priorities we have when we design political institutions – and the idea that things should be easy to understand and navigate is currently undervalued.

Image: Héctor J. Rivas on Unsplash.

This blog post is part of our Repowering Democracy series. This year we will be publishing a series of short pieces of writing from mySociety staff and guest writers who are thinking about how our democracy works and are at the frontlines of trying to improve it.

This week Dr Kathryn Rix writes about the opening up of parliamentary information in the 19th century. TheyWorkForYou is twenty years old, but in many respects is a digital continuation of similar projects and arguments about parliamentary transparency that go back centuries.

Learning more about this history helps situate our work in the longer context – and this period (with league tables of MPs, arguments about league tables of MPs, and a clear illustration of the link between changes to the physical building and transparency), is one with obvious application to our work today.

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On 22 February 1836 a landmark vote took place in the House of Commons. It was significant not because of the issue involved – a local railway bill – but because for the first time, MPs left the chamber to vote in two separate division lobbies, following which an official division list was published, recording the names of every MP voting in the majority and minority.

The publication of these official lists from 1836 made it far easier for those outside Westminster to scrutinise and assess the activities of their representatives. One Radical MP described this change as “perhaps one of the most important measures ever sanctioned, as a check upon the conduct of members”.

Before this ground-breaking division, the official records of the Commons gave only the names of the tellers who counted the votes in each division, and the total number of MPs voting on each side. The Commons had just one lobby, so when divisions took place, the presumed majority stayed in the chamber to be counted there, and the presumed minority went out into the lobby.

The informal record

Although there was no official record of how each MP voted, some MPs – notably the Radical backbencher Joseph Hume – compiled their own lists of divisions and supplied these for publication in the newspapers. However, these unofficial lists were usually produced only for more important divisions and sometimes gave the names of those in the minority, but not the majority. They were notoriously inaccurate, and MPs regularly wrote to the press correcting errors.

Pressure to improve this system and publish a full official record of every division increased after the 1832 Reform Act, the first major reform of the British electoral system. One of the Act’s key aims was to restore public confidence in government by making the Commons more responsive and accountable to public opinion. In this spirit, the Radical MP Daniel Whittle Harvey put the case for official division lists, arguing that:

“every person now acknowledged that responsibility, and not secresy [sic] and concealment, was the basis of the trust reposed in the hands of Representatives by their constituents … In a Reformed Parliament he believed, that all hon. Members would be desirous that their constituents should know how they voted”.

A select committee in 1834 felt the best option for compiling accurate official division lists would be to construct a second division lobby, but the cramped conditions of the Commons chamber made this impractical. However, when MPs moved into temporary accommodation following the catastrophic fire at Westminster in October 1834, this obstacle was removed. The additional second lobby, which facilitated the publication of official division lists, was built during the 1835-6 recess. It became an integral part of the Commons and was replicated in the new Palace of Westminster designed by Charles Barry.

Use by newspapers and journalists

Information extracted from the official division lists was widely reproduced and analysed in the newspaper press, as well as in guides to MPs’ voting behaviour, such as An Atlas of the Divisions of the House of Commons (1836), which listed every MP’s vote in the 1836 parliamentary session in a tabular form. Such analysis of MPs’ votes was not entirely new. Richard Gooch’s The Book of the Reformed Parliament (1834) had tabulated MPs’ votes in selected divisions in 1833 and 1834, and had been used at the 1835 general election to challenge MPs in several constituencies about their attendance levels at Westminster. MPs had, however, disputed the accuracy of Gooch’s publication, based as it was on unofficial records. At Droitwich, where his opponent calculated that he had voted in just 11 of the 116 divisions listed by Gooch, John Foley insisted that his votes “had been given much nearer ninety-nine times than nine”.

Extract from Atlas of Divisions (1836)

The publication of official division lists meant that MPs could no longer try to shirk responsibility for particular votes by claiming that they had been misreported. Another highly significant development was that, with all divisions fully recorded, accurate calculations could be made of how many times MPs voted each session. The Atlas displayed these totals against each MP’s name, a novel feature which one commentator tellingly described as “a scale of diligence” by which voters could measure “the conduct of representatives”.

Rankings and league tables

National and local newspapers compiled and dissected figures on MPs’ attendance levels on a weekly and annual basis, making it much easier for voters and the wider public to access this information and use it to call MPs to account. While annual attendance statistics sometimes listed their names alphabetically, it became common for MPs to be ranked alongside their colleagues – either nationally or regionally – on the basis of how often they had voted, producing what were effectively ‘league tables’ of MPs. The Gateshead Observer referred to its annual attendance tables of north-eastern MPs as a ‘parliamentary audit’ or ‘reckoning day’. MPs had been accustomed to explaining to their constituents how they had voted, but increasingly also found themselves having to justify how often they did so.

For those MPs who appeared towards the top of these tables, these statistics provided welcome proof of their diligence. After being ranked as the fifth most attentive MP during the 1840 session, Henry Salwey, MP for Ludlow, was praised by his supporters as “most assiduous, and most constant – ever vigilant in promoting … the local interests placed in his care, and the general welfare of the community”. In contrast, other MPs and their supporters rejected attempts to reduce their Commons contribution to mere numbers. At the 1841 Hertfordshire election, the voting record of the Conservative MP Abel Smith was compared unfavourably with his Liberal opponent, who had voted three times more often. One of Smith’s backers argued, however, that “we don’t count the number of divisions – we look to the importance of them: we don’t wish our member to sit through every paltry discussion – as though nailed to the benches”.

The reaction of the quantified MP

The question of how useful these attendance figures were as a measure of MPs’ commitment to representing their constituents was widely debated during the nineteenth century. The Morning Chronicle was not alone in mocking the idea that an MP’s “whole duty … consists in walking in and out of the lobbies”. It was pointed out that notable figures such as Lord John Russell (a former prime minister) – who voted in 28 of 198 divisions in 1856 – and William Gladstone (a future prime minister) – with 58 votes that session – would be found lacking if judged only by this measure. The ‘Division-list Test’, as one MP labelled it, failed to take account of MPs’ contributions in other areas of the work of the Commons, particularly in serving on committees. Although one Worcester newspaper noted the relatively poor attendance of the local MP, Joseph Bailey, in divisions, it observed “in justice” to Bailey that “his labours on Committees have been incessant”.

There were other reasons why voting in numerous divisions was not necessarily seen as demonstrating dedication to parliamentary business. The influx of MPs from the smoking or refreshment rooms when the division bell rang, without having heard the preceding debate, was often commented upon.

Such behaviour prompted the Conservative MP Charles Adderley to argue that there could be “no worse test of a man being a useful member of Parliament”, since “a man might attend every division… and be the idlest dog in the House”. Another argument against testing MPs’ diligence in this way was that the overall totals did not distinguish between critical issues and less significant matters, such as local or private bills which did not affect the MP’s constituency. William Scholefield, generally seen as a hard-working representative, told his Birmingham constituents that he had deliberately abstained in many such cases, since “I will never vote on a bill unless I distinctly know what I am going to vote about”. Yet while the use of the “Division-list Test” could be challenged in various ways, it continued to be seen as a useful indicator for constituents in deciding whether their representatives had been attentive or neglectful in carrying out their parliamentary duties.

Images: ‘Division barrier and lobby’ and it is taken from pg. 409 of J. Ewing Ritchie, The life and times of William Ewart Gladstone. The pictorial edition Volume I.

Dr Kathryn Rix is Assistant Editor of the House of Commons, 1832-1945 project at the History of Parliament Trust, which is currently researching electoral and parliamentary history between 1832 and 1868.

This blog post is part of our Repowering Democracy series. This year we will be publishing a series of short pieces of writing from mySociety staff and guest writers who are thinking about how our democracy works and are at the frontlines of trying to improve it.

As part of this work, we are working to solidify our views on where Parliamentary reform would work in a complimentary way with the principles behind our services. This week our senior researcher, Alex Parsons, discusses how changes to how MPs vote can improve both transparency and the parliamentary working culture.

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Improving how MPs vote isn’t just about adopting new technology. The sudden move in the pandemic from MPs physically packing into voting lobbies to voting on their phones felt like catching up with a century of technology all at once. But that period was over quickly and things are now (roughly) back to how they were before.

This is because parliamentary processes also reflect political culture. Thomas Edison proposed an electronic voting system for the US Congress in 1869, but one wasn’t actually implemented for 90 years after that. The technology existed, but that wasn’t enough.

New technologies can change who holds power and threaten how things work. Decisions about technology become wrapped up in fights to preserve or change political culture. When thinking about technological changes, we can’t just approach it as a project of modernisation – we need to have a view on the culture we want to create.

Our view is that when MPs vote, we want processes that create transparency on the votes of individuals, that help create an effective working culture, and are sensitive to the circumstances of representatives’ lives.

These elements are not separate. Both transparency around voting and sensitivity to the lives of representatives are important to creating an effective democratic working culture. The approach needs to balance the fact that MPs are standing in for the rest of us, with the fact that they are also people, and are entitled to decent working conditions like anyone else.

This leads to three recommendations on how the UK Parliament should handle its internal votes:

• 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.

In this week’s blog post, I’m going to walk through a bit of the backstory to this thinking, and the benefits of this approach.

How votes work now

Currently, when a decision point is reached in a debate, there is a “voice vote” in the room to test if anyone objects. If they do, MPs vote by physically moving into two rooms connected to the debating chamber. Two different systems kick in here – MPs tap their passes on readers to record how they individually voted, while Tellers (two sets of two MPs) count the number of people who entered to report back for the purpose of the vote. This takes quite a long time, and a vote can last around 15 minutes. Part of this includes an eight minute window for MPs to reach the lobbies from elsewhere in the Parliamentary estate.

The current system isn’t pointlessly antiquated and slow, it is antiquated in a way that supports the way power currently works in the Commons. A slower voting process discourages too many votes – which reflects the reality that non-government approved amendments do not win, and MPs aren’t really engaged in a functional process of improving legislation. The lobbies themselves are defended as an opportunity for MPs to talk to ministers, but the influence also works the other way. The lobby system is a physical and intimidating process of sorting that enforces party unity and discourage rebellion. It is a more difficult thing for someone to walk into a room of their enemies, while being shouted at by their friends, than it is to press a button.

Any change from this system has the potential to disrupt how power works, shifting power away from a shared consensus of party leadership (who, regardless of the specific issue, are in favour of MPs doing what parties say) and enabling more individual action by MPs.

Our view is that this broadly would be a good thing – empowering individual MPs and Parliament collectively over the party leaderships would enable a culture closer to what citizens collectively want from MPs. Importantly, it also helps create a better working environment for MPs themselves.

Why we care about the votes of individual MPs

To provide better information through TheyWorkForYou, we need more complete individual voting data. The more formal mechanisms there are to manage absences, the more we can say what an MP’s vote in comparison to their party’s vote means, and produce better information for our users. Giving disclaimers and saying “it’s more complicated than that” is one approach, but it’s better to fix the problem at the source.

Ultimately we think that MPs are responsible for how they vote and that giving more power to MPs helps them keep their promises to us. The growing amount of “rebellions” (where MPs vote against their parties) is assumed (at least in part) to result from TheyWorkForYou making individual voting records more salient. While MPs do not have strong individual mandates, they do have opinions about where leadership is drifting beyond what they said in elections. We think it is more effective for the responsibility of remembering promises to be distributed among a party, rather than seeing an election as endorsement of any and all future decisions of the party leadership.

We’re not blindly pro-rebellions, but we think it’s important to create the space where they’re a real option available to MPs. We want better data, but we also want to give MPs more room to make decisions.

Separating debates from votes

Grouping votes is already the standard working pattern in the Scottish Parliament and Senedd. The Scottish Parliament groups votes into a “decision time” at the end of the day; the Senedd similarly has a “voting time”. Combined with electronic voting systems – these parliaments can handle a number of votes in the time it takes the Westminster commons time to do one vote. This was also a recommendation of Sarah Childs’ Good Parliament Report, and the Fawcett Society’s A House for Everyone.

But is it right to split up debates and votes? The Parliament website says that parliamentary “[d]ebates are designed to assist MPs and Lords to reach an informed decision on a subject. This decision is then often expressed in a vote (called a ‘division’), for or against”. Don’t we want MPs to make decisions following the debate so their votes are informed by the arguments they’ve heard?

The problem is this description is technically true, but fiddly in the details. While debates are an opportunity for individual MPs to talk about principle and specific issues with legislation, when we move to votes, party power asserts itself. MPs who were never part of the debate are summoned by the division bell, and the vote is decided by who holds power in Parliament, rather than strong arguments made in the moment.

Debates and votes are connected indirectly. The best way of describing the process is that parliamentary debates are the visible portion of a wider set of conversations between groups of MPs as well as between government MPs and leadership. These conversations pre-determine the outcome of votes, by finding if there are any areas the government will accept and support amendments on, or to save face, will more quietly accept in the Lords rather than the Commons. It’s not that MPs’ concerns and opinions go nowhere, just that the method they can have impact is indirect. To describe this isn’t to say it’s good, or an ideal way of working, just that it is not important for how the Commons currently works for votes to directly follow the debate they relate to.

The connection between debates and votes is part of a long debate about the role of MPs and technology. Jacob Rees-Mogg, in arguing against remote electronic voting, argued that if MPs didn’t “have the inconvenience of having to be here physically, they don’t necessarily take it as seriously”. This is a less substantial version of Thomas Wakley’s 1839 complaint about having division bells at all – where he found it “most mischievous, that hon. Members should come down there to vote upon a question without having heard one word of the discussion”.

Ultimately, Wakley has lost this argument – but separating out debates and votes, and moving towards a decision time, at the least removes one source of party pressure, and helps build an effective working culture that also has good transparency to the rest of the country.

This decision time should be held within some concept of “core hours” for Parliament – helping most MPs make the voting period within their other responsibilities, personal and professional.

Being sensitive to the lives of MPs

Sometimes MPs can’t make it to Parliament for reasons that are part of the normal human experience. People have children and people get sick. These are things we recognise as important to safeguard in employment law, but there are difficulties for MPs in applying this to MPs who are effectively self-employed, but with obligations to constituents.

The way Parliament currently balances this is through proxy votes – where MPs can, in circumstances like maternity/paternity leave or prolonged sickness, designate another MP to cast a vote on their behalf. Similar mechanisms now operate in the Scottish Parliament and Senedd. In TheyWorkForYou, proxy votes are displayed the same as normal votes, with a note of who the proxy vote was cast by.

The proxy vote system (introduced in 2019) was a result of two factors. The first is a long running trend where TheyWorkForYou (or similar analysis) highlighted individual voting records in a way that did not capture informal mechanisms of managing long absences like pairing – where parties mutually agree a list of absent MPs so the final result is not affected by absences. While in practice the absence is being accounted for, this is happening in a way that is not transparent to the public. In 2018, women MPs argued that TheyWorkForYou metrics were part of a standard where MPs had to work too soon after having children. This more broadly reflects the issue that Parliament and political life are structured in such a way that assumes the model MP is male, and TheyWorkForYou reinforced rather than challenged this.

The second factor was that a breakdown of trust between parties on pairing led to heavily pregnant MPs needing to vote. Informal mechanisms are ultimately dependent on goodwill, something that cannot always be relied on.

Proxy votes were a solution to this. They are formal mechanisms that are guaranteed by Parliament rather than parties. They reflect the reality that often, an MPs vote is the same as all other MPs of that party, and other MPs can easily cast it for them. By creating an explicit way MPs can be absent for sustained periods, the stream of individual data is created that preserves visibility on the impact of MPs, without requiring a daily presence in Westminster.

This system is a good innovation, but it should go further. While circumstances that lead to prolonged absences are explicitly included (and others should be over time), people often need time off work to handle important issues in their lives. Currently, this remains managed through informal pairing approaches. Party managers can give MPs permission to be absent (“slips”), which will then be managed through party channels.

The problem with this informal approach is another area where it gives parties arbitrary power in one aspect of an MP’s life, that can be used to encourage discipline more widely. In 2022, female Conservative MPs argued there was sexism in when slips were and weren’t allowed – with an example of a slip not being given to a mother needing to take a child to hospital, while feeling male colleagues were easily being given permission to go on holiday. In other cases, permission might be denied to punish internal critics. This is not a healthy system – it works for party management, but not for MPs, and doesn’t work transparently for the rest of the country.

The solution to this is to manage “slips” through the same proxy vote mechanism. MPs should be given the equivalent of leave through a set number of times they can designate a proxy for the day, no questions asked. This accomplishes a double goal of removing more absences from the parliamentary record, and reducing another arbitrary way parties can hold power over MPs.

Looking for answers that work for everyone

We believe that transparency in how MPs vote is important. Through our voting records we want to present straightforward summaries of the impact of MPs in Parliament, that inform our users, and encourage focus on significant decisions made in Parliament. From our point of view, the more complete the data, the easier it is to create summaries that accurately reflect underlying realities without long disclaimers. As such, we’re in favour of both making voting easier and parties publishing the instructions they give MPs, to give the public more complete, and easier to understand, information about voting.

At the same time, making voting easier improves the quality of life of MPs. Making voting more predictable, and reasonable absences more possible, fit well as part of a package of changes improving parliamentary life.

While TheyWorkForYou will sometimes make life harder for MPs (and that’s partly the point), in other cases, our frustration at lack of transparency, and MPs’ frustrations at arbitrary and bad working conditions come from the same place: an agreement between party leaderships that power should be centralised. But there are ways of changing that, and we should talk more about it.

Image: Johann Siemens on Unsplash.