New launch, new launch! We could have just talked about our new votes platform, but it was much more interesting to also explore a bit of history, and research into how MPs and the public use TheyWorkForYou. So, together with Dr Ben Worthy, Alex and Julia, that’s what we did.

Further information

• Find the TheyWorkForYou Votes platform here.
• Here’s a blog post about its launch.
• And here’s the same launch event that you hear in this episode of the podcast, only in video form.
• If you’d like to help us do more of this kind of work, please donate to mySociety.
• Sign up for the Repowering Democracy newsletter.
• How to help us gather information on how MPs are voting on the End of Life Bill.
• Ben’s research can be found on his website Who’s Watching Westminster.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00
Hello again. I’m Myf, Communications Manager at mySociety. We recently launched a new vote information platform, votes.theyworkforyou.com, and this is the first step towards making it much easier to understand the context around how your own MP voted – and also, if you’re a specialist, you’ll find lots of new tools and data that you can use.

Myf Nixon 0:23
We had an online launch event for this, and you can listen to that right now. As well as Alex getting into the more technical details, we’ll first of all hear Julia talking about some of the milestones in TheyWorkForYou’s history, and Dr Ben Worthy sharing some of his fascinating research on how MPs and the general public have, through history, used voting records.

Myf Nixon 0:47
I’ll put the links in our show notes to everything that gets mentioned in the recording. And also, if you’d rather watch this than listen to it, you can do just that on the mySociety site. So again, I’ll make sure that that link is in the show notes.

Louise Crow 1:00
Hello everyone, welcome. I’m Louise Crow. I’m Chief Executive of mySociety. Thanks for joining us for this one hour session on MPs’ votes, why they’re important, and most excitingly, how we’ve improved our publication of information on TheyWorkForYou.

Louise Crow 1:15
At mySociety, we create and run digital services to break down barriers to democratic participation, and we aim to equip people to take action and drive meaningful change. We use a combination of digital expertise and human centred design approaches to deliver open, usable services that enable people to inform themselves, take part in decision making and improve their lives and communities.

Louise Crow 1:43
Now TheyWorkForYou is one of our longest running and best known services; it now covers the UK’s devolved parliaments alongside Westminster; and MP voting records are perhaps the part of TheyWorkForYou that has the biggest impact on the wider political conversation.

Louise Crow 1:59
So we’re very happy to be launching this update at a time when such key issues are being debated and ultimately decided on in those parliaments.

Louise Crow 2:07
A little bit about the running order. Today, we’re going to kick off with Julia Cushion, mySociety’s Policy and Advocacy Manager. Julia, is going to give us a potted history of TheyWorkForYou, and the ways in which we use it to improve practice in Parliament by showing an example of how things can be better.

Louise Crow 2:25
Then I’m extremely delighted that we’re joined today by Ben Worthy. Ben’s a reader in public policy based at Birkbeck College. He studied access to information, open data and transparency in the UK and elsewhere, and is author of the Politics of Freedom of Information: how and why governments pass laws that threaten their power. He’s also completed a two year Leverhulme Trust project looking at the impact of TheyWorkForYou.

Louise Crow 2:53
And you can find out more about that by going to whoswatchingwestminster.wordpress.com, and Ben’s going to tell us all about why we should care about MPs’ voting records and whether watching MPs actually improves their behaviour.

Louise Crow 3:08
Finally, we have Alex Parsons, who leads mySociety’s democracy practice. He’s going to talk about the problems with the information that Parliament releases on votes, how we’ve addressed those problems in our latest version, and what the work is that still needs to be done, and then it’s going to be over to you for questions. So do enter your questions as you think of them below the video. And now, without further ado, I’m going to hand over to Julia to let her set the scene.

Julia Cushion 3:34
Yeah. So I’m setting the scene a little bit today by talking about why we publish voting information and the sort of thinking that we’ve done going into it, and the way that it has changed over the 20 years that TheyWorkForYou has existed.

Julia Cushion 3:46
So it is nice to start with a little bit of history. In the late 17th century, Sir Francis Winnington said, “It is not national nor rational that the people who sent us hither should not be informed of our actions.”

Julia Cushion 3:56
And that basic principle is the one that guides TheyWorkForYou, making sure that people are aware of the voting behaviours of the politicians that they elected.

Julia Cushion 4:05
And it’s worth considering what we’re doing in a bit of context here, because there’s a nice fact that it was after the great fire in 1834 that MPs finally agreed to have a second division lobby built, so that actually there were distinct voting lists between the ayes and the noes, and that you could ascertain how your MP had voted.

Julia Cushion 4:24
Until then, it had was just the job of individual MPs who tried their very best to make lists and then provided them to newspapers but they weren’t accurate. And so yes, Parliament has a long history of changing what and how it communicates about votes, and we are just little part of that history trying to nudge it forwards.

Julia Cushion 4:41
So that basic premise is this: it should be easy to see how your MP has voted, and it’s worth saying not just your MP, your other representatives, too. TheyWorkForYou does cover the devolved parliaments from across the UK, as well as the Westminster parliament.

Julia Cushion 4:54
But although it should be easy, it is worth saying that we recognise that voting and how Parliament works and what a vote means is complicated So we do put a lot of thought into how we display that information and how we communicate it, and our thinking of it has changed over time, and I’m going to talk a little bit about that too.

Julia Cushion 5:10
We take two approaches, which are briefly: we try to provide more information – voting information – than parliament does at source, by reworking parliamentary data and by making summaries that are easy to understand and engage with.

Julia Cushion 5:22
And then also, as well as trying to make that complicated information simpler by displaying it in different ways, we argue for the information to be simpler to begin with: the processes of voting and how Parliament publishes its own voting data could be simpler to begin with.

Julia Cushion 5:34
So I’m going to cover both of these, starting first with providing more voting information. Again, a little bit of history here. I’ve got two screenshots of Parliament’s website in 2005 and they work for you in 2005 and just recognising that back in 2005 you could see your MP’s email if they had one, that you can see there quite a few didn’t. Their personal, independent website if they had one, and their biography on Dods.

Julia Cushion 5:58
But there wasn’t the same way of having an individual MP page and looking at your MP’s voting record, whereas TheyWorkForYou, with help from the Public Whip, was making that available back in 2005 and some of these things have stayed the same.

Julia Cushion 6:11
So, back then, we were publishing voting records and linking to the relevant votes, as we do now. And yeah, I wanted to touch on this relationship with Parliament, where we are trying to encourage them to move forward.

Julia Cushion 6:21
Back in 2005 we were breaking copyright by publishing this information in this way, but it ultimately led to new forms of licensing, so more tools and projects were legal and available. And that’s very much the spirit that we still operate in, and the spirit of this event today, which is to say we’re producing more voting information than ever. Alex is going to cover that.

Julia Cushion 6:39
And not only is it improving TheyWorkForYou and the information we provide on there, but it’s making available the opportunity to make other tools and resources and do lots of interesting things with the data as well. But that’s Alex’s role so I’ll leave that to him later.

Julia Cushion 6:52
Obviously, as Louise mentioned in the introduction, a really prominent part of TheyWorkForYou is our work in summarising votes, in producing these voting record summaries where we say if MPs voted consistently one way or the other, or sometimes voted a certain way, and here, just to sort of talk briefly about our approach, we think it’s really important to try to be both clear and accurate, and we want to make something that’s simple and easy to understand if you’re not an expert in how Parliament works, but always providing links to more source data and more opportunities to explore if you’d like to.

Julia Cushion 7:25
But it’s worth saying that we do recognise that people are busy and they may not always explore the source data, and so it’s really important to us to get these summaries as accurate and clear as possible, and make clear why we choose the things that we do and the process that we go through to do those.

Julia Cushion 7:40
And so you’ll always find links to giving feedback and to understanding more on TheyWorkForYou And yes, as I’ve already mentioned today, we’re having this event because we’re launching TheyWorkForYou Votes, and we’re making even more of the source data available. But I will leave that to Alex later.

Julia Cushion 7:56
So as well as the work that we do to make it easier to understand how your MP has voted, and to summarise those votes, as I mentioned, we also do some work behind the scenes trying to argue for improvements to voting processes.

Julia Cushion 8:09
So there’s taking complicated information and trying to make a bit simpler, but there’s also trying to simplify at source. So here, our principle is that it should be easier for MPs to vote in the first place and for everybody to understand those votes.

Julia Cushion 8:22
And here we’re also balancing processes that create transparency, but we’re also really concerned and sensitive to the circumstances of representatives’ lives, what it is like to be an MP, the job of an MP, and how the working conditions of MPs are changed by how voting changes.

Julia Cushion 8:37
So we believe that the House of Commons should defer votes to a standardised voting time where you could have multiple votes quickly in succession through electronic means. At the moment, each division has eight minutes attached to MPs being allowed to walk through either lobby. But on average, a vote takes somewhere between 12 and 18 minutes, and so it’s a long part of the parliamentary day that it takes for an MP to vote.

Julia Cushion 9:00
The current proxy voting schemes are mostly controlled by the whips, and we believe that they should be extended more so to MPs’ personal discretions. They should have more charge over those things and also alongside the physical process of voting.

Julia Cushion 9:13
Talking about the data that Parliament publishes, Alex will talk a bit towards our steps towards a motions database, but Parliament could itself maintain and publish a database of motions to make this all much clearer, and also Keeling schedules, which is a kind of track changes on legislation, so you’d be able to see much more clearly what an individual amendment was doing to the legislation.

Julia Cushion 9:35
And finally, a key part of TheyWorkForYou is that we publish MPs’ votes within the context of their party, and so we say how they compare to their party, but we always have argued that voting instructions given to MPs, the whipping instructions, should be made public.

Julia Cushion 9:49
Sometimes this is talked about like it’s obvious, but I think for lots of people, it’s not obvious. And so I think there’s a lot to be gained from that,.

Julia Cushion 9:57
Before I hand over to Ben, I just wanted to recognise, as we said at the beginning, that we tried to take a really thoughtful approach to voting information, because what an individual vote means is complicated. And again, looking to the history, how we have talked about votes has changed over time.

Julia Cushion 10:14
We know that when you start highlighting aspects of behaviour, this does change behaviour. And Ben is going to go into a lot more detail about this, but a few things that we have noticed and changed over time and tried to adapt towards: back in the early days, we were publishing statistics based on how regularly MPs intervened in debates.

Julia Cushion 10:32
MPs started talking really, really briefly to try to up their rankings. And so those kind of comparisons we’ve removed over time. In general, rankings or league tables of MPs isn’t something that we publish anymore. The comparisons that we do publish are within parties. And also the types of votes that are included in our voting record summaries have changed.

Julia Cushion 10:54
Some of the changes that we made to votes to make sure they were focusing on votes that have parliamentary impacts. And so, for example, we no longer include opposition day votes as part of our voting record summaries.

Julia Cushion 11:06
So yes, to say that very much the through line has carried out throughout, and TheyWorkForYou ‘s history, which is, we want people to be able to see and easily understand how their MP has voted. But we acknowledge the impacts that our work has, and we’re trying to monitor and make that as successful and helpful as possible.

Julia Cushion 11:24
So it’s changed between 2005 and 2025 but yeah, we hope in positive ways. And the way that we try to find out whether what we’re doing is working and having the impact that we’d like is by asking for feedback, which you’ll see us ask for all over our websites. And we really do mean it, not only just in general, are they helpful?

Julia Cushion 11:41
But for things that are really important that we get right: things like the voting records and what gets included and how they get aligned, we have a form you can fill out to tell us if you think new votes should be added, or if you have any thoughts or concerns with our current ones.

Julia Cushion 11:57
The final thing to say before I pass over, because we are a charity now it’s kind of my job to say it is that one of the constraints for us making TheyWorkForYou as successful as possible, is funding. It’s something that we’re always looking for to improve our service. So just in case someone would like to fund TheyWorkForYou , has great ideas about how we can improve it, we always love to have that conversation.

Julia Cushion 12:16
So yeah, thank you for listening to our little potted history about TheyWorkForYou , and now I’m handing over to Ben.

Ben Worthy 12:22
Thank you so much. OK, hello everybody, and thanks so much for asking me along here. My name is Ben Worthy. I’m an academic based at Birkbeck College University London, and along with Stephanie and Kat I did this two year project, as Louise said, funded by the Leverhulme Trust that looked at the different platforms that people could use to watch what politicians were doing, and obviously TheyWorkForYou was at the centre of it.

Ben Worthy 12:50
So what we asked with our research was three questions: who’s actually using these sites, and how are they using them? What are they doing with the data here? And then finally, probably the most important and interesting part is what impact is it having?

Ben Worthy 13:06
And we were interested in the impact, not just on the MPs who are under observation, but actually on the people who are doing the watching. So I just want to go through each of these questions in turn, and just to let you know, we used a whole series of methods to try and work this out.

Ben Worthy 13:23
We looked at reporting in the national, regional, local press. We had case studies. We got some great data from TheyWorkForYou itself. And perhaps most interestingly, we did a YouGov poll of 100 MPs to ask them what they thought about TheyWorkForYou .

Ben Worthy 13:41
When we look at the first question about who’s watching and using this data from TheyWorkForYou, a lot of them would be what you’d call the kind of usual suspects, the people you’d expect to be using the site. So journalists, not just national journalists, but also investigative journalists, regional journalists and local journalists.

Ben Worthy 13:59
You’ve got activist campaigners, and that was both campaigners on particular issues related to certain votes, but also transparency campaigners more generally and of course, lobbyists and other bodies.

Ben Worthy 14:11
But lain on top of this were some slightly more unexpected users, you’d say. Academics made quite a lot of use of this data, and did all sorts of interesting things with voting data.

Ben Worthy 14:25
And we actually found, based on data from TheyWorkForYou , that 2% of all the hits on the site come from the House of Commons itself, and that amounts to 6,000 hits a month on the site.

Ben Worthy 14:40
MPs use the data in two ways. Firstly, they use it to look at themselves and see how they’re doing. That was actually much more important in the earlier days, as Julia said, when actually MPs were ranked according to attendance and work.

Ben Worthy 14:55
But of course, the other way in which they use it is for ammunition to criticise the other politicians, something which I want to return to.

Ben Worthy 15:03
How about the public? Well, actually, compared with lots of the other platforms, TheyWorkForYou is very heavily used. And interestingly, their survey data shows that around one in five users were people who say they’re not particularly interested in politics and come upon the site through a series of different routes, and that’s really positive for political engagement.

Ben Worthy 15:25
In terms of how it’s being used, well, there’s a couple of different interesting ways. Of course, the national press report important votes and how MPs voted. What we found even more interesting is that the reason the local press often pick up data and give it a local spin – How did your local MP vote on this issue? And you’re probably very familiar with these little postcode finders, which are now a regular feature of important parliamentary votes, where you put in your postcode and find out how your local MP voted.

Ben Worthy 15:59
More interestingly, it’s not just about what’s happened, but about what can happen in the future. And we found there’s a use of TheyWorkForYou to try and predict what MPs might do in future votes.

Ben Worthy 16:11
Here’s some really interesting analysis ahead of the last assisted suicide vote, where actually MPs were analysed for not just their past voting records, but also their publicly stated stances, so this campaign group attempted to guess what might happen with the vote.

Ben Worthy 16:31
It also links to all sorts of other interesting innovations. We found links between voting records and e-petitions, gifs and memes that are created in the wake of votes and things like a scorecard for MPs to see how they’ve performed.

Ben Worthy 16:45
I just want to qualify this by saying these scorecards are very much not objective and often created by political parties or campaigners, and a great example from Extinction Rebellion, who used voting records to put up these kind of fake blue plaques on MPs’ offices for those MPs who voted against the greater regulation of the water industry and the greater regulation of the dumping sewage.

Ben Worthy 17:12
So, so far so good with the public: you can see that it’s heavily used and that people find out about it, not just directly by using it, but also indirectly through the media. Then we get the interesting question of MPs and how they use it.

Ben Worthy 17:25
Now, at first glance, it looks like when we asked 100 MPs, it split roughly evenly between MPs who thought that it had a positive effect, TheyWorkForYou, those who thought it had no effect and those who thought it had a negative effect.

Ben Worthy 17:37
But when we dug into the data, it got rather more interesting. The top line here is all MPs, but the other two lines underneath are Conservative MPs, who at the time were in government, and Labour MPs in the bottom, who at the time were in opposition.

Ben Worthy 17:53
There’s a pretty distinct difference in terms of levels of enthusiasm for TheyWorkForYou. The reason for this is twofold, really. First, Conservative MPs were much more the target as government MPs, of TheyWorkForYou, so felt less positive towards it, and Labour MPs were more enthusiastic, probably because they were using it a great deal more against government MPs at the time.

Ben Worthy 18:16
We’d be fascinated to run this again to see if those attitudes are reversed. We also found there’s lots of other interesting kind of distinctions and nuances within the data, depending how old the MP was, as to what they thought the effect of TheyWorkForYou was, and also the seat safety, which is the same kind of proxy. The safer the seat, the less concerned an MP was by TheyWorkForYou.

Ben Worthy 18:40
There was also, unsurprisingly, a big gender difference, because we know female MPs are much more closely scrutinised generally than male MPs. What we found overall was actually sites like TheyWorkForYou do make MPs more accountable.

Ben Worthy 18:55
They feel the pressure, and they do something very positive in democratic terms, which is spend a lot more time explaining what it is they’re doing in Parliament. You can see these kind of posters and gifs that they create themselves, to tell people why they voted a certain way what they’ve been doing at Westminster.

Ben Worthy 19:12
We also found that MPs are behaving better in various other ways. We’ve found a few MPs, around the time of the second jobs discussion, self reporting that they have accidentally breached codes of conduct.

Ben Worthy 19:30
We also found big spikes whenever there was a controversy over a register of interest, of other MPs registering as many interests as they could when they saw an MP getting into trouble about it.

Ben Worthy 19:42
And also, more generally, the discussion around voting, around registers of interest, around all these other things, has helped apply pressure, which has led, in turn, to the kind of ongoing reform around MPs and the Code of Conduct of Parliament.

Ben Worthy 19:56
Now I’ve talked a great deal about the House of Commons, and not at all about the House of Lords. There’s a particular reason for this. Essentially, there is much less interest in the House of Lords. There’s very little interest in House of Lords in terms of votes, unless A, something very controversial takes place, or B, the House of Lords is very much opposed to the House of Commons on an important issue.

Ben Worthy 20:19
Actually, when the data was looked at in the House of Lords, it was normally data around attendance and allowances, rather than voting records. And of course, the discussion around peers, how often they attend, when they claim the allowance, kind of plays to ongoing narratives around the House of Lords and to what extent it is a working body or not.

Ben Worthy 20:41
And of course, as Julia hinted, there has been some resistance. We found very little evidence of gaming lately. The sense was, a lot of the gaming or attempts to manipulate things came around the time when there were the rankings of MPs over things like attendance.

Ben Worthy 20:58
There were, of course, complaints. There’s complaints on record there from Hansard that data is used to misrepresent what it is MPs are doing. Robert Largan, when he was an MP, persuaded 49 of his colleagues to actually sign a letter complaining to mySociety about how they represented particular votes.

Ben Worthy 21:19
There was a controversial issue back in 2013 when the Sun newspaper published a series of lists about what they call “lazy MPs”. It then emerged that some of those MPs who had attended less than others, had significant caring responsibilities, and actually the positive note, the Sun pulled the story afterwards.

Ben Worthy 21:41
But while we acknowledge that MPs can make valid points about misrepresentation and what other people do with this data, remember, MPs also enjoy using voting data in all sorts of interesting ways.

Ben Worthy 21:57
Boris Johnson, you may remember, famously claimed Labour MPs had voted against the NHS budget bill when that vote never actually existed. And similarly, Labour also made great play about a missed vote on Heathrow that Boris Johnson skipped during the time he was foreign secretary.

Ben Worthy 22:17
So just to conclude, we felt that actually these sites do make MPs and peers more accountable, particularly in how they explain what they’re doing. It’s led to some positive behaviour change. It has driven some resistance, but it’s normally just at the margins and not on a large scale.

Ben Worthy 22:33
I think the really important thing to remember is that sites like TheyWorkForYou help create a metric of what constitutes a good or bad politician, and it kind of contributes to the picture in people’s head about how politics works, and that’s really, really important, and it also helps us inform the kind of narratives and stories that we tell about politics.

Ben Worthy 22:59
If you want to find out more about this, please, as was said, go on to our WordPress blog Who Is Watching Parliament. You can download the report or an executive summary. I also wrote a blog summarising everything on mySociety’s blog site as part of their Repowering Democracy series.

Ben Worthy 23:16
And just to round it all off, once we’d done this research, which we really enjoyed and thought had some really fascinating results, we’ve then done a study of the Westminster Accounts, which you may know is a website that, at the push of a button, allows you to see MPs’ registers of interest and donations.

Ben Worthy 23:33
And just as a final thought, you’ll be probably unsurprised to know that MPs are much less enthused by the idea of people looking through their donations and registered interests than they were about their voting record. Thanks so much for listening.

Julia Cushion 23:48
Thanks, Ben. We’ll hand over to Alex now.

Alex Parsons 23:50
Thank you for that. Ben, that was fantastic. I’m going to be talking about the new site we’re launching. TheyWorkForYou Votes. So here is the new site we’re launching, TheyWorkForYou Votes, which is a new platform for presenting the voting information, that is meant for anyone to use, but is also we’ve been designing for our own work, to help us do better work on TheyWorkForYou, and to be able to do better analysis.

Alex Parsons 24:13
So our initial requirement for this is, we wanted better tools and information to help understand and create these voting summaries. We wanted to see at a glance more information about a range of votes and to be able to dive in and understand what those votes were about.

Alex Parsons 24:27
We wanted more flexibility in number crunching, and to be able to both do and support more ad hoc analysis of votes. Part of this meant untangling some of our processes. We’ve gone through a slow process over the last few years of building new data flows and tools, migrating our existing approach into new systems, and the end result of that is TheyWorkForYou Votes, at votes.theyworkforyou.com, a new annex that is useful in itself, but also a foundation for a range of work we’re doing that we hope is useful for others too.

Alex Parsons 24:54
So the basic bread and butter of what we do is display the results for votes and calculate breakdowns by party and identify disagreements within parties, but now what we’re also adding is these basic breakdowns by party to say who was for and against the motion, and understand divisions inside a party.

Alex Parsons 25:12
We also have a searchable voting list that shows how individual people voted, and also this party alignment, which highlights rebels who will have a lower alignment with the party.

Alex Parsons 25:22
So that’s also sortable and searchable. Where we’re going beyond the numbers is in generating analysis of parliamentary dynamics.

Alex Parsons 25:31
So based on how votes are divided in a particular way, we’ve represented them as one of eight common clusters reflecting who was proposing the particular vote, divisions among opposition parties and levels of participation.

Alex Parsons 25:46
And the purpose of this is be able to very quickly get a sense of what the interesting votes are to look at and just generally understand at a glance when looking down a list or the particularly interesting votes happening in that day or month.

Alex Parsons 25:56
We calculate these for all the new votes we know about for House of Commons votes. These are calculated and published within minutes of the votes being published on the Commons voting website.

Alex Parsons 26:06
The thing we’re really doing that’s different in this website is we put a lot of work into identifying what’s actually been voted on. Often it’s quite hard to work out the motion that relates to a vote. It’s not always printed immediately before the vote in the Hansard and it isn’t directly linked to in the API data.

Alex Parsons 26:20
So to do this, we’ve built a very complicated parser to identify things that look like motions and trying to assign them to the right decision. Having the text of the motion makes it easier for us to understand and do analysis on the motion.

Alex Parsons 26:32
So from this, we can link to basic descriptions of different vote types, like amendments, second readings, approved Statutory Instruments and provide additional descriptions of how that particular vote fits into the parliamentary process.

Alex Parsons 26:45
From here, what we can also do is something that a few people have asked for over the years, which is to be able to see votes that are associated with a specific piece of legislation going through Parliament.

Alex Parsons 26:54
So we now automatically tag votes that seem like they’re related to the same bill, to make it easier to find amendments or significant stages of a bill. I will say this is slightly temperamental at the moment, because it depends how things are named and labelled, but it is better than nothing, and we’re seeing how we can adapt it over time.

Alex Parsons 27:09
The biggest difference between TheyWorkForYou and other systems that are tracking votes is we don’t just track votes. We also include decisions that are made without a vote, which are what we call ‘agreements’, and from this we link to where the relevant motion was decided.

Alex Parsons 27:24
We do this for a few reasons. It was practically a necessity when we were trying to assign motions to decisions, to know about all the agreements, because to assign the right motion to the right decision, you have to understand which of all the decisions were being made.

Alex Parsons 27:36
But also just useful to have a canonical reference for different parts of parliamentary process. Often, there’s a high profile issue that can be passed without a vote, and people go looking for the vote and they can’t find it, and that, of course, is confusion. Am I in the right place?

Alex Parsons 27:49
So by having a canonical link where we can talk about, here is the decision that was made, here’s how that links the legislation, here’s how it links the motion, we can show more about how the parliamentary process works, and can tag them as part in part the process of passing legislation.

Alex Parsons 28:02
In rare cases, we’re also including these in voting summaries we did. We did this, for instance, retrospectively, on the vote to set a net zero target for the UK and some on the standards committee votes.

Alex Parsons 28:15
We’re generally conservative on this, because agreements can be hard to interpret. They might mean everyone was in support, and so there was no opposition. But what they can also mean is where, fundamentally, it’s known who would win the vote. And as Julia covered, voting could take quite a long time, and so is costly. And so agreements are a way where, effectively, everyone agreeing not to spend the time for a known outcome.

Alex Parsons 28:34
So it can reflect both “this is very important and everyone supports it”, or it could reflect “actually, this is not controversial, but also not widely seen as important”. So by pulling these out, we want to shed a bit more light on how this aspect of Parliament works, because most decisions made. Especially in terms of the internal movement around stuff are made by this sort of consensus.

Alex Parsons 28:52
A result of the work we’ve been doing behind the scenes, is that TheyWorkForYou Votes now powers the TheyWorkForYou voting summaries. So this is where we group rated votes together to show a record on TheyWorkForYou.

Alex Parsons 29:04
Building on last year’s change to how we approach scoring and vote inclusion, this new technical approach gives us more flexibility in calculating voting summaries for different time periods.

Alex Parsons 29:13
So we can now show an ‘all time’ and a ‘this parliament’ view, which means we can feel more comfortable putting more and more votes into the ‘this parliament’ view, then they won’t get swamped by older votes at the same time, as reflecting the implication of votes can be long running, and the record is not reset each election.

Alex Parsons 29:30
These voting summaries are currently complete up to the start of this year. We will do an update covering the first part of 2025, in June. And here is a part of the site that’s currently boring, but I’d like, in the long run, to be the most interesting part.

Alex Parsons 29:43
As Ben covered, an impact that TheyWorkForYou has been more public explanations by representatives of how they voted. We’d like to start recording this to make them more accessible to people viewing representatives’ voting records. So divisions, agreements and votes by individual representatives can be annotated with additional information or links.

Alex Parsons 30:02
We can also record information about the party voting instructions. When this becomes public, we test this out on specific votes, but our plan in the long run is to make this directly available to representatives to annotate their own votes.

Alex Parsons 30:12
This will both add more information to TheyWorkForYou, but also create a general resource of finding out not only how people have voted, but why.

Alex Parsons 30:19
So I think this is the direction we want to take with this site. It’s just, where can we build on the official information to give people more opportunities, to give representatives more opportunities to communicate, and more people more chances to find out information that is relevant to these specific votes?

Alex Parsons 30:35
The thing we really want to do with this is make it a platform lots of people can build on. We’re going to make more and more of the information accessible on TheyWorkForYou over time to reach our wider audience, but we want to raise the raise the standard and ease of analysis of parliamentary data, so making the data not just available for an API, but as bulk downloads that make it easier for research and analysts to get the benefit of all the work we’ve done, joining up this data without having to do it themselves.

Alex Parsons 30:59
So as a side effect of how we’re working with this data, you can now run SQL queries almost directly against the data we hold. We won’t have to iterate through APIs a lot. We’ll be doing some guides on how to get the most out of the raw data we’re publishing. But generally, the goal we want here is to lower the bar to exploring virtual information, so that if you have a question that can be answered, exploring it, it is easier to jump to how you answer that question, rather than how do you deal with five or six different sources of data.

Alex Parsons 31:24
So over the next few months, we’re going to be testing that annotation feature, starting with the assisted dying third reading, which, as a free vote, especially benefits from gathering statements from MPs about how they vote.

Alex Parsons 31:36
We have a spreadsheet which we’re sharing on social media, where we’re trying to capture statements from MPs stating their stance on this issue, so we can then re-annotate that vote, and TheyWorkForYou Votes with that information.

Alex Parsons 31:48
We’ll also be adding coverage of what we’re roughly calling ‘statements and signatures’. But the goal of this is to capture Early Day Motions in Parliament in the same system in a way that’s generalised.

Alex Parsons 32:00
Other lists of MPs, such as signing a petition or signing… when a group of MPs sign a letter, we want to be able to, for a range of things that are affecting MPs signaling, that so these are often things that do not have direct practical implications, but our MPs signaling, I have a view on this stance. I am part of this group, we want to help make an aid for campaigners in understanding MPs’ interest, in putting MPs that are useful to talk to.

Alex Parsons 32:00
So those are the plans that we’re likely to extend over the next few months and results that will appear in TheyWorkForYou and in our other service, the Local Intelligence Hub.

Alex Parsons 32:37
Going beyond these, these are not currently funded projects, but how we would like to extend this further. The first aspect is devolved parliaments. We’ve currently included agreements and motions for the Scottish Parliament, in part because they publish a nice motions database, which is one of our recommendations for the UK Parliament.

Alex Parsons 32:52
So the implementation was far, far easier. In principle, we want to try turning on the motion detector for the Senate, which might work fine, we just need to budget time for adaptations needed there.

Alex Parsons 33:05
We don’t currently cover votes in the Northern Ireland Assembly at all because TheyWorkForYou scrapers do not extract the divisions from the transcript. This is something we can fix. Northern Ireland Assembly publishes lots of great data we can make use of.

Alex Parsons 33:15
We need to do some additional work to properly display the results of cross community votes. So here my thinking is to, where we can, define a set of linked work we might be able to work with volunteers to make progress on so just chipping away the problems and getting all the information from different parliaments into this system, and one of the benefits of this is you can start to see like legislative consents on bills.

Alex Parsons 33:36
So for instance, there’s one example – I can’t remember where the Scottish Parliament has given legislative consent to a bill. It appears in the same list as the votes in the Commons. And so there is there’s something to be said for seeing the UK, as like a parliament with five chambers, and they don’t understand how things are flowing between all of these, is helpful to understand.

Alex Parsons 33:37
And the second bit is the House of Lords. For the moment, we are covering the votes in the House of Lords, but we’re not currently extracting the motions or the agreements. I’d like to do more of that because it’s interesting to understand, like, where do the changes that eventually make the bills come from?

Alex Parsons 34:12
And especially one of the assets we’ve built is this very, very complicated system to extract the motions for what MPs are voting on. Sometimes what you get is “We disagree with this Lord’s amendment 16”. It’d be very nice to know what Lords amendment 16 was.

Alex Parsons 34:27
Currently these are published. They’re not included in Hansard, so they’re published in a set of PDFs of the amendments papers moving between houses. Ideally, we think they should be published better, but I think we can work with what’s there. And so here, what I’d like to do is wrap this up as a package of work, improving our ability to help understand and scrutinise the work of House of Lords.

Alex Parsons 34:45
So in general, this is a work in progress. There are forms all over the site to flag mistakes: in particular, the motion extractor. We’ve tested a bunch of stuff. There are going to be problems somewhere. If you see something that’s wrong, hit the button. That helps us to flag it for the future.

Alex Parsons 35:02
This is already a site that’s powering TheyWorkForYou, empowering what people are seeing every day. It’s useful to us. I want it to be useful to other people. So if there are ways it can be more useful, let us know. And I think we are now able to move to questions, either for us about this or any of Ben’s research.

Julia Cushion 35:21
Thank you so much, Alex. We have got some questions coming through. I think you have covered some of this in some of the work that you were just talking about. But one of the questions was, what are your next plans for TheyWorkForYou Votes out of the things you told us, is there anything you would particularly prioritise? Or do you think that there are some dream things that you haven’t mentioned that you would like to see one day?

Alex Parsons 35:42
So like the annotations bit is the bit I’m most keen on in the near future, because I think that’s something where we can sort of demonstrate that it’s useful from the outside, like gathering all this information in one place. And in some of our work, we’re like, we think Parliament can do this better. We want to demonstrate how, but also in other aspects we’re aware of where we can do things that Parliament can’t, because it has lots of powers and resources, but also has constraints because it has to do a certain set of things in neutral ways governed by how MPs wants it to be run.

Alex Parsons 35:47
And so from the outside, there are things we can do that are less hard, easier to do than inside parliament. So stuff like annotations, is where we see that being a key thing.

Alex Parsons 36:23
Similarly, as you said at the start, we’d like information about the whips to be published. I am curious to the extent to which we can systemise leaking it. So that’s some of the things I want to build towards, is, can we effectively make whipping information public without actually requiring things to be published from within parliament itself.

Alex Parsons 36:43
The steps we want to explore over the next few months are better working with representatives to see if they want to engage the system, how we can engage with the system, and when we start gathering this information, how we get it to people, into TheyWorkForYou, into other systems, to get the most from that information.

Julia Cushion 36:58
Yeah, really helpful. Thanks. I think sometimes we get feedback that voting is just one part of what an MP does, or that it’s nuanced. And I think we want to capture all of those things, and we want TheyWorkForYou to show those and so, yeah, absolutely great steps in that direction.

Julia Cushion 37:10
We’ve got another one here. How can I subscribe to hear more about votes topics that I care about? Is that still via TheyWorkForYou, like we run the alerts, or is there now more information via the vote subsite?

Alex Parsons 37:20
We don’t have any (vote) alerts directly off the TheyWorkForYou site. In principle, you could set up stuff with the API if you’re technically able. But I guess the thing to say that’s most relevant to that is next month, we’re going to be releasing another update to TheyWorkForYou, specifically looking at the email alerts and especially improving our keyword alerts functions to make it easier to find debates and votes on particular issues.

Alex Parsons 37:43
So what I’d say is, TheyWorkForYou is still the site for that, but we will be getting better at that pretty soon. So subscribe to our newsletter for information about when those new features launch.

Julia Cushion 37:53
And here’s a question. Maybe Louise, you could also want to come in on this, having worked at mySociety for a long time. Have you ever made changes to the TheyWorkForYou platform based on direct feedback from a Member of the Commons or Lords? Are you transparent about this?

Julia Cushion 38:07
I know that the example that Ben mentioned, the Robert Largan one – we wrote a whole blog post about this – made us think about certain things and we hear from MPs and members of House of Lords all the time in terms of updating their contact information, other parts of their biography on TheyWorkForYou.

Louise Crow 38:24
I mean, I think lots of the direct feedback has been in the public domain. So one that sticks in my mind was, again, on the subject of absences, from votes, feedback from women who are MPs that their absence when they were having babies, was not well represented when they were on maternity leave.

Louise Crow 38:46
And I think in that case, it is also the parliamentary system which was very out of date in that there was no really good provision for that as a workplace. So I think in general, that has been a positive discussion trying to move things forward in terms of the role of MPs and making it accessible to lots of different kinds of people, which is obviously really important. I can’t think of a private piece of feedback that we acted on specifically about how how we do things, no.

Julia Cushion 39:23
The mySociety/TheyWorkForYou blog is a treasure trove of decisions and changes and things that we’ve made over time and the communication we’ve had.

Julia Cushion 39:30
We’ve got a question here, if any serious lie or foul play is uncovered, do you liaise with other organisations such as Full Fact or Hope Not Hate?

Julia Cushion 39:37
I wouldn’t say lies or foul play is something that really comes into TheyWorkForYou in terms of votes, because it is a record of how people are voting.

Alex Parsons 39:46
But it’s incredibly useful when trying to understand for the voting summaries, what’s going on, look for organisations who have already done summaries. We tend to be a bit behind doing the voting summaries, as in we have like a period at the moment, and partly why it’s useful is other people have had time to write detailed explanation of what’s going on with them. So we’re very much building on the work of other organisations when we come to that point.

Julia Cushion 40:08
We take seriously and think carefully about what each vote means, in policy terms. And so as Alex is saying, yeah, the work of other organisations helps us there. Alex, a question, maybe for you, how does the clustering part of TheyWorkForYou Votes work?

Alex Parsons 40:19
The clustering is basically… what we wanted was a shorthand that worked across parliament. So what we do is, for each vote, we create six columns of percentages saying, did the government vote for, against or was absent, and did opposition parties vote for, against or absent?

Alex Parsons 40:38
And so that sort of creates the class that means for all the votes we knew about up to that point, including the ones in the devolved parliament, to create a set of clusters and sort of roughly then work out what they are actually signifying.

Alex Parsons 40:50
So the thing about clustering process is kind of inherently arbitrary. We could have 20 if we wanted, but that’s not a good stopping point. So basically, how this currently works is when votes are loaded in it compares them to the centres of those clusters, and say what the best cluster is, and also if it’s roughly speaking a fix, but it’s a bit out, but is an outlier, we sort of flag it as an outlier.

Alex Parsons 40:50
So for instance, the second reading of the recent Assisted Dying Bill was a good one for this, because it’s a free vote, the parliamentary dynamics should be all over the place. The clusters shouldn’t pick it up properly.

Alex Parsons 41:24
And it goes, yeah, this looks like, roughly like something the government’s posing, but the opposition is rejecting. But seems a bit weird, which is what you’d expect from a free vote. So we also have somebody to go in and then modify that directly, but it’s, in general, sort of useful for us, like going down a column and going, like, low participation votes. Interesting. What’s that about? Or like, these are, you know, these are the strong conflicts. And also, just, especially, like, what was the direction of the vote in terms, like, is this an opposition moment being proposed? Is this a government moment?

Alex Parsons 41:49
So it just helps us, like, at a glance, trying to understand, like, what’s happening that day in Parliament once they’re going through, like, 20 votes at the time.

Alex Parsons 41:56
I can also take the vote motion of the House of Lords question quickly. Yes, it doesgo back in the Commons on that. We’re not currently using that information, but it’s available. It’s the ping pong between the houses that’s a bit unclear, but definitely the House of Lords has better publication on the amendments.

Julia Cushion 42:11
Brilliant. Thank you so much. Ben, if you don’t mind me putting you on the spot, I guess it would be great to hear your reflections on some of the things that we’ve been talking about today, some of the stuff that Alex has been working on, and talk to us through any of the other questions or thoughts, changes since you’ve done your research, or, yeah, any reflections?

Ben Worthy 42:30
Yeah, just a couple of things as everybody was speaking. And obviously the complaint that this data is taken out of context is not a criticism of mySociety. It’s a criticism about what people do with the information. And you know, one of the things that jumped out really interestingly when we spoke with MPs is the idea that, yes, this is objective data, but of course, different people with different agendas will use this in all sorts of ways.

Ben Worthy 42:57
Another thing that that was really important when we did our research is that actually there’s a huge black hole of data about lots of the other things that MPs do. And remember that MPs are extraordinarily busy. They do a huge amount of work. Almost all of them, they’re working 70, 80 hour weeks.

Ben Worthy 43:18
So for example, we have almost no data on what MPs do in their constituencies. We do know that over the past few decades, there has been a huge move for MPs doing a huge amount of work in their constituencies, and unless and until MPs publish data about what they do in their constituencies, how many surgeries they hold, what they do, we have no idea.

Ben Worthy 43:41
So the complaint that this data can be misunderstood: it’s also the only data we have about what MPs are doing. But I think we found one or two MPs and published a number of constituency surgeries they held. Apart from that, almost nothing.

Ben Worthy 43:56
And also, I just want to flip on the head some of the the complaints that MPs have. So the letter from Robert Largan, which complained about mySociety, had 50 MPs sign it, which is astonishing, and a real tribute to how important they actually think TheyWorkForYou is, to get 50 backbench MPs to sign letters is quite impressive, and it also tells a story about the way in which this kind of data has become a really important metric about how we understand what MPs do.

Ben Worthy 44:25
And that’s a that’s a thing to be celebrated, and I think lots of the work that’s happening here is actually helping fill out some of that context. A frequent complaint from MPs is there’s no whipping data, people think that we do all these votes by our conscience. But that’s what mySociety is for. It’s the fact that whipping is secret, but that would be a really important thing to know, because most MPs, most of the time, vote according to their whip, especially now when you’ve got so many new MPs as well.

Julia Cushion 44:25
You’re absolutely right. I think in our dream world, we would show loads more. You know, we want to be a site where people can find out about all of the different things that their MP does. But as you say, there’s only so much data available. And I think some of this annotations and EDMs and other work that we’re doing is trying to go some way to that. UI improvement features, I think any any sort of feedback or features for TheyWorkForYou, Support@theyworkforyou.com is a good email address to write to and tell us what you think.

Alex Parsons 45:16
Also, there’s a big form on the website at the moment.

Julia Cushion 45:19
“When amendments, typically those from small parties are not selected by the speaker,is there a way you can indicate this to people looking at the votes which do take place?” I know that there’s been votes and amendments recently that people were really trying to follow, and another great example of how confusing Parliament can be. And then combining that one, Alex, with: “Any tracking of legislative consent motions to decisions in devolved legislatures would be very interesting to the Commons library”.

Alex Parsons 45:44
Taking the legislative consent ones first. Yes, I think I’ve spotted a few in the Scottish Parliament. I’d like to see how that does with the motion detector, see if that’s coming up OK. So please get in touch if there’s something specific that’s useful to talk about there.

Alex Parsons 45:56
And then if that’s stabilising in the Scottish Parliament, extending that to the Senate and the Northern Ireland Assembly would be a nice thing to progress from there. So, I’ve seen, I’ve seen a few of them. This will be interesting to keep track on how that’s going.

Alex Parsons 46:06
If votes are the only thing that is visible, people’s public conversation get a bit confused. It’s like, well, I want to know what happened with this thing. And the answer is, well, it went nowhere. But there’s no specific place you can go to for that.

Alex Parsons 46:16
And this again goes back to having a motions database, where we very clearly show the roads not taken in terms like, there was this motion, there was this amendment proposed. It has a real link on a real website, and you can also see it wasn’t discussed. So just being able to, like, highlight all those sort of paths not taken in terms of things that didn’t need a vote, or things that didn’t get voted on, just helps, like anchor that wider discussion about how Parliament works.

Alex Parsons 46:40
And then also just to say, on the benefit of information, about what MP is doing, the rest of that. Yeah, this is sort of a thing we’re sort of aware of, always people talking about a vote’s lost. Like, people think as TheyWorkForYou as the vote site, but TheyWorkForYou does a lot of other things, and especially the email alerts.

Alex Parsons 46:56
And we’d like votes to be one of the things that we do, as opposed to the main thing that people see us doing. And there’s an interesting project I’d like – like a smaller and bit more UK project – but DC inbox, and this is an American academic who essentially subscribes to all the newsletters of House of Representatives and that publishes the results of that. And I think that’d be a really interesting project. Again, what people are choosing to communicate and what people choose to do locally.

Alex Parsons 47:21
So like, I’d like sort of flesh out a bit what a UK version of that would look like in the same sense that what MPs do isn’t just in Parliament, it’s around the rest of the place. And where can we sort of make that more accessible, more communicable?

Julia Cushion 47:32
“What would be the most helpful thing for TheyWorkForYou that Parliament could do with its data on votes?” If you had to pick one thing that Parliament could do to make our lives easier, Alex, what would it be?

Alex Parsons 47:42
I mean, I’d definitely say, having just spent all the time building the motions database, not having to do that would be great. And if they could retrospectively make that time pointless, it’d be fantastic. Just because it’s a fairly horrible piece of code that – you have to look out for lots of different edge cases to properly match the two.

Alex Parsons 47:59
So having a system where in some way, you could say, this is a motion, this is where it was voted on. The Scottish Parliament effectively has this – their motions database is linked to their votes database. There’s some exceptions, like when things get amended, but that will be the thing. We want to add value on top of what Parliament does. And so the more we can do things that Parliament can’t do for various reasons, and the better Parliament does things, the resources it has, the more that helps us out.

Alex Parsons 48:23
At the same time as I sort of appreciate the reason we can do this is because we are able to pull in a slightly more freeform way between these different things, without having to say, this is an official system. This is how it all works. So it is easier for us to do some things, but at the same time is it would be better when it’s done at the source.

Julia Cushion 48:39
And we really invite people to tell us, what are the things that working and not working? And yeah, please do stay tuned, and please do register for our Repowering Democracy newsletter, because that is where you’ll find out all of the exciting things that we get up to.

Myf Nixon 48:54
Thank you so much, everyone, and that’s it. Thanks for listening. As was mentioned a couple of times by a couple of different people, we would love to do more work like this, and we’re full of ideas to improve TheyWorkForYou and keep making it easier and easier for people to understand how Parliament works and how to play a part in democracy.

Myf Nixon 49:12
So if you’re able to make a donation, it really helps. Again, I’ll put the link in our show notes to our secure donation page where it’s really simple to make either a one off or a repeating donation. Thanks so much, and thanks for listening. Bye.