TheyWorkForYou aims to improve the quality of UK democracy by making more and better information available to everyone. In previous updates, we’ve expanded coverage to all the UK’s parliaments and brought all the registers of interests together.

Now we’re pulling in data from beyond Parliament to provide richer insights into your representatives. Alex and Julia share our new features:

• Committees and APPG memberships
• Signatures (Early Day Motions and open letters)
• Vote annotations
• Adding context to parliamentary debates
• Improved email alerts for political monitoring

No intro this time: we’re plunging you straight into the audio from the event!

Useful links:

• If you’d prefer to watch the video of this session, it’s on our YouTube channel.
• TheyWorkForYou is here, and TheyWorkForYou Votes is here.
• Donate! It helps us do more of this sort of work! Thank you!
• Subscribe to our updates here (make sure ‘Democracy & Parliaments’ is ticked if that’s what you’re interested in).
• Julia mentions Local Intelligence Hub, which you can play with here.
• Alex mentions a video about how other parliamentary websites get audiences in an age when search engines have become less useful: it’s this one – also available as a podcast here.

Transcript

00:00 Julia Cushion Thanks so much for coming along to this little update. We try and do these every so often. 

00:03 You might have come to our one a few months ago, we were talking about TheyWorkForYou Votes, whereas today, we’re telling you about some of the broader stuff we’ve been up to on TheyWorkForYou. We’re calling it “A richer view of Parliament.”

00:19 And what we’re trying to achieve here is to make the most of the fact that we are a non parliamentary source and not an official Parliament website, which means we can pull on all sorts of sources of information to give a richer view. 

00:33 And our aim here, as always, is to make Parliament more accessible, understandable and accountable, and that goes for all of the UK’s parliaments. 

00:40 Over the last few years, we’ve been expanding to give coverage to all of the parliaments, but today we’re talking more about some of the sources of information that are more focused on the Westminster Parliament, and these are both semi parliamentary, and outside Parliament work that we’ve been doing to get more data and bring that into TheyWorkForYou.

01:01 So just a quick structure about how we’re going to go about today. Firstly, I’m talking you through our brand new features on TheyWorkForYou. And if you’ve been on the site recently, you might have spotted a few new things, and we’re excited to talk you through those today. 

01:12 So I’ll be talking about our Early Day Motions and open letters in “signatures” section, and our new data on APPG memberships. And then Alex will take over from me to talk about the improvements of some of our other features: profile pages, more voting content, and some really exciting updates to our email alert service. And then we’ll have some time for questions. 

01:33 I don’t think this will take the full hour, but there’s plenty of time there if you do have any questions, so jumping right into the stuff that is new: open letters and Early Day Motions. 

01:45 We, as I mentioned the beginning, are excited that at TheyWorkForYou we can offer this amazing service of bringing in information from across lots of different sources. And we want to give a richer picture of how democracy works.

01:58 So people know us for our voting records, and those are still really important. Alex is talking a bit about them later. We published a blog post yesterday on our most recent updates to voting records. 

02:00 But we also want to give a more holistic understanding of what MPs do. We know that they do a lot more than just vote. What differentiates MPs from each other, the signals that they give about their values and interests and where they fall on policy arguments. And so as you can see in this section on the right, this is the new sidebar on TheyWorkForYou, and we have this section called “Signatures”.

02:29 So Early Day Motions: many of you in the audience may already know this, but they’re something of an internal parliamentary petition service. They don’t have very particular formal powers, but it’s about MPs being able to lodge their opinion on something to show their position. 

02:43 MPs can propose their own motions and co-sign motions proposed by others. And  they’re useful in reflecting the live interests of different MPs. Quite often, they’re very topical. 

02:54 You may have seen this week, I think it was on Tuesday, the lead story on the Guardian was about an Early Day Motion about Prince Andrew, and you can see there that the bottom screenshot is from TheyWorkForYou. So we are showing Early Day Motions that are signed, along with what they are called and the other members who have signed them.

03:13 But we’re also moving beyond Early Day Motions – because Parliament does also make Early Day Motion data available – to looking at open letters, and we’ve noticed a trend where open letters are increasingly being shared on social media as a kind of alternative to Early Day Motions. 

03:30 They serve many of the same purposes, and there’s more immediacy to them, because you can prepare them and get them out on social media quickly, but the nature of them as kind of screenshots of parliamentary paper mean that they are hard to easily search and understand if your MP has signed them. 

03:45 So we now have these loaded into TheyWorkForYou Votes and feeding into TheyWorkForYou, which makes the content of the letter searchable and the signatories easily searchable. And you know, you can sort A to Z, all of that sort of thing, see where your MP has signed. 

03:58 And I’ve got a little bit of data about this in a second, but it’s worth saying, as with all of the features we’re talking about today, there’s almost always a form there to say if there’s a new open letter that you’d like to tell us about, or a mistake, or anything like that, so that we can keep these really up to date. 

04:13 And yeah, in case you’re interested, we had a little look at the numbers here and had a think about why maybe open letters were becoming more popular, and I think format is an important point here, because they are free from the format restrictions that Early Day Motions have. 

04:28 An Early Day Motion has to be one single sentence, and it has to be less than 250 words. As you may have seen, a lot of these letters are a lot more than one sentence and 250 words, which can be important if you are trying to represent a nuanced position, or maybe bring together MPs who have quite complicated views around a shared position. Having more space to do that helps. 

04:48 And there’s another load more benefits, as I mentioned about, you know, the speed of getting them out on social media.

04:54 And if you’re interested, the number of Early Day Motions proposed has remained roughly the same. But the signatures have dropped a lot. And so there’s half as many signatures as there were in 2015, and the number of signatures per EDM has also dropped to less than half. 

05:13 So that is our Early Day Motions and open letters. And that “Signatures” tab is there for you to go and have a look at, and we’ll keep it updated. As we say, please keep us informed if you spot any open letters that you’d like us to include on there. 

05:33 Moving on to All Party Parliamentary Group memberships. You may have seen that we’ve been doing some work on All Party Parliamentary Groups for a while. We spotted that after the election, we were tracking the number of APPGs, and after the rule change, there was a huge drop in APPGs as well. 

05:44 So we’ve been looking at them for a while, but this is the first time that we’ve been able to make membership data available. We’re really excited about this, because it isn’t something that’s been made available before. 

05:53 Parliament only gives the four officers of each All Party Parliamentary Group, but each group must have at least 20 members to be constituted. If you haven’t come across the All Party Parliamentary Group before, they are groups of MPs and members of the House of Lords and external members – and more on the external members later – who come together around a shared policy interests. 

06:12 Some of the groups are really small and less active, but they are a route where money can flow into Parliament, and where some important policy debates happen. So we’ve been really interested in these for a long time. 

06:12 They don’t have any particular formal powers, but they can be really influential. Some of the groups are really big and very active. 

06:28 We’re also interested in them because we, as we say, we’re trying to portray a kind of more holistic understanding of an MP: what their interests are, how they spend their time working in Parliament. And I think All Party Parliamentary Groups can be a really interesting way to find out what you and your MP might have in common.

06:46 So yeah, we’re really excited to make this membership data available. Our process for finding this out had a few steps to it. Firstly, Alex built a scraper, and then we had volunteers help us check the work of that scraper, and we found membership lists for 205 of the groups online. 

07:04 All Party Parliamentary Groups can have a website. Many of them do have a website, but they don’t all have a website. And of those that do have websites, they don’t all publish their membership lists, either.

07:14 They’re not required to: they either have to make them available online or give them to us when we ask. 

07:20 205 did make them available online, and we found them and loaded them in through that route, and then we contacted the remaining by email, and 140 of them gave us their membership information. 

07:32 Two of them were in touch, but declined to give their lists for various reasons, and 94 didn’t respond. 

07:37 And so that was kind of disappointing, but we are feeding this into our bigger picture that we will then eventually bring back to the Parliamentary Commissioner.

07:45 Just a few things to note here from our findings: 650 MPs belong to at least one All Party Parliamentary Group. So you can see that most MPs, the vast, vast majority, are a member of an All Party Parliamentary Group. 

07:59 Only 35 don’t take part in any at all, and that is largely government ministers, who aren’t allowed to be a member of an All Party Parliamentary Group. 

08:07 On average, MPs are a member of 10. And half of MPs are in at least eight. And so you can see the distribution there. For anyone who’s interested, it’s Sharon Hodgson MP who is a member of 63 All Party Parliamentary Groups. 

08:19 And there’s a good range of topics in there as well. One thing just to note here, that we found interesting, was the language in the guide to the rules for All Party Parliamentary Groups said that we could ask for the membership list that included parliamentary members and non parliamentary members, but the understanding of what a non parliamentary member is is quite confused across the different groups. 

08:44 The rules say that it is one who has asked to be on the group’s membership list. But the nature of the way that the Secretariat sometimes run these groups or other features, it’s not really clear what the membership list really is, and so some people took that as a mailing list. 

08:58 The screenshots you can see on this page are actually from the Open Banking APPG, which was a really interesting case. You can see that top screenshot is from their parliamentary page, and that is the financial contributions that they have declared, which are above £1,500. 

09:14 But they, in their list of members that they sent to us, took non parliamentary members as donors, which is a much broader list that we wouldn’t have found out about if we hadn’t have asked. 

09:24 So we’re sort of paying a bit of attention to this. We’re going to be looking a bit more into this in the future, but just an interesting quirk, and again, a case where we’re doing this digging, we find out that the rules in practice can be different to how they’re written on paper, or there are differences in how they’re understood.

09:41 And yeah, this is basically all from me before I hand over to Alex, but I just wanted to flag in this kind of busy slide that there are lots of places that you can get this, All Party Parliamentary Group data. And it’s been really encouraging to see, I think we put it live on Tuesday morning, and there’s been lots of interest already.

09:57 These bottom left, as I’ve shown you already, you can visit your MPs page on TheyWorkForYou, and under the “Committees and All Party Parliamentary Groups” tab, you can see all of the groups that your MP is a part of, and toggle down to see more information about them, see if they have a website.

10:13 And then it will also take you to the APPG register in the middle top there, you can see, from our data site, you can download the full spreadsheet and the full data set for all of the All Party Parliamentary Group data that we found, which, as I say, is not totally complete, because we didn’t get totally complete responses.

10:31 That is available there to download as Excel, JSON or datasette, whatever you would like to do with it. And then on the right hand side is actually just to say that our information about All Party Parliamentary Groups has been loaded into the Local Intelligence Hub. 

10:44 And so this bottom right one is where we have a kind of table builder, and you can compare APPG membership with loads of other factors. And then the top right is from an individual MP’s page on the Local Intelligence Hub. So just more ways to navigate this data. 

10:49 Be really keen to hear from you, what you do with it, what you’re interested in about it, so we can make it as helpful as possible. 

11:05 Alex Parsons  So I’m Alex. I’m going to cover two areas, building on those big new areas of data, covering areas where we’ve been tidying up and improving some of our old work. 

11:12 The first area we’re going to cover is huge improvements to the MP profile pages. These have had a complete redesign. Moving the menu to the left here is more than just moving it to the left. 

11:28 It means that we can have more content, pick up all these new areas, and gives us more future proofing to be able to have more different kinds of information and makes it easier to explore the stuff we already had. 

11:34 So for instance, we’ve separated out “Speeches and questions” into its own page here, which makes it a bit easier to see how to get around it. 

11:44 And we’ve, similarly, on the Register of Interest page, gone through and given it the ‘expand’ and new buttons we were using on different parts of the site. 

11:51 So basically, in every single page here, we had a bit of a look at how could we add a bit more hand-holding language to help people understand what’s going on in here, and how we could just tidy up and make it a bit easier to move around these MP profile pages, which we see as the core of what TheyWorkForYou is doing. 

11:58 So as part of that, on those vote sections, we’ve added added links to context in other areas of the site. 

12:13 In the “Recent votes” page, we now have linked the vote analysis content, which is our fuller analysis of votes in votes.theyworkforyou.com, which contains more stuff about party breakdowns, contains more stuff about the motion, where we’ve been able to reconcile that with Hansard, but we’re also where possible – if an MP spoke in the same section as a vote, we link to any speeches they made there. 

12:36 So this is temperamental in the sense that sometimes debates go across multiple sections, but as a proof of concept, this works quite nicely, especially if an MP is quite involved in a bill, their speeches are now quite easy to link to from there.

12:50 And part of the reason here – this example is from Diane Abbott, who’s been around for all the periods we cover, back to the 1987 Parliament, and obviously significantly before that – it makes it easier to click around some historic votes, and in principle, also to look at just the more recent votes, including the current parliament. 

12:50 On the voting summaries page, in addition to seeing the all-time voting record, you can now see the voting comparisons for specific periods, including the current parliament. 

13:18 We may in the future switch the default view to look at just the current Parliament, to better surface the recent votes people are probably looking for. But we also want to think about how we best balance this with the importance of the long term view. 

13:35 So we’re balancing this up at the moment, but for the moment, all the data is there and you can switch between them. 

13:35 We’re also laying the groundwork for linking to public statements from voter record summaries. One of the interesting things that TheyWorkForYou has had a part in changing is that MPs are now more likely to give public statements about why they voted a certain way. And that’s really interesting. 

13:51 We want to capture that and show it back to the people visiting the site. So on the TheyWorkForYou Votes site, we have the functionality to let us, and potentially in future, MPs, directly add links to public statements they made to votes, and when  that happens with votes that we include in the voting summary, we now show a link here that people can click through.

13:51 So I hope my head is not in the way. It might be, but there is a link here to public statements made about this particular vote. For the moment, we’ve done this for five votes on the assisted dying third reading: two pro, two against, and one abstain. 

14:25 But we think now all the pipes are in place, and we can get this information all the way from the votes page to the very the high profile voting summaries page, we’re thinking about how we can best gather more data systematically.

14:37 First on that vote, because we think it’s interesting, free vote to gather more information about, but also how we could, in future, make it easier for MPs to submit things themselves. 

14:45 But that is in part, yeah, laying the steps along the way. Similarly, we’ve also flagged this one as a free vote, and we’d like to capture more whipping information where possible on a series of votes. 

14:55 This isn’t publicly available. The House of Commons library has a selection of votes that are known to be free votes, but in some cases, this is known to be incomplete because votes could be whipped for some parties and not others. 

15:07 And so while our framework lets us capture this information, figuring out how to display it is a bit more complicated. 

15:14 So again, what we’re doing there is, we’re thinking about, how do we display it when we get to this page that we want to be simple and comprehensive, and then coming back all the steps like how do we gather the data that feeds into that? 

15:25 So this is very much an early work in progress in how we get that data there, but in the long run, I’d like to again, gather more information that is outside, what’s happening in Parliament, and help get it into these pages to help people understand more about their MP.

15:35 The second set of things I’m going to talk about is our email alerts. So TheyWorkForYou sends a lot of emails every day. We run the email alerts, and hundreds of thousands of emails sometimes go out. 

15:49 Most of these are for people with alerts for their own representatives. But there’s a very strong use of email alerts as a parliamentary monitoring tool, and what we found talking to people in the past is that the alerts help move information around Parliament, through government and through civil society, and this is especially important for smaller organisations that wouldn’t otherwise have the capacity.

16:09 So here’s some sort of quotes we found last time we surveyed people. Just in terms of organisations that can’t afford dedicated parliamentary monitoring, that can’t have a member of staff on it all the time. 

16:14 And I like this example especially, of a child poverty group who were getting the subscriptions to written answers from DWP ministers, and that was given them the clearest view of policy change that helps them, you know, help their clients. 

16:30 Similarly, we had a response, I think, from someone in DWP who was like, this is a fast way of getting information about – because there’s large operational department people all over the country, that actually that was a relatively good way of finding out about updated change to policies. 

16:31 So again, it’s just helping to get especially the Written Questions and Answers through the system, and helping people understand more about changes in government policy and what’s going on inside parliament. 

16:51 Yes, so we’ve done three things to improve this, for this group. We’ve made it easier to create more complicated keyword alerts. 

17:00 We have a feature to suggest useful phrases to include, and we made it easy to view recent mentions on the alerts on the website, as well as in the inbox, to help better manage alerts. 

17:10 So for the first step, previously, you’d have to assemble a search in the search bar using a series of ORs and advanced search operators, which people can do, but not many people were making use of it, and so we built a new interface, just at a very basic level, that makes it easy to group multiple phrases together. 

17:30 So here’s an example where I’m looking for information about Freedom of Information. I’ve got “Freedom of Information”, I’ve got “FOI” as a different search word, and now this search will get results for both of those.

17:40 But we’ve also tried to think about how we can help people know what those terms are, because it’s not always clear what is the term of art used inside Parliament for a specific debate. 

17:48 So what we did was we built a big vector search table – which helps find things that are similar in meaning, rather than similar in words – of what’s in Parliament, of the parliamentary transcripts over the last ten years, and then using common terms we know about from previous searches, we look for where we could suggest additional ones that were similar. 

18:03 So in this case, it’s taken “electric vehicle” and suggested “electric car” and then “EV” as potential extra terms to include. 

18:12 At the moment, this is limited to a certain amount of queries because we’re testing it out, and it’s an example of how we’re looking for low resource uses of where machine learning can help us out – because no machine learning or AI is used as people are using the terminal. 

18:26 But as in the past, we’ve done the data crunching to help improve things a bit. So we’re thinking about how you can best keep this feature up to date in the long run and provide a model for other parliamentary monitoring sites in terms of sustainable use without massive changes to our underlying infrastructure.

18:44 This is sort of a nice ‘quality of life’ thing in terms of managing lots of different requests. So when you get through, you can review the results of your search. You can see how many were mentioned the last week, when it was last mentioned.

18:48 If it was never mentioned, it might be a bad search. And we’re simply able to click through and see the kind of things that were alerted recently. So again, just helping you review and make good search choices, rather than just guessing as you entered keywords. 

19:07 We’ve also made it easier to manage how the alerts are managed, and this helps people have a greater range of alerts on different kinds of subjects. So you can see which ones – just on the theyworkforyou/alert page, you can see which ones have recent mentions, and also click through to the results in the browser.  

19:29 So again, here, what we’re trying to do is make it a bit easier, both to get alerts in your inbox, but also, if, say, you’re sharing an account between a few members of staff at a small organisation, just to be able to see here are the things that happened last week, be able to check in on that periodically. 

19:38 It’s just a nice little way of, you know, keeping in touch with Parliament without it need to be anyone’s full time job.

19:46 That’s the end of the alert stuff. Any questions on that in a bit, but I’m just going to share a few more things that we’re adding in the next weeks and months. So hopefully in the next few weeks, we’ve been creating the tools and features we need to make the most of our coverage of debates.

20:00 And especially, as Julia said, we’re not the official Parliament website, so we have a bit more freedom to add context around the margins to help people understand what’s going on. 

20:13 So we want to add better context and explainers for key debates. So far, the vote annotation thing I’ve already talked about previously.

20:15 If you enter TheyWorkForYou looking for your MP, it will highlight if your MP has made a specific statement about a decision in a vote. 

20:16 At the moment, that’s like four people, but in future, it will be more and similarly, we’ve improved the approach we had to Wikipedia data matching. Because we previously – and continue to – link to Wikipedia articles that match content to debate. We’ve improved the approach. 

20:39 We’re using new NLP techniques to better work out what are the appropriate links. And we’re still testing this out, but we have much fewer false positives at the moment. 

20:53 So basically, we’re trying to make it so that links that there are more relevant. Coming up in the next few weeks is improved display of our glossary, where we’ve been doing some work in terms of how we manage it, display it ourselves, and we’ve revived the old TheyWorkForYou annotation feature, not at this point for public use, but for our use, in terms of being able to make it easier for us to add context to debates. 

21:10 So if a high profile debate comes up, we now have more options to say, here is what’s happening. Here is, because it’s not always clear from the parliamentary transcript exactly what’s going on, and sometimes very interesting things happen between the lines. 

21:32 And so we want that ability to go back in and say, here is what was happening when this was going on. So this is something we’re building the capacity for ourselves. At the moment, in the future, we may also be interested in opening it up to other trusted partners, but for the moment, just building the groundwork for us to, I guess, do what I see as, like, normal stuff that isn’t new feature, but is like continuous, like making Parliament easier to understand, to lay in the groundwork for future work. 

21:46 Something we have a talk on in the next few weeks is something called WriteToThem insights. So a thing we run alongside TheyWorkForYou is WriteToThem, which helps people write to their representatives at different levels of government in the UK. So you enter your post code, you get your councillors. If you’re in devolved areas the country, you see more people than just your MP.

22:04 What we don’t have a good view on, is what people are writing about on the site, because we don’t read people’s messages, except in certain circumstances where… that’s in our privacy policy, but in rare circumstances we do that, but basically we don’t systematically look at it, and we don’t want that. 

22:19 So what we’ve been doing is running a survey of people to ask them, just in a sentence, what did you write about? 

22:23 And we’ve been doing analysis, bringing in some interesting cluster LLM usage to understand a bit more about what people are writing about.

22:33 And that found out some really interesting divisions between case working, campaigning or policy use on the site, and this is informing our future plans for how we can make WriteToThem more useful to people and getting the right message to the right place. 

22:46 So more on that in the next few weeks, but some really interesting stuff coming out of that survey.

22:53 On our WhoFundsThem work, where we are continuing our work in looking at money in politics, one of the small upgrades in this one was making the Register of Interests upgrades more uniform through the site.

23:04 We have two reports in the pipeline that we hope to get out in the next few months. The first is Leaky  – got a nice [picture of a ] leaky pipe there – which is our report about the collection system for election donation data, where… to spoiler it, the collection system for electric donation, the data is difficult to understand. 

23:20 And so this gives us an interesting new window to do analysis that it’s difficult to do at scale – where in principle it’s technically possible, but parliamentary rules make it quite difficult to access the results. 

23:20 There are diagrams in there that do not help you out, but explain that it’s difficult to understand. And the second is the helpfully titled “Untitled” written questions report, where we’ve been using AI approaches to explore overlaps between Written Questions and MPs’ declared interests. 

23:42 So a range of practical and policy results coming out of that one, which we’ll have more to say in the next few months. 

23:43 How you can help. Thank you all for coming. I’s nice to have an audience. That’s one way you can help. So certainly, one thing you can do is use the site and give us feedback. These are new features. We’ve got buttons all over the place to help give us feedback about, like, where people have the wrong information, especially on APPGs. 

24:04 We’re anticipating some of these will be wrong because we’re getting lists that may be out of date on APPG websites. We’re hoping this is part of a process where everyone keeps things more up to date. 

24:14 So it’s easy to work this out, but there may be some teething troubles in that. So we expect things to be a bit wrong. We’re very open to where, you know, things need to be corrected. 

24:23 Similarly, tell other people about these new features and work. like we think. Adding this up, the last few days, we’ve made a lot of changes to how TheyWorkForYou runs this year, with TheyWorkForYou Votes, providing better analysis of stuff on the voting end for all these new features, to give you a richer view of what MPs are up to. 

24:38 So please, if you’re interested in TheyWorkForYou, and you know other people who might be, please tell them there’s more to see than there was a few weeks ago.

24:50 We’ve got a newsletter at mysociety.org, to tell you more about our work. So please, if you want to hear more about what we’ll do in the future, please go there. If that’s the wrong link, which I’m suddenly panicking about, maybe someone will put it in the chat the right link.

24:58 And especially, one thing you can do is support us financially. We want to run the best version of these sites to make UK democracy more accessible, and we want it to be freely available to be able to do the best version of that. 

25:13 We do need financial support, but we can’t offer much more than what we give everyone for free anyway. Every donation helps us go further and faster in the work we’re doing.

25:19 We think there’s a real role for from the outside, joining up more of these official and unofficial sources. And just generally, we’ve got a philosophy that it’s not just asking Parliament to be better, that there are things we can do to improve democracy from the outside, and we’re optimistic about a capacity to do so. 

25:35 So I think that’s the end of my things. But if I’m right, the next slide will just say a big “Questions”. 

25:35 So if that’s something you want to help out with, the donate links are not only on this slide, but everywhere, all over the site, and it’s always appreciated, and it really makes a big difference. 

25:48 It does. It’s question time. 

25:50 Julia So somebody’s saying, what would really help them is to see an at a glance brief description of the content of a bill or issue that the MP is voting for, and also amendments. 

26:00 We know how hard it is. We feel the same way trying to track amendments to a bill and what they’re trying to do, find that information coming back to voting records. Yeah, Alex, have any comments on that? 

26:11 Obviously, by putting them in voting records, we’re trying to kind of cluster them. I think some of the stuff you were saying about the work we’re doing, about annotating debates, fits into this. But yeah.

26:19 No, this is an interesting thing, because one of the things we’re doing at the moment is looking a lot at international parliamentary monitoring sites, and many of them have as a core component, bill analysis, which isn’t something we do a lot of. 

26:20 The parliament’s API’s got better on this. One of the things that we are doing in a loose way, is on the TheyWorkForYou votes site, there are tags which group votes on the same bill together, where we can find them, which sometimes usefully pulls up the legislative consent from the devolved parliaments.

26:45  Alex We’d like to get better at this. There’s especially there’s a piece of work I’d like to do – well, there’s a few pieces of work I’d like to arrange on the House of Lords, and one of which is making the amendments flowing between the two houses easier to understand. 

26:59 We think there is good potential in especially using new LLM based technologies to extract information from those PDFs the amendments are in. I think it’s very plausible to get better at putting those amendments out. 

27:10 One of the things that happened to TheyWorkForYou Votes now, is we match, we try to associate the votes with the motion where we know it. So we have a bit more ,to click back from the vote to what was being voted on. 

27:21  But as things are live, it’d be much better to be able to pull that up the amendment paper. So currently we are making baby steps in certain directions. It would be a big new thing, but I think it would be certainly worthwhile. 

27:31  So basically, yes, it’s a problem. We haven’t solved it. I’d like to, I think it’s possible. So yes.

27:39  Julia Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, I think there’s more people in the chat as well saying the same thing that it is extraordinarily hard to follow the different votes on a particular bill. And as we were saying-

27:49 Alex Very frustrated by the Lords ones.

27:52  Julia Yeah, we share that pain and we are excited, well, we’re optimistic people generally, but optimistic that we can play a role here. So thank you for pointing that out. Really, really really nice to hear and helpful. Thank you, Catherine, for your nice comment. 

27:56 Chris has asked us about, how do we get this information to ordinary folk who may have voted but take no part in how we are governed? Yeah, really interesting point. I think that is very much why we exist. We think, you know, democracy goes beyond just voting every five years, and we’re always interested in going and talking to people and groups and encouraging more and different kinds of people to use our sites. 

28:19 That is my favorite part of my job, when I get out from behind my screen and go and talk to people. And so, yeah, you can do something by telling your friends and family, people you know, about us, and we also love to go and talk to people.

28:40 Alex And to plug a different event we ran recently: we recently ran an international event, in part looking at this question about, how do we get the information out of these websites, especially when searches are turning more to AI that makes it harder to click through to things, about people’s experience, about using video to get information out to more places, about using WhatsApp channels to get information out to more places.

29:01 So basically part of the way we see TheyWorkForYou is it’s supposed to be the hub of a range of different… you know, we want journalists, we want people who have their own audiences, to use our site to get the content. 

29:11 And we ourselves want to try and get it for them, like, we know it’s not enough just to put it on TheyWorkForYou. We want to figure out how we can get this information where it’s most needed. 

29:18 But yes, so this is the start of, I think, how we get the information out there, just having it all in one place, make it easy to discover.

29:33 Julia Absolutely, yeah, we’ve been talking about building the pipes, and the pipes are now working and hopefully we can then take them to some more places. 

29:34 Aaron asked us about, is there a function where you can follow one MP’s answers and debates, but not the voting records? Do you want to just say a bit more about that?

29:40 Alex Yeah, there is. So sorry, I didn’t take screenshots of this, but on the alerts page, there is a representative alerts immediately beneath that, where you can see your current representative alerts and click on or off the button about votes. 

29:53 So you can just see their contributions to debate questions. So that is on theyworkforyou.com/alert if you currently have alerts. And simply, when you create new alerts, it should ask you if you want to cover their voting records.

30:06 Julia Brilliant. Thank you so much. And then, yeah, I’m still in the chat, and then I’ll go to Q and A, if that’s okay. But thank you so much everyone for your engagement. 

30:06 Yeah, absolutely, Mark’s point here about that, the olde worlde language of Parliament makes it hard to know what an actual vote has achieved. And we’re trying to do a lot more with that, with TheyWorkForYou in our policy grouping so that it’s clear what the actual implication of a vote going a certain way is.

30:27 On parliamentary memberships of APPGs, yeah, absolutely. I know what you mean: on parliamentary membership. Yeah, Secretariats, exactly. And so it’s not always very clear who is in which group. 

30:48 We had an MP email us this week to actually say that they’re not in some groups that we had been told that they were in, and that they were in some other ones. And so it’s something that we’re definitely monitoring. 

30:58 Oh, if you’re interested in attendance, we’ve had 50 people at the webinar, but hopefully next one, there’ll be even more. So bring your friends. Brilliant, cool. Let me now have a look at the Q and A.

31:17 Let me… I’ll press the “answered live” question. Individuals and organisations can apply to APPGs as non parliamentary members. Yeah, absolutely, Alex, thanks for your question. Yes, it’s a really interesting feature of them, actually, and it’s something we’d like to look a bit more into. 

31:32 In some cases, the membership, the non parliamentary membership, are individuals. In some cases, it’s organisations that we find in these lists who are just interested in the sector, but increasingly, we’re finding actually that they are there are categories of paid for membership.

31:49 And so All Party Parliamentary Groups are setting thresholds where, to be this level of member it costs £500 pounds, or this level £1,000. And there’s nothing against that in the rules, but there’s very little guidance on it, if that makes sense. 

32:02 So it’s something that we’re following and interested in. I’m not sure if it was envisaged, like historically, the situation there, but it does seem to be a trend, and the blurring of lines, as I say, between sort of policy and advocacy activities of groups of like Secretariats or bodies generally, and their APPGs, there seems to be, like, some overlapping cases. Alex, did you want to come in on that one at all? 

32:35 Alex Yeah, it is certainly, like, it’s sort of interesting, because, like, they have to call them into the list. They don’t have to release a schedule of what they’re charging to be a member of an APPG if they are. 

32:41 Which was one of the things we’d like to change. Like, if you are charged to be a member of an APPG, then we’d like to know how much you’re charged and, kind of, to who.

32:48 There is… like, the generous interpretation of it is it helps you spread the cost the Secretariat across an industry, that if there’s lots of industries involved, lots of companies involved, you can spread the cost out, rather than someone sorting this out behind the scenes. 

32:58 On the other hand, there’s also been a few cases where we’ve seen it highlighted some of our past blog posts where, effectively, it’s been fairly clearly billed as, like, “if you give us this money, you will have access to parliamentarians” – and in almost exactly that language, which is, of course, you don’t want them to be more subtle than that, but they should be. 

33:19 So it’s one of those things where it’s like, it’s very clearly a way that, you know, the value proposition is, we have MPs, you have money. Let’s meet in the middle. And that’s not great. 

33:31 So, we’d like some more transparency there to try and push towards the good version of APPGs, because we believe that APPGs, they’re not just vehicles for corruption. They’re also nice talking shops and help people understand issues and get things across. But we really want to put pressure on to get towards the good version rather than the bad version, absolutely.

33:50  Julia So let me have another look. Question from Catherine in the chat: open letters. It’s really interesting that we’re tracking these. The impact of them in Parliament is the evidence of their effectiveness over EDMS. 

34:02 That’s right, it’s not really… effectiveness, I think, is a hard thing to track or measure there. I don’t think we’ve done any analysis yet on number of signatures of open letters versus EDMS, Alex, but we could.

34:15 Alex Yeah. I think the interesting thing about them is that some of the open letters were quite big, and this is part of why we started tracking them. There’s a few different – we’re going to encounter some interesting use cases as we go into it, but I thought one of the interesting ones here is effectively a mechanism for Labour backbenches to group together and write to a minister in a long form. 

34:31 And that’s in part why the length of it is quite interesting, because it lets people do the “you’re doing a great job, Minister. We’re all on board with the Labour party programme, however -“, and that is sort of like signaling that a group of people was interested, and sometimes quite a significant group of people is interested in it.

34:53 I think one of the largest ones we had was around UK’s recognition of Palestine as a state, which, of course, has obviously now happened. So that was part of that internal discussion inside the party. So I think that sort of interesting way of trying to understand parliamentary dynamics is often it is the governing party dynamics and open letters – which are both public/private signal and you’re trying to show deference up, while also opposition – is a really interesting mix of what that actually looks like for, you know, for people to have arguments inside the party about something. 

35:18 Julia Yeah, absolutely. I think also there is something about the social media age, where the parliamentary paper or whatever is a bit more Instagrammable or whatever than just the Early Day Motion screenshot on the website. And so, yeah, something really interesting about that.

35:33 I’m just coming back to the Q and A. Question here on building an archive of APPGS, including press releases – sometimes it’s unclear if they are genuine. 

35:45 Yeah, really interesting one. I think it’s hard because there are so many APPGS. There are 543 at the moment. There’s been up to 900 before, but we would like to increase and strengthen our connection and relationship with All Party Parliamentary Groups and to be able to offer more insights into the work that they’re doing. Yeah, Alex, did you want to come in on that one? 

36:08 Alex  I think it’s really interesting because, semi-unofficially, like, we should gather all that, someone should get Parliament to gather all the stuff. They ought to have a membership list at least. But I think – it’s been especially useful if APPGs have websites, that they should almost always have websites, that’s nice and explaining what they’re doing, and they should list their stuff there.

36:28 I know Parallel Parliament has gathered a few more doc– our original approach was to try and gather even more documents, but we ran into obstacles in terms of people not wanting to give us the documents that they should have done.

36:38 So we scaled down to the memberships because we thought that was the most useful thing we could do. But I know in some cases, more information is available on the Parallel Parliament website, who has done a bit more work around APPGs in that way, so some of the information will be there, but yeah, essentially, I don’t think we’re going to build a big data set around APPGs, but we’re very interested in them, because it’s adjacent to lots of other things, like trying to explain what’s going on there. 

37:05 So I think the short answer question is no, but I get a lot of words in the meantime, so hopefully some of them are useful.

37:07 Julia But it is very interesting. The question from Paul about, do they have a requirement to publish accounts of their donations and sponsorships and how the money is spent? Very interesting question. There is, in the “financial contributions and benefits” section of their parliament page, any donation above £1,500, they need to declare. And you will see there. And that comes out with every edition of the register, which comes every six weeks, there is a new rule in the rules that came in last April about income and expenditure statements that they have to produce about all of their income and expenditure.

37:37 We’ve been a bit confused, basically trying to follow when they’re supposed to come out, because, as it stands, I think only four or five have actually published these income and expenditure statements, but at their first AGM, so after a year of being constituted, after the general election, they should be producing these income and expenditure statements, but on the parliamentary page, it says, have they produced one? And the rules suggest that they’re supposed to have done and so many of them say No, when my readings are they are maybe supposed to say yes. 

38:12 And so we’re keeping an eye on that as more groups come to this one year period, because I think, yeah, there could be much, much better transparency around the financial ins and outs of All Party Parliamentary Groups. So very much, one that we’re keeping an eye on, and I would say, expect a blog post from us on that in the future. But yeah, great question.

38:36 Sorry. I’m not quite doing a very good job of going through the Q&A and saying what ones we’ve done, and I think we have answered that one about following an MP’s debate, yeah, including debates that are raised but awaiting dates. Alex, I didn’t know if you had any thoughts on that -don’t know if you can see that one in the Q and A.

38:56 Alex Yeah, it’s one of those things. There’s, like, a lot of things on TheyWorkForYou that in principle could be a big feature. There’s just a lot of them. So I think we’re unlikely to do that in the near future, but also, for us to remember that is something that might be helpful. There are lots of small areas where we can make things better, and it’s trying to pick the right route through what’s easy and what has the most value, but definitely an interesting area. 

39:16 It’s what is helpful in helping build good data at Parliament, what is helpful about people, like helping people understand their MP specifically? And I think what we try to do for this update is bring in more information that is helping people understand their specific MP. 

39:28 And yes, trying to get that balance right between, here is some data, but also here is the context around that, so that we can properly explain how Parliament’s working, is a difficult one. So yeah, good idea. We’re probably not going to do it soon, but it’s a good idea if somebody wants to give us loads of money that would expedite it. That would expedite it. 

39:33 Julia Thank you so much for all of your questions. And yeah, I thought that was a really nice framing Alex about this being about more context around individual MPs. But there are so many connections in Parliament between votes MPs, things that are going on that we would love to do more with. So yeah.

40:00 I’ll give it another minute, in case anyone had any final thoughts or questions to ask. Really, really appreciate you coming along today. We like doing these chatty catch ups. And so if you’re not already on our mailing list, please do. We’re also on BlueSky and Instagram and, increasingly, Tiktok, so you’ll see my face there. And yeah, we’d love to have you be more involved. Thank you so much for coming along. Really nice to see you all. 

40:26 Alex Thanks everyone.