The TheyWorkForYou alerts system will send you an email every time your chosen keyword is mentioned in Parliament. A recent survey revealed that this system is being used by a broad range of different organisations and individuals. We’ve been speaking to a few of them to find out more.

First of these is Ben Leapman, Editor of Inside Time, the national newspaper for prisoners and detainees, circulated to all of the UK’s 141 prisons. 

A unique publication

As Ben explains, “Each issue includes news, features, advice, puzzles – and eight pages of readers’ letters, which provide a fascinating insight into what’s on the minds of men and women behind bars. 

“We’re a not-for-profit publication and a wholly-owned subsidiary of the New Bridge Foundation charity, which was founded in 1956 to create links between the offender and the community. We’re funded by advertising revenue. As far as we’re aware, no other country has a national prison newspaper. We’re unique!”

As Editor, Ben commissions articles, decides which stories go on which pages, fact-checks, and plenty more. But he also writes news stories. We were, of course, interested to hear how TheyWorkForYou alerts can help with this.

Parliamentary mentions of prisons

“I use the alerts service to monitor for the keywords “prison” – it’s as simple as that,” says Ben. 

“Prisons are a crucial public service, but sadly they don’t get as much attention from politicians or voters as schools and hospitals – it’s a case of “out of sight, out of mind”. So the volume of daily mentions is manageable, and I’m able to look at them all.”

These simple alerts have resulted in Inside Time stories such as this one, about an innovative scheme to reduce violence, being trialled at 18 prisons. 

“I don’t think there has been any public announcement or press release about it,” says Ben: “I hadn’t heard of it until I saw the parliamentary question.”

And here’s another recent story, this time prompted by a House of Lords debate in which Lord Farmer, who wrote two Government reports on the importance of family visits to the rehabilitation of prisoners, says that Covid restrictions in prison visits halls are doing harm.

Stories can arise from all types of parliamentary activity: “I’ve found news stories in Commons and Lords debates, Select Committee hearings, written answers to Parliamentary questions in the Commons and Lords, Scottish Parliament proceedings, even the proceedings of Bill committees.”

Communication is key

Finally, we asked Ben what he thinks the impact of such stories is.

“I’m a news journalist – I think it’s always important that people are well-informed. For the general public in a democracy, exposure to news is essential so that people can cast their vote in a well-informed way. 

“In England, prisoners are denied the vote – but there are other ways that reading news can be a direct benefit. Say we report on a new course or initiative that’s happening at a particular prison. If one of our readers reads that story and likes the sound of it, they could apply to transfer to that prison – or they could ask staff why it’s not happening at their prison.

“Prisons are rather secretive places, they’re not great at communication – so it’s often the case that both prisoners and prison staff are unaware of things going on around their prison or in other prisons, both the good and the bad.”

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Thanks very much to Ben for giving us these insights into how he uses TheyWorkForYou alerts in his work. 

It’s certainly one area that we’d never have imagined before he filled in our survey — but we are very glad to know that our services are helping with the admirable aims of Inside Time.

Whether or not you voted for the MP you ended up with, it pays to keep a careful eye on what they’re saying and how they’re voting.

Democracy works best as a model when we, the public, hold our MPs to account. If you see them acting or speaking in a way that’s contrary to your views, tell them — otherwise, how will they know that anyone feels differently?

But you’ll only be able to do that if you know what’s going on.

Here’s one of the services that you might not know about, but which is a crucial tool for anyone wanting to stay up to date with Parliament:

Alerts

Sign up to an alert, and we’ll send you an email every time your MP speaks in a debate, or votes. Or, if there’s a topic you care about, we can send you an email every time it’s mentioned in Parliament.

You can set up any number of alerts, to comprehensively cover your interests.

What to do

First of all, visit this page if you’d like to follow your own MP. Just input your postcode and email address, and you’re all set.

Or, if you’d rather follow a word or phrase, follow the simple instructions in this post.

Already signed up?

One fifth of the UK has a new MP after the election. If you already have an MP alert set up, but your MP has changed, you also need to visit this page to switch over.

And if you already have some other alerts set up, and you want to refine them, there are instructions here.

Useful for everyone

Email alerts are a really simple way to keep informed. They can be halted or paused at any time to suit your needs, and if Parliament isn’t sitting, your chosen MP isn’t active or your keywords don’t come up in a debate, you won’t receive anything on those days.

It takes just a few seconds to scan the email, and, if you’re interested in the content, a couple of minutes to click through and read the content.

Useful for businesses, campaigns and charities

Alerts can be equally helpful if you work for an organisation that would benefit from knowing whenever your field is mentioned in Parliament.

If an MP shows sympathy for your cause, you could get in touch and see if you might work together; you might ask them to submit a question to the House, come and see your organisation in action, or help you to forge useful links.

Or if they say something misguided, you can put them right with a press release or a letter inviting them to come and see the facts for themselves.

Some organisations run campaigns around upcoming legislation, asking their supporters to get in touch with their own MPs with their experiences and information that might help inform their vote.

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Image: ©UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor/ Stephen Pike (CC by-nc/2.0)

If you subscribe to emails that tell you every time an MP speaks via TheyWorkForYou, then you may have noticed a change in today’s mailout.

From today, we’re trialing alerts not just when your chosen MP has spoken, but also when and how they voted — and what could be more timely, what with the dramatic votes of last night! As always, you can click the link in the email to see further context.

The alerts also cover votes in the House of Lords, and in the Scottish Parliament.

This is one part of the work we’re able to do towards enhancing access to democracy, supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundations. It’s a feature we’ve wanted to add for a long time — not to mention something that you’ve been asking for — and as we hope you’ll agree, it certainly adds to our overarching goal of trying to make the goings-on in Parliament more accessible to everyone.

Find out more about votes

Generally speaking, you can check the Recent Votes page on TheyWorkForYou to see whether your MP was present for a division; or if you know what date it was held on, you can go to the calendar, click through to the relevant debate, and find the divisions usually near or at the end of the page.

How to sign up for alerts

Not signed up to follow your MP’s activity in Parliament yet? It’s very simple: just go to this page and input your postcode.

Enjoy tracking your MP’s votes, and watch this space for more voting-related improvements coming soon.

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Image: Luca Micheli

How do you know when Parliament is going to be debating the things you care about? One way is to use TheyWorkForYou—you can set it up to send you handy reminders ahead of time.

On the agenda

The legalisation of cannabis is one of those topics that people have strong opinions about, and we’ve noticed a few tweets where people are saying that they’ve used WriteToThem.com to share their views with their MPs, ahead of today’s Westminster Hall debate on the matter.

Of course, you can share your thoughts on any topic with your MP, at any time. Doing so just before a debate is useful, though, as it means your representative is more likely to take your views into consideration before voting or speaking.

TheyWorkForYou.com, our site that covers the UK’s parliaments, actually makes it pretty easy to time your messages correctly. As well as publishing everything spoken in Parliament, it also shows upcoming business.

More than that, you can subscribe to any key word or phrase within the upcoming business section, and we’ll send you an email whenever it arises. So, whether you care deeply about cannabis, or your interests lie in another topic all together, you’ll know when a debate is scheduled.

And then you can get straight onto WriteToThem to write your message.

Here’s how to set up your ‘future business’ alert:

1. Go to the future business page on TheyWorkForYou.

2. Enter your chosen word or phrase in the search box to the right (titled Search upcoming business, or set up a future business email alert)

3. You’ll be taken to a page showing any future business containing your keyword. On the right of that page you’ll see a box like this:

Notice the small text: (or just forests in Future Business). Click on this if you’d like to receive results only for forthcoming debates.

 4. You’ll be asked to confirm what you want:

As you’ll see, this confirmation also teaches you a shortcut, if you ever want to search within Future Business directly: [keyword section:future]

5. Click ‘subscribe’ and you’ll be asked to input your email address (unless you are already logged in). Check your email to confirm your address and you’re done — all ready to fire off an email to your MP next time something important is on the horizon.

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Image: Alexodus (CC)

Parliament is back in session – that means that TheyWorkForYou.com will be filling up with lots of new content as our representatives come back to work and start on the rounds of debates, committees, and written answers.

How do you keep up with the stuff that’s relevant to you? Well, you could read it all, every day – or you could be smart, and set up a topic alert.

Receive an alert every time your chosen word or phrase is mentioned

If you’re interested in a specific topic, and you’d like to receive an email every time someone mentions it in Parliament, follow these steps.

1. Search for your chosen topic

Let’s say you’re particularly interested in badger culling, and you’d like to receive an alert every time the word ‘badger’ is mentioned in Parliament.

i) Enter your search term on the homepage:

Tip: If your chosen search term has more than one word, you may find it useful to put it inside quotation marks – otherwise you will receive alerts every time both words are mentioned, even if they are not mentioned adjacently.

ii) Click ‘search’, and you will be taken to a page of search results for your term:

TheyWorkForYou uses ‘stemming’ – so these results contain mentions of words such as ‘badgers’ and ‘badgering’: again, if I want to only receive mentions of the word badger, and none of its derivatives, I should put the word in quotation marks.

iii) Click on the large blue link to the right of the page: “Subscribe to an email alert for [your search term]”.

iv) If you are logged in to the site, that’s it – you’ve subscribed, and you don’t need to do anything more.

If you are not logged in, don’t worry. You don’t need an account in order to sign up for alerts.

Input your email address, and click on the ‘subscribe’ button (NB not the ‘search’ button, but the higher up button marked ‘subscribe’):

We’ll send you a confirmation email.

Click on the link in the email, and there you go – you’re subscribed.

You can sign up for as many alerts as you like: if you are interested in many topics, it is probably worth registering, as you then do not have to go to the bother of inputting your email address and clicking the confirmation link for each one.

In our next post, we will look at how to manage your alerts, and common mistakes that can be made setting them up.

Prefer to receive alerts every time a specified MP speaks? See our previous post.

Image: Lorenzoclick (CC)