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/RSS FeedTheyWorkForYou 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.” (more…)
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Often, responses published on our Freedom of Information site WhatDoTheyKnow result in newspaper stories, or feed into campaigns or research.
When this happens with one of your own requests, you can add a link to the page. These then appear in the side column, like this:
It’s a great way for other users of the site to see the direct results that come from the simple act of making an FOI request — and now we’ve also added an ‘FOI in Action’ page, where you can see all of them in one place.
Here are five stories that have caught our eye from that page:
- A request for all communications around Eric Trump’s March 2025 visit to Edinburgh allowed the public to see the briefings made to the First Minister of Scotland ahead of their meeting — and resulted in this national news story.
- Minutes from the Ministry of Justice’s Working Group on Unregistered Marriages, acquired via this request, fed into a chapter of research on many aspects of modern marriage, this one being on unregistered Muslim marriages.
- All evidence points to this response being the basis for the New York Times piece [paywalled] that broke the massive story of the government’s £2.4 million expenditure to hide a life-or-death data breach, concerning Afghans who worked with the British forces.
- A 2022 report into misogyny in the British Army was not released until requested and then pursued via the user’s right to an internal review. The user knew of its existence thanks to previous news stories referring to it. The Byline Times reveals the report’s shocking findings in this news story.
- This 2019 report from The Bureau of Investigation looked into public sector adoption of algorithmic and data-driven systems, presciently foreseeing the explosive adoption of AI in our public services. This was based on several requests from a single user.
We’re not far off listing 3,000 citations on WhatDoTheyKnow — and these are just the ones users have added. If your request resulted in a piece of journalism, informed a campaign or fed into research, do add it in. As well as helping to show others what FOI can do, it provides a significant link back to the external site, helping bring it more readers.
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Image: Peter Lawrence
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TheyWorkForYou Votes is mySociety’s new platform that provides more information than ever about how MPs (and other elected representatives) have voted.
It’s launching on Monday 19th May, and we’re running an event where you can learn all about it.
Votes in the UK’s Parliaments determine the laws that we all live by, and we want the information about who voted for what to be as accurate, easy to use and easy to understand as possible.
Whether you’re a data whizz who wants to get into the details, or a citizen who wants to know whether your MP has been paying attention to your emails, we think this new service will be helpful to you. Thanks to TheyWorkForYou Votes, we’ve been able to make improvements to our own websites (like TheyWorkForYou and the Local Intelligence Hub), and also, true to our open source principles, we’re making more data available in more formats that you can use and re-use for your own clever tools!
Join us for our launch event at 12pm Monday 19th May to cover both why we publish votes, and what you can get out of the new platform.
Register on Eventbrite now to hear from:
- Louise Crow, mySociety’s Chief Exec
- Dr Ben Worthy, Birkbeck University
- Alex Parsons & Julia Cushion, mySociety’s democracy team
See you in a couple of weeks!
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Image: UK Parliament (CC BY 2.0)
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It’s March 4 2025, and we’re releasing a bunch of new data on TheyWorkForYou, around each MPs’ financial interests: that’s whether they have second jobs, what donations helped them campaign ahead of the general election, and whether they’ve received gifts such as Taylor Swift tickets.
In the course of assembling this data — with the help of our brilliant team of volunteers — we’ve come to understand exactly what the problems with the current system of reporting are.
If you’re seeing this on the morning of release, we’ll also be launching a report at 1pm today, and you’re welcome to join us. (Don’t worry if you’re too late; we’ll be sharing the video afterwards. Just make sure you’re signed up for our newsletter to be alerted when it’s available).
Don’t forget to check out your own MP, to see who funds them, on TheyWorkForYou.com. And if you have any questions about this project, the data, or MPs’ financial interests in general, send them to us at whofundsthem@mysociety.org.
If you appreciate this type of work, please help us do more of it by making a one-off (or even better, a regular) donation. Thank you!
Transcript
[0:00] Julia: If you’ve ever wondered if your MP has a second job, what donations they received, or if they were one of the ones that got a free Taylor Swift ticket, we’ve got the answers for you. (more…)
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We’ve got updates from Julia on this Parliament’s first Register of Financial interests, showing what second jobs and gifts, etc, MPs have declared; and on the startlingly diminished list of All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs).
Meanwhile, Gareth tells us how to get a discount on WhatDoTheyKnow Pro, and we hear from AccessInfo about a new award – the winner will be invited to Madrid to present their work.
Alongside all of that, Myf explains how a WhatDoTheyKnow user harnessed the power of Reddit to verify the responses they were receiving to their FOI requests.
Enjoy!
Links
- Blog post on the Register of Financial Interests spreadsheet; and more details on what it contains
- Blog post about Reddit, WhatDoTheyKnow, and Physician Associates
- Blog post on the diminishing number of APPGs
- AccessInfo Impact Awards
- Full details on how to get a discount on WhatDoTheyKnow Pro by linking to your outcomes
- Our TikTok account
- Our Bluesky account
Music: Chafftop by Blue Dot Sessions.
Transcript
[0:04] Myf: Hello. Thank you very much for tuning in.
[0:07] This is our second monthly collection of news and updates from mySociety, and my name is Myf Nixon. I’m mySociety’s Communications Manager.
[0:15] This month, I’m going to share with you five pieces of news — two from our democracy work, and three from our transparency side. (more…)
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/RSS FeedIt’s our first ever podcast at mySociety! Heeey how about that?
Myf, our Communications Manager, runs you through all the stuff we’ve been doing at mySociety over the last month. It’s amazing what we manage to fit into just 30 days: you’ll hear about a meeting of Freedom of Information practitioners from around Europe; our new (and evolving) policy on the use of AI; a chat with someone who used the Climate Scorecards tool to springboard into further climate action… oh, and there’s just the small matter of the General Election here in the UK, which involved some crafty tweaking behind the scenes of our sites TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.
Links
- TICTeC videos on YouTube
- TICTeC photos on Flickr
- Browse the TICTeC 2024 schedule, find slides etc
- Matthew’s post on updating TheyWorkForYou on election night
- Sign up to get an email whenever your MP speaks or votes
- Democracy resources and our future plans in Alex’s post
- Local Intelligence Hub lets you access and play with data around your constituency
- Matt Stempeck’s summary of the Access to Information meetup
- Our summary of Matt’s summary of the meetup
- Updates from all those ATI projects around Europe
- New in Alaveteli: importing & presenting blog posts; request categories and exploring csvs in Datasette
- Fiona Dyer on how volunteering for Scorecards upped her climate action
- Where to sign up if you fancy volunteering as well
- mySociety’s approach to AI
- Contact us on hello [at] mysociety.org if you have any questions or feedback.
Music: Chafftop by Blue Dot Sessions.
Transcript
0:00
Well, hello and welcome to mySociety’s monthly round-up.
My name is Myf Nixon, Communications Manager at mySociety.
0:11
This is part of an experiment that we’re currently running where we’re trying to talk about our work in new formats, to see if that makes it easier for you to keep up with our news. (more…)
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CSV is a great format for releasing sets of structured data in response to Freedom of Information requests. Indeed, on WhatDoTheyKnow we’ve seen several thousands of CSVs released.
We’ve recently added the ability to explore CSV files via a Datasette instance. Here’s an example.
Opening the CSV in Datasette makes it easy to explore and analyse it in an interactive website.
If you’re not familiar, Datasette converts the CSV to an sqlite database, which means you can then query the data using SQL.
Alaveteli uses the publicly available lite.datasette.io instance by default, but you can host your own instance and configure it at theme level like we’ve done for WhatDoTheyKnow.
You can see the implementation details at mysociety/alaveteli/#7961.
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Banner image: Joshua Fuller
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My colleague Alex has already written about looking forward from this election, so here I am going to look back at the technical work that was involved for the election, and in getting all the new MPs into TheyWorkForYou.
Boundary changes
This election was the first UK Parliament election with boundary changes since 2010. Due to the long-running nature of TheyWorkForYou, which has been around now for over 20 years, this can throw up some interesting challenges. In this particular case, it turned out we were using two different JSON data lists of constituencies – both containing the same data, but one also included the other Parliaments and Assemblies, whilst the other included alternative names for some constituencies. I took the opportunity presented to merge these together and update the bits of code to use the one consolidated dataset, and then added in the 650 new constituencies to the JSON data.
Loading the new constituency data into TheyWorkForYou then threw up another historical problem – the constituency table was still using the very old Latin-1 character set encoding, rather than a more modern encoding such as UTF-8, that almost everything we have uses. This had been fine until now, with even Ynys Môn covered by that encoding, but the new constituency of Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr contained a letter that Latin-1 could not cope with, leading to a quick emergency upgrade of the table to UTF-8 (thankfully this is a backwards compatible encoding, so worked without issue).
We had already generated data of the new constituencies and loaded these into our lookup service MapIt before Christmas. Ordnance Survey more recently published the official dataset of the boundaries, which we could then import via our usual processes, though even this raised a small issue to be resolved. It turned out in the last data release OS had given the parts of two county council electoral divisions with detached parts (Lightwater, West End and Bisley and Thorpe St Andrew) different identifiers, which they had reverted in their new release, causing our import script to get a bit confused – resolved with a small manual script.
Displaying on TheyWorkForYou
In the period before the election, we knew people would be using our site as a postcode lookup, perhaps to look up their previous MP but perhaps also expecting something useful for the upcoming election, which we wanted to provide, and so we used Democracy Club’s API to show election candidates and link to their WhoCanIVoteFor and WhereDoIVote services. We also displayed your boundary changes using the new constituency data mentioned above.
TheyWorkForYou isn’t just the UK Parliament, though, it also covers the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, and the Northern Ireland Assembly, so we also had to maintain the provision of that information to people – email alerts for those bodies continued throughout as usual, and the postcode lookup kept showing people their representatives in the devolved nations.
Once the election closed, we automatically updated our messaging, and the next day switched back to our normal behaviour of taking you directly to your MP page in England, and showing you your MP and other representatives elsewhere.
We had a fun issue where some people were getting their new MP, whereas some were getting the old MP – during the period of dissolution, when there are no MPs, we have a configuration flag to enable the site to know it should return the latest result even if it’s not current (you don’t want this all the time, when e.g. an MP has resigned or died), but once new data was being loaded in, one database query was returning results in a random order; fixed by adding some sorting by descending end date.
Election result data
At the last election in 2019, we took a live feed of election results from Democracy Club, who have collected all the candidate information for their Who Can I Vote For service – which all began as the result of a mySociety project back in 2010.
Democracy Club were performing the same service this time, and gratifyingly it was quite a small change to have our 2019 code work with any 2024 changes to the source information (incidentally, there aren’t a lot of narrative doctests in our codebase, but I quite like the one in use there!).
This script would do half the job, of taking in some source data (who has been elected, and including their TheyWorkForYou identifier if they already had one due to being a previous representative of some sort) and amending our source JSON data to add the newly elected representative.
The other half is loading that source data into the TheyWorkForYou database for display on the site. Our normal loading script works fine, but looks through all the source data to see if there have been any changes to take account of. For the election, we don’t need it to do all that, so I tweaked the script to only do the minimal necessary to load in newly created information.
These two scripts were then added to a cron on our server, running every few minutes through the night. I did stay up long enough to check that the first few worked okay, before leaving it to itself from then on. I also set it up to pipe its output to our Slack channel, so people could see it operating:
This also meant as the final few trickle through, it’s popping up reminding us it’s still doing its job:
All the results (bar the one we’re still waiting for) are now committed to the repository, joining all our other open data.
Support TheyWorkForYou and our work
TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem are run by mySociety, a small UK charity. We’re a very efficient operation and do a lot with a small team; if we had bit more money, we could achieve a lot more.
We want to see a transparent, resilient democracy, with equal access to information, representation and voice for citizens. If you believe in this vision please donate today to enable greater transparency and accountability of the next government.
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Image: Moritz Kindler
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The ICO have today announced that they intend to fine the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) for their accidental release of staff’s personal information in August 2023. This data was released in response to a Freedom of Information request made using WhatDoTheyKnow.
mySociety is a charity; we run WhatDoTheyKnow as a vital tool to help anyone exercise their right to information held by public authorities. We understand the repercussions of a breach like this, which serves to demonstrate that public authorities must be good at dealing with personal information. We welcome the ICO’s emphasis on the importance of robust release processes to ensuring that information that is important to the public interest can be released safely.
We take the responsibilities that come with operating a large platform extremely seriously, especially around the personal data breaches that can occur when authorities’ release processes fail. Following this breach, we’ve undertaken a significant programme of technical and process work to play our part in reducing the risks of this kind of incident.
We’ve developed a new piece of code which analyses spreadsheets as they come in as responses to FOI requests on WhatDoTheyKnow, and holds them for review if they are detected to contain hidden data. The deployment of this code has proven successful and we will be continuing to improve it. In its first three months, this spreadsheet analyser has screened 3,064 files and prevented the release of 21 spreadsheets that have been confirmed to contain data breaches, and 53 which were likely to contain data breaches (around 2% of the files screened in total).
In an ideal world, such measures would not be necessary; we continue to work with authorities making such releases to help them understand the reasons for data breaches, the potential severity of their impact, and how to avoid them.
This blog post was updated at 10:04 on 23 May to correct the figures around the number of spreadsheets screened.
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Image: Pietro Jeng
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Tl;dr: We’ve added lots of local council data to the Local Intelligence Hub.
In February, we launched the Local Intelligence Hub, and today we’ve released a huge new update.
We designed the Local Intelligence Hub — in collaboration with The Climate Coalition and supported by Green Alliance — to provide all the data you need, either about one constituency or across the whole country, on issues around climate. It helps you gain a deep understanding of public opinion, demographics, political considerations, and much, much more. In short, it’s an extremely powerful tool, free to use, and invaluable for anyone pushing for better climate action.
At launch, we divided the data by UK Parliamentary constituency — but with this huge new update, you can now also explore data at the local council level.
As ever, there are several different ways to view this data:
- by individual authority, so you can deep dive into your local area
- as a table, so you can compare councils by metrics that matter to you
- plotted onto a map, so you can see where to find hot- and cold-spots of action
And it can all be downloaded as a spreadsheet for use on your own desktop.
What kind of data are we talking about?
We’re pulling together data from multiple different sources. What does it all have in common? We reckon that it provides new insights for climate campaigners, researchers, journalists and organisations — especially when it’s combined in new ways, as Local Intelligence Hub allows you to do quickly and simply.
Sources include national polling data, information from our services CAPE and Scorecards, and other Climate Coalition member organisations, like the National Trust and the RSPB.
And we’re always looking for more data, so do get in touch if you know of a useful source we haven’t yet included!
What can I do with it?
You will know best how this rich data could inform your work, but here are a few ideas to get you started.
1. Build a profile of your local council
Dip into the local council page and see what data awaits you! Here’s an example of the top-level stats you can find for Leeds City Council:
- The area has a strong mandate for climate action. MRP polling suggests we’d see 88% of Leeds City residents support onshore wind compared to 83.5% national average, and just 10% oppose net zero compared to 12% national average.
- Leeds City Council is doing better than most councils, but could be doing more. It scored 53% on the Climate Action Scorecards, gaining its highest scores in Planning and Land Use, but with the biggest room for improvement on Transport.
- Emissions are huge, but so is the population. Leeds City Council serves 798,786 residents compared to the average of 307,712. According to BEIS data, Leeds City Council has influence over 2,822 kilotons of CO2 emissions, which is more than twice the national average of 1,168.3.
- There’s an active climate movement. In Leeds city there were more Great Big Green Week events than average in both 2022 and 2023.
2. Design a national campaign strategy
If you’re a campaigning organisation looking to work out where and how to allocate resources, the table-builder and CSV download could form an essential part of your planning process. Here we’ve generated the single-tier councils with Net Zero target dates that fall within the coming decade, and sorted by their Action Scorecards overall score, alongside useful data about public opinion and emissions.
Council Name Action Scorecards overall score Net Zero target date Population Oppose Net Zero % Total emissions (ktCO2) IMD Trussell Trust foodbanks Support onshore wind Wolverhampton City Council 21 2028 264407 12 854 1 0 82.0 Middlesbrough Council 21 2029 141285 12 558 1 7 78.0 Bromley Council 26 2027 332752 12 938 5 4 88.1 Dumfries and Galloway Council 28 2025 148290 15 864 3 3 80.0 Oldham Borough Council 32 2025 237628 12 690 1 2 80.1 Cheshire East Council 33 2025 386667 13 1860 4 2 87.9 Highland Council 35 2025 235430 13 1268 4 7 82.6 Nottingham City Council 42 2028 337098 9 1038 1 10 78.0 Haringey Borough Council 52 2027 266357 7 617 2 1 79.3 Tower Hamlets Borough Council 53 2025 331969 6 1019 2 0 79.8 Bristol City Council 55 2025 465866 8 1295 2 13 86.5 3. Visualise your goals
Local Intelligence Hub helps you zero in on the areas of the country that meet specific criteria. For example, where are the district councils who have declared a climate emergency but haven’t published a climate action plan? Here’s a map that shows you — just one of hundreds of maps that you can generate with a few clicks, and no expertise required:
What to do with all this lovely local data?
Thanks to this update, it’s now easier than ever to push for local climate action. With these rich new insights, you now have a number of talking points with which to engage your local councillors or council climate officers — and a wealth of facts and figures to back them up.
What next?
We need you to use the Hub and tell us what works, and what doesn’t! Give us your feedback — and if you’d like to know whenever we add something new, sign up to updates and we’ll let you know when there’s new data to play with.
Photo by Daniil Korbut on Unsplash
