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Whether or not you voted, or no matter who you voted for, every person in Wales is now represented by six MSs in the Senedd.
And the good news is, we’re here to help you navigate the new system!
✉️ You can find out who your six MSs are, and contact all or some of them, through WriteToThem.
🔔 Want to follow what they’re up to? The new MSs have been loaded into TheyWorkForYou, so you can also set up alerts to receive an email any time they speak, or whenever a topic you care about is mentioned in the Senedd.
📊 If you use constituency data based on postcodes in your work, you can easily convert it using our new tool — more about this below.
✉️ Find and write to your representatives in seconds
Just enter your postcode in WriteToThem and we’ll show you:
- your six MSs
- your MP
- your local councillors
From there, you can send a message directly through the site.
PS: We’ve been funded by the Welsh Government to make improvements to WriteToThem: more news on that soon!
📊 A brand new postcode converter tool
With new constituencies having been created across Scotland and Wales, organisations will find that any postcode data they used to depend on to map their supporters to representatives is now out of date. Happily, we can help.
Enter your postcode into our online tool and it’ll give you a simple copy-and-pastable output you can plug right into your spreadsheet.
🔔 Democracy doesn’t stop on election night
Elections matter, but democracy is also what happens in between them. TheyWorkForYou covers the Senedd in English and Welsh, so you can keep track of what is happening locally on the issues you care about.
We’ll send you alerts directly to your inbox, and we’ve upgraded the customisation functions recently! Need some more help? Here’s our guidance page.
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Thanks to funding from the Welsh Government, our parliamentary website TheyWorkForYou now includes debates and a list of all Members of the Senedd, in both English and Welsh. Find them via www.theyworkforyou.com/senedd/ and cy.theyworkforyou.com/senedd/.
Completists will be glad to know that, with this addition TheyWorkForYou now covers all the law-making parliaments of the UK.
Those familiar with the site will know that the email alerts service is one of TheyWorkForYou’s key features. Anyone can sign up, for free, to receive emails when their representatives speak or vote, or when their topics of interest come up in debates. We send millions of these email alerts out per year, and they’re also indispensable for charities, companies and governments who use them to monitor parliamentary discussions on topics relating to their work.
Alerts are now also available for the Senedd, to help people and organisations living and working in Wales — and anyone else who’s interested — to stay informed about what is said and done in the devolved parliament.
When users in Wales enter their postcode on TheyWorkForYou’s homepage, they will see the members of Senedd as well as their MP in the UK’s national parliament.
They’ll be able to check when their Senedd Member last voted, and what they’ve been saying in debates; as well as using the site’s powerful search function to access previous mentions of their topic of interest. More technical users may also use the data for their own projects through TheyWorkForYou’s API.
We have wanted to add the Senedd for many years. Now, thanks to support from the Welsh Government, we’ve been able to complete the work needed to make it available in TheyWorkForYou’s fully accessible format.
This is a continuation of our mission to make the UK’s Parliaments easier for everyone to access, understand and engage with. Through the regular publication of debates, plus TheyWorkForYou’s search and alert functions, we want to support Welsh citizens and civil society to play an active part in democracy.
Our WriteToThem service, which allows people to send an email to their elected representatives quickly and easily, already covered members of the Senedd. The two sites link together so that, having checked your Senedd Member’s activity on TheyWorkForYou, if you wish to respond to them, you can click through to WriteToThem and send an email.
Mick Antoniw, Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution at the Welsh Government, said: “We’ve been pleased to work with mySociety as part of our efforts to involve as many people in our democracy as possible. Being able to follow topics and receive updates about what happens in the Senedd will help people see how we discuss the issues that matter to them most. We’ll continue to work to increase democratic engagement and open up democracy to more people.”
Our own Chief Executive Louise Crow added, “By extending our coverage – and especially email alerts – to the Senedd, we hope to help people and organisations living and working in Wales stay informed about what is said and done in their devolved parliament”.
This addition represents dedicated effort from staff members. Matthew Somerville made TheyWorkForYou work as a bilingual site and wrote the code to work with Senedd data. Alex Parsons and Struan Donald also contributed significantly.
Translation has been diligently handled by Wyn Williams. TheyWorkForYou is open source software, and this work — in particular, the import of Members — built on previous code submitted by Ross Bowen and Sam Knight. Thanks to them all.
If you'd like to see us extending our work in democracy further, please consider making a contribution.Donate now—
Image: Senedd Cymru (CC by/2.0)