New to TheyWorkForYou: Signatures / mySociety

One thing we want to take more advantage of with TheyWorkForYou is the fact that we’re not an official website — and so can pull on multiple official and unofficial sources of information to present a richer picture of how our democracy works. 

Our trajectory with voting summaries has been to focus on votes that are substantive. This means they’re generally on issues whipped by parties, and there are few differences between the voting records of MPs in the same party.

But we’d also like to make it easier for everyone to understand what differentiates MPs: the signals they give about their values and interests, and where they fall on internal arguments about policy direction. 

As such, all MPs now have a Signatures tab on their TheyWorkForYou page, which tracks Early Day Motions (EDMs), open letters, and Motions to Annul signed by the MP. 

EDMs

One form of information we want to make more use of are Early Day Motions (EDMs). These are technically ‘proposed motions’ that may be elevated to a full debate. In practice this rarely happens and they work as an internal parliamentary petition service, where MPs can propose motions and co-sign ones proposed by others. They are still useful in reflecting the interests of different MPs even if EDMs rarely lead to substantive change in themselves. 

To provide better access to this information, we’ve added EDMs to TheyWorkForYou Votes as ‘Signatures’. Here TheyWorkForYou Votes is working as a general data backend that will help power features in our own services, and makes it easier to access the data for bulk analysis. This then feeds into individual MP profiles. 

With this, we are catching up to what Parliament displays on their MP profiles (EDMs), but also building the framework to expand to the UK’s other Parliaments and to capture extra-parliamentary statements like open letters that serve a similar function. 

Open letters

Over the last few years, we’ve noticed more open letters being shared on social media, where screenshots of a list of names on official parliamentary paper are serving the purpose of  signalling in public that a grouping exists in a political argument. 

A recent example of that is the big open letter for UK recognition of a Palestinian State. This was initially posted on X as images, and we’ve transcribed it and made the list of MPs searchable. 

There are a few reasons why MPs might prefer to use these kinds of open letters rather than submitting an EDM. Social media reach means that MPs can make a full public statement without the parliamentary publishing process. A letter can be published in full without the word count restriction of a letter to a newspaper, so can pick up more names.

Similarly, open letters are free from the format restrictions and word count of EDMs (a single sentence of less than 250 words). This can be important as many letters represent a group of government MPs trying to change the government position. Being able to write more is important in referencing previous government actions, anchoring the change in agreed principles and so on,  while still being a critical signal. 

This fits with a general change in usage of EDMs. While the number of actual EDMs proposed per year  have remained roughly the same, overall signatures have dropped by almost half since 2015 (33k to 15k), and far fewer petitions get a large number of signatures. The average number of signatures per EDM has dropped from 27 to 12. Some of this activity has moved to the new social open letter format. 

There are also some disadvantages to open letters. Publishing via screenshots means it’s not very accessible or searchable — a problem if one reason for signing is to signal to constituents.  If an open letter is important, people want to sign after the fact. EDMs have a mechanism for that, while for open letters you might get “here’s another page of names in another tweet” or social media posts saying “I support this too” —  but not in the same place as the original. 

For our purposes, it also means there’s collection work to be done finding the letters in the first place, and transcribing the images into text. We’ve got some good technical processes on the latter; and we’ve opened a form here where people can tell us about them. But it’s more work than just plugging into Parliament’s feed, which is what we do for data elsewhere on TheyWorkForYou. 

Looking at open letters is a shift towards including more extra-parliamentary activity — but reflects the need for parliamentary monitoring sites to react to changes in how parliaments and representatives behave, and think creatively about how to make use of new sources of information. 

Motions to Annul

Motions to annul are technically a form of EDM, but we’ve separated them out because we see them as something worth highlighting in their own right. 

To take a few steps back, when Parliament passes laws (primary legislation), it fairly commonly gives the government authority to make additional orders/regulations (secondary legislation) that fill in specific details in laws without the full parliamentary process. 

Secondary legislation still needs to be approved by Parliament – and this happens in two ways depending on how the law was written. Either the regulations need to be approved in a vote to become law (positive procedure), or they need to not be voted against within 40 days (negative procedure). 

Most legislation (around 75%) is passed through the negative process, and in practice the power to object is used very rarely (the last successful Commons objection was in 1979).

The mechanism is to make a Motion to Annul (for historical reasons called a ‘prayer’) through the EDM process. There is no threshold at which this is promoted to a vote and the government controls the Commons agenda. It is more likely if the motion is tabled by the Leader of the Opposition, or as the number of signatures goes up.

Come to our event

Join us on Thursday 23 October for a webinar on our new features, plans for the site, and our vision of a more open Parliament. 

Even if rarely successful,  these represent engagement with the legislative scrutiny process, which we felt was worth highlighting, and we separate these out in the signatures page from other EDMs.