Today we’re launching TheyWorkForYou Votes – our new vote information platform.
Our goal with this service is to create and support better analysis of decisions taken in the UK’s Parliaments. We want this service to both be directly helpful to the general public, and indirectly by providing new tools and data to specialists.
We are running an online event at midday to talk about the new site and the context of this work – please come along.
If you like our work, and want to see us go further – please consider donating to support mySociety and TheyWorkForYou.
What’s new in this site
Vote analysis
For each vote we show:
- Breakdowns for and against the motion by party/government/opposition.
- A searchable voting list with party alignment – how far off an individual MPs vote is from the average position of their party.
- Which of eight common ‘parliamentary dynamics’ the vote falls into – reflecting who was proposing, divisions among opposition parties, and levels of participation.
Here is an example of this for the approval vote of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill.
We calculate this daily for all new votes we know about, but for House of Commons votes this will be calculated and published within minutes of the vote being published on the Commons Votes site.
Motions and legislation tags
The day after a vote, we automatically link up decisions with the motion that is being voted on. From this we can link deeper into debates, and add extra explainers for common types of motions.
We also automatically tag votes that seem like they’re related to the same bill to make it easier to find amendments or significant stages of the bill (because of naming variations, sometimes some are missed).
Here’s an example of that for the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill.
Divisions and agreements
For the House of Commons and Scottish Parliament, we extract from the official record references to decisions made without a vote (“on the nod”) and create ‘Agreements’ from these, linking to the related motion.
We do this to create a canonical reference for agreements. When a high profile issue may be passed without a vote, it can be hard for people to find. By extracting these from the official record, we show more of how the parliamentary process works, can tag them as being part of the process of passing legislation, and include them in voting summaries (in rare cases).
Here is an example of an amendment made to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill that was accepted without a vote.
Voting summaries by time period
TheyWorkForYou Votes now powers our voting summaries – where we group related votes together to show a record on TheyWorkForYou.
Building on last year’s change to how we approach scoring and vote inclusion, our new technical approach gives us more flexibility in calculating voting summaries for different time periods. We now show voting records in TheyWorkForYou by ‘all time’ but also by the different government tenures since 1997.
By creating a view for the current Parliament, we can make recent decisions easier to discover and include, while reflecting that the implications of votes can be long running, and the record is not reset at each election.
The voting summaries are currently updated up to the end of 2024 – we will do an update covering the first part of 2025 in early June.
Annotations and whip reports
An impact of TheyWorkForYou has been more public explanations by representatives of how they’ve voted.
We want to start recording this, to make them more accessible to people viewing their representatives’ voting records.
Divisions, agreements, and votes by individual representatives can be annotated with additional information or a link. We can also record information about party voting instructions (the whip).
Initially, we will be testing this out on specific votes, but our plan is to make this directly available to representatives to annotate their own votes, and have this information feed through to TheyWorkForYou.
A hub of voting information
Over time, we will make more of the information in this platform more directly accessible on TheyWorkForYou to reach our wider audience.
But our goal is generally to raise the standard and ease of analysis of parliamentary data for everyone. We make all our data available not just through an API, but as bulk downloads that make it easy for researchers and analysts to get the benefit of the work we’re doing to join up different data sources.
Support our work
Through TheyWorkForYou and our wider democracy work, we take a practical approach to improving politics in the UK. Over the last two decades we’ve shone light on UK democracy by tracking MPs’ votes, publishing registers of interests, and sending email alerts—making sure those in power know the public is watching. Because we don’t have paywalls – charities, community groups, and everyday citizens can access unbiased political information without cost.
To keep the service running and continue to innovate and adapt to changing times, TheyWorkForYou relies on supporters. A monthly contribution of £5 (or what you can afford) helps cover core costs, safeguards its independence, and lets the team keep innovating for a fairer, more transparent political system.
If you support us and our work, please consider making a one-off or monthly donation.
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Header image: photo by Christian Boragine on Unsplash
