Statements, EDMs and open letters / mySociety

Here are some notes on our in-progress work on TheyWorkForYou, including what we’re doing around Early Day Motions (EDMs) and open letters.

To put this link at the top, we’re looking for more examples of open letters signed by MPs – if you have any, let us know!

Showing signals better

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 MPs of 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 the policy direction. 

We want to improve the data we have access to, so we can add new information to TheyWorkForYou, and to tools like the Local Intelligence Hub, where understanding more about local MPs’ interests can help constituents and their representatives have more productive conversations. 

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 can, however, be useful in reflecting the interests of different MPs even if EDMs rarely lead to substantive change in themselves. 

To have better access to this information, we’ve added EDMs to TheyWorkForYou Votes as ‘Statements’. 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. 

But we also need to note that EDMs have changed a lot in the last ten years. 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. 

There’s still a lot going on here, and it’s worth tracking —but not on its own. We’ve called this section ‘Statements’ both to be able to cover similar ‘proposed motions’ in the UK’s other Parliaments, but also to capture extra-parliamentary statements that serve a similar function. As part of this, we’ve added the ability to capture and store open letters. 

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 to submitting an EDM.

Social media reach means that MPs can make a full public statement without the parliamentary publishing process : and 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. 

But there are also some disadvantages for the format. 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 to 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. 

There is also, in the scenario where we succeed in being the authoritative store of open letters, a need for us to add the ability for MPs to co-sign letters we store. There’s no technical problem with this (and it would work well with other things we want to do, like giving MPs the ability to link to public statements on votes), but that means there are multiple versions of lists floating around. 

In the long run, there might be a good niche for a parliamentary “writing an open letter” service that takes the EDM infrastructure but breaks out of that box to facilitate new ways MPs are making collective signals.

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. 

Next steps

• We need more examples of notable open letters, especially where they show an interesting factional argument within parties. Please use our form to tell us about them (ideally for letters since the start of the 2024 Parliament). 
• In TheyWorkForYou, we’re rolling this information into a general improvement in how TheyWorkForYou displays the profile of MPs, with better indications of what MPs are interested in. 
• In TheyWorkForYou Votes, we’re going to be adding more analytics of statements/signatures to provide more information on party and cohort breakdowns in signatures. 

Header image: Photo by Romain Dancre on Unsplash