TheyWorkForYou voting summaries update: October 2025  / mySociety

This update to TheyWorkForYou voting summaries brings us up to date as of the end of September 2025 (covering Q2+Q3 2025). 

To learn more about our process for updating MPs’ voting summaries, please read our previous blog post.  We have also recently released TheyWorkForYou Votes which, as well as providing open data for anyone to use in their own online parliamentary projects, is now powering TheyWorkForYou’s voting summaries. 

This update adds 21 votes and 3 historical votes to expand new and revised policies. We have also started to bring more information we’re gathering in TheyWorkForYou Votes (vote annotations and whip reports) into the voting summary pages of TheyWorkForYou. 

Previous draft policies have been put live for:

• Border Security Bill
• Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Votes have been added to existing policies for:

New policies have been created for:

• Increasing local council power over bus services
• Preventing sentencing guidelines requiring offender background reports based on race, religion, culture, or similar traits.
• Creating a new regulator for English Football
• Proscribing Palestine Action, Maniacs Murder Cult, and Russian Imperial Movement as terrorist group

Draft policies for:

• English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill
• Sentencing Bill

Have been created and will be added in the next update after the third stage (approval) vote. 

If your MP voted in any of the divisions feeding into these policies, you’ll see them on their TheyWorkForYou page in the ‘Voting summaries’ tab.

Annotations and free votes

One of the things we want to do with TheyWorkForYou Votes is gather public statements MPs make about their votes and make this accessible through TheyWorkForYou. 

We’ve completed work to flag when we’ve gathered some statements associated with a policy line, and are testing this with a few statements on the Assisted Dying Bill third reading (the annotations column in the table at the bottom). These are flagged on the MP in question’s summary page. Our next step here will be to crowdsource more statements that were made around this specific vote. 

We are also starting to experiment with recording some votes as free votes and flagging these in in the summary page. This is step one towards gathering and displaying whipping information. Currently we have only included a few votes from the current Parliament to refine the approach. 

Bus powers

When adding new policies we check whether there were any obvious votes in the last decade that should also be included. 

For a new policy around ‘increasing local council power over bus services’, we have added a retrospective scoring agreement for the 2017 Bus Services Act (which was passed without a vote, with explicit cross-party approval in the debate). 

Minimum detention requirements

Here we have adjusted the description of the policy to:

voted for/against reducing (for some kinds of offenders) the minimum detention requirement before release to *reduce pressure on prison capacity*[last bit added]

The original was framed more generally in a way that could have worked as an all-time policy description, this now includes the justification used across these votes currently covered for the change. 

Palestine Action proscription

We’ve created a new one-vote policy line for voting for/against ‘proscribing Palestine Action, Maniacs Murder Cult, and Russian Imperial Movement as terrorist groups’.

This vote passed a noteworthiness criterion for a single vote policy through not only for the continuing impact (leading to hundreds of arrests for supporting the now proscribed group), but the initial circumstances of the vote.

This was the first vote to be held on proscription of a group under the Terrorism Act, with all previous examples having been taken by unanimous agreement. While there were few votes against (which will show as a difference from the party for Labour MPs), there were also a large number of absences and some conscious abstentions from Liberal Democrat MPs (who voted both for and against, which we convert to an ‘abstain’). 

As part of our 2024 scoring changes, absences and abstentions are treated differently. MPs who abstained are recorded as voting, and will have a line for this policy. MPs who were absent will not be given a policy line for this policy (and this isn’t shown as a significant difference from the party).

LGBT+ Rights

As part of this update we’ve renamed the ‘Gay rights’ policy to ‘LGBT+ rights’. In substance this change better describes votes already included in the policy, as relevant votes have generally covered multiple groups (and this fulfils our uniqueness and cohesion criteria better than a new policy line). This wider framing provides a sharper lens on already included votes. For instance, in an already included 2024 vote on a conversion therapy ban, while the kind of conversion therapy being discussed covered multiple LGBT groups, in practice the opposition to a ban in the debate followed from opposition to trans conversion therapy specifically.

This shift lets us capture votes that represent attempts to restrict or expand the rights and status of trans people independently of other groups. In this specific case, an amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill around the definition of sex data, requiring sex at birth to be recorded in official contexts (far beyond settings where it is is practically relevant).

As part of this, we have reviewed if any previous votes should be added to an expanded definition, finding two relevant decisions that would have been appropriate under the original definition. The approval of 2019 guidance around inclusive relationship and sex education has been added as a scoring vote, and the inclusion in the census of separate questions around sexual orientation and gender identity has been added as an informative non-scoring agreement. 

Launch event

This Thursday we’ll be hosting a webinar to talk through a range of recent changes to the MP profile pages and email alerts. We’ll also share more information on our mailing list over the next few weeks. Sign up here and make sure you have ‘Democracy and Parliaments’ checked as an interest if you’d like to receive these emails.