Because that’s the fundamental concept of a democracy: we vote our representatives in, and they work on our behalf.
Perhaps you feel that your representative isn’t, in fact, working very hard or very effectively? Well, that’s one thing that TheyWorkForYou can help with: it can show you what your representative is doing – and if you find that unsatisfactory, it also shows you how to contact them and tell them about it.
Most of the content you’ll see on this site – the debates, the facts and figures about MPs – is imported from elsewhere.
Debates, for example, come from the official parliamentary Hansard. MPs’ positions, interests and job titles also come from parliamentary sources.
The difference between TheyWorkForYou and the Parliament website? We give the data a bit of a polish: we make it easier to follow debates by highlighting who’s speaking, for example, and allow you to search and link to them too.
We also perform some automated analysis, for example, MPs’ pages will tell you how many times they have spoken, and whether that’s above or below average.
Voting content is taken from Public Whip, a separate project (not run by us) which also works with scraped parliamentary data.
Yes! That means that TheyWorkForYou is also a rich, accessible historic resource.
Here’s everything you’ll find on the site currently:
It’s all searchable, and when you find part of a debate that interests you, you can share it, because each statement in every debate has its own URL (web address). For more information have a look at our blog post on using TheyWorkForYou as a history resource.
No, but votewatch.eu do, and they might have what you're looking for.
By all means let us know, but be aware that because, as explained above, much of our data replicates the official parliamentary source, the error may well originate from there.
Parliament undertakes a rolling process of corrections and updates. When their content is amended, the next time our site picks it up, our content should be amended too.
MPs’ stances are made up from a number of different votes which Public Whip have deemed to be relevant to the topic. For example, an MP’s position on Trident is judged from the way he or she voted on each occasion listed here.
If an MP’s votes all, or almost all, align strongly with those listed on that page, we’d say they “consistently” voted in favour of Trident. MPs who have voted in a different way are marked as having “almost always voted for”, “generally voted against”, or “consistently voted against” the issue, depending on how many of their votes align with this list.
You can see a link at the end of every such statement on TheyWorkForYou, titled “details” – clicking on that will show you exactly which votes went towards any particular stance.
The votes that go to make up each position are carefully compiled by hand: we’ve written a couple of blog posts on how we do that: read the first one here and the second here.
The voting record is not affected by what MPs and Peers have said, only how they voted in relation to that topic in the house – i.e. "aye" or "no". Votes on each topic were examined, and strength of support determined based on these votes. Follow the "votes" link next to each topic for details. Additionally, in many votes, MPs and Peers are told how to vote (“whipped”) by their parties. Since the Whip is secret, we have to assume, like the Speaker, that all votes are free.
Details of the votes on which each policy position is based are available on the Public Whip website. You can read more about the process we follow when researching the policy positions on our blog. Please contact us if you’ve spotted something which needs to be updated or corrected.
We’d love to – but please be aware that we’re a small team, so we can’t always introduce new features as quickly as we’d like to. However:
We welcome contributions of images, especially for those representatives who don’t yet have one.
But please note that any image we use must have been released by its owner under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license – which means that anyone is free to copy and use the image themselves, with attribution.
Unfortunately, that means we can’t just use any old photo that you may have found on the web: it needs to be from a verified public domain source, or owned by you, or you need to have permission from the owner for it to be used on the site.
If that is the case then please do forward it to us and we will be happy to use it.
A few people have asked why we publish statistics on how often MPs use alliterative phrases, such as "she sells seashells". It has even been mentioned in the House of Commons.
Simply put, we realise that data such as the number of debates spoken in means little in terms of an MP’s actual performance. MPs do lots of useful things which we don’t count yet, and some which we never could. Even when we do, a count doesn’t measure the quality of an MPs contribution.
After reading media reports like this one in The Times (cached article), and hearing from real MP’s researchers who have admitted to tabling questions to increase their boss’s rankings, we became concerned about the use of these statistics.
We’ve done two things. We’ve added the silly statistic, to catch your attention. And we’ve removed the absolute rankings. Instead of saying an MP is exactly 5th for giving out verbiage in the chamber, we now just say that they are "well above average".
Our advice — when you’re judging your MP, read some of their speeches, check out their website, even go to a local meeting and ask them a question. Use TheyWorkForYou as a gateway, rather than a simple place to find a number measuring competence.
If you have suggestions for other metrics we could add which would be useful, send them to the usual address. We’ve got a few ideas ourselves, to keep you on your toes.
TheyWorkForYou used to get its ministerial information, as with much else, by scraping various pages on the official parliament.uk site. The official site stopped maintaining a list of PPSs in January 2009, which means our scraper could no longer find and work out the information. Without a central list of Parliamentary Private Secretaries, there isn’t a lot we can do.
Click ‘Advanced search’ under the box on the search results page, and you’ll see a number of options for refining your results. But you can do everything that Advanced Search does, and even refine your search further, right from the search box.
RSS is a means of fetching frequently-changing content from the web. The resulting feed can be read via a 'feed reader', or used to provide content for other websites and applications.
TheyWorkForYou provides a number of feeds. For example, there are feeds for all Commons, Lords and Westminster Hall debates. There are also feeds for each representative's speeches: some MPs use these to display their latest activity on their own websites.
TheyWorkForYou automatically scans the text of debates to find phrases of more than two consecutive words which are also the title of a Wikipedia page, and then links them to those pages. Where the topic could refer to one of multiple Wikipedia entries (e.g. 'Michael Jackson' could refer to the pop star or to the once U.S. Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security), we link to the top page in Wikipedia's disambiguation list.
This generally provides a useful service whereby you can look up any unknown name or phrase easily. However, the automation of this process does sometimes mean that we link to an inappropriate Wikipedia page. If you find an example of this, please do let us know and we will remove the link.
The API queries the TheyWorkForYou database to return data on MPs or debates. It’s free for use that is both low-volume AND charitable, and there’s a small fee attached for any usage outside that.
Here’s some of the data you can fetch with the API:
And lots more – see the whole list on the API page.
Here are some quotes from our users.
Jo Brodie, Science Information Officer & Islet Project Coordinator, Diabetes UK:
"TheyWorkForYou.com contributes to my 'current awareness' of what is being said about diabetes and insulin (access to treatment, statistics etc) and other related health topics (for example organ transplantation and stem cell research as that's very relevant for diabetes and its complications too). The email alerts and RSS feeds mean the information lands rather helpfully in my intray.
"The Science Information Team at Diabetes UK occasionally gets asked stats questions on the numbers of people with diabetes, or a particular complication of diabetes, in a specific location. We don't have access to this sort of data but the top statisticians in the Department of Health do, so it's often worth our while having a quick search to see if something's been asked and answered.
"Even if a question results in "information of that nature is not held centrally", that's useful because we can demonstrate that there isn't a good answer and this will save the original enquirer spending time on a fruitless search.
"If information is forthcoming there is often a reference or info about the way in which the evidence was collected - if this is publicly available then we can use that resource to find other things. (I think this is how I found out about the Prescription Pricing Authority which deals with costs of medications - a useful resource when someone wants to know the impossible 'how many people use insulin?'). So basically it 'begets' further info!
"It's a great site - thank you."
Robert Goodwill, MP for Scarborough & Whitby:
"Use the site all the time and print off bits to send to constituents. My local newspapers are registered so they often cover my comments in Parliament that I wouldn't even send out as a press release."
TheyWorkForYou’s code is completely open source and anyone is welcome to use it – however, we recommend using our more recent codebase Pombola, which is much easier to install and run. Drop us a line and we’ll be happy to explain more.
See our privacy policy page for details.
If your postcode is brand new, it’s possible that we don’t yet have the data to recognise it. The site will update in due course when we upload new data from Ordnance Survey. We’d suggest using a nearby postcode that you know to be in the same constituency.
Otherwise, please drop us a line and tell us the postcode you’re trying to input.
Our postcode-to-constituency mapping is handled by MapIt, a piece of software which takes the centre point of a postcode and returns the constituency that point is in. In rare cases where postcodes straddle boundaries, this method delivers the wrong results for a handful of people.
At the moment, we can only suggest that you use a neighbouring postcode in order to bring up the right representatives.