Keeping tabs on the UK’s parliaments & assemblies
Giving evidence on second jobs
5 June 2025 @ 9:58 am
A few weeks ago, I was part of a panel giving evidence to the House of Commons’ Standards Committee on ‘outside employment and interests’ (second jobs). Here’s the video, or the transcript. My evidence was based on our findings and recommendations from our WhoFundsThem project and our Beyond Transparency report. We worked with volunteers to…
Improving transparency from the outside
5 June 2025 @ 9:56 am
As part of our WhoFundsThem project, we released a big report detailing what we learned while working with volunteers to explore the MPs’ Register of Members Financial Interests (RMFI). Many of our recommendations are for changes Parliament should make, but we always want to think about what we can do from the outside to keep…
Tackling the Climate Crisis with Access to Information rights
28 May 2025 @ 2:17 pm
Our hour-long webinar brought together investigative journalist Lucas Amin of Democracy for Sale; Anne Friel, Head of Just Societies at Client Earth; and Joschi Wolf of the German transparency project Frag Den Staat
Introducing TheyWorkForYou Votes
19 May 2025 @ 8:02 am
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 ran…
Norfolk County Council: “Scorecards have helped us strive for greater transparency and accessibility in our climate action efforts”
15 May 2025 @ 8:01 am
The Council Climate Action Scorecards are helping climate officers across the UK to understand which elements of their path to Net Zero are working well, and which areas need improvement. Marina Ebbage, Procurement Policy Officer at Norfolk County Council, explained the many ways in which Scorecards have helped the authority’s Climate Hub team in their…
TheyWorkForYou: how you can help
14 May 2025 @ 10:14 am
Here’s an update on some upcoming TheyWorkForYou projects, and how you can help us make them better. TheyWorkForYou has also joined Bluesky – so follow us there! Come to the launch of TheyWorkForYou Votes TheyWorkForYou Votes is mySociety’s new platform that provides more information than ever about how MPs (and other elected representatives) have voted. …
APPGs – new stuff we’re releasing and new stuff we need your help with
13 May 2025 @ 10:53 am
We’ve built a tool that helps us release a lot more useful information about All Party Parliamentary Groups, but we need humans to help us with membership lists. The new stuff For each new APPG register (which are released approximately every six weeks), we now produce lists of new APPGs, removed APPGs and updated APPGs.…
TheyWorkForYou has a new votes platform, and we want to tell you about it!
7 May 2025 @ 3:44 pm
TheyWorkForYou Votes is mySociety’s new platform that provides more information than ever about how MPs (and other elected representatives) have voted. It’s launching on Monday 19th May, and we’re running an event where you can learn all about it. Votes in the UK’s Parliaments determine the laws that we all live by, and we want…
News from the ATI Network – March 2025
3 April 2025 @ 1:05 pm
Here is our monthly round-up of news from the transparency organisations in the ATI Network. This month, we have updates from Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Croatia, Hungary, Greece, South Africa and Latin America. What a global hum of transparency activity! Access Info Europe have brought a joint legal challenge against the European Commission’s new…
Legal reform of FOI laws in France
2 April 2025 @ 2:18 pm
These are notes from a recent ‘fireside chat’ held by the ATI Network. For the sake of frank conversation and knowledge exchange, the session was not recorded, but you can read on for the main points. Laurent and Xavier from the French Alaveteli site MaDada were talking about their learning process from working with Access…