Keeping tabs on the UK’s parliaments & assemblies
Our transparency rules need to adapt to the rise of AI
30 October 2025 @ 11:47 am
The government is making a significant investment into AI in public services, and systems are changing apace. AI is increasingly being deployed in every department of government, both national and local, and often through systems procured from external contractors. In a recent article for Public Technology, mySociety’s Chief Executive Louise Crow flags that we urgently…
TheyWorkForYou Update: A richer view of Parliament
23 October 2025 @ 4:13 pm
We want to improve the quality of UK democracy by making more and better information about Parliament available to everyone. In previous updates to TheyWorkForYou, we’ve expanded the range of official sources the service pulls on: extending to cover all the UK’s parliaments, and recently bringing together all the registers of interest in one place. …
Improving TheyWorkForYou email alerts
23 October 2025 @ 3:54 pm
You can subscribe to TheyWorkForYou’s alerts to receive email updates on representatives’ parliamentary speeches and questions — but they’re also strongly used by civil society as a parliamentary monitoring tool, letting organisations know when their topics of interest have been mentioned in debates or votes. Our alerts help the flow of information from Parliament through…
Future boundaries for devolved legislatures
23 October 2025 @ 10:49 am
The Scottish Parliament and the Senedd are both holding elections in May 2026, and the Northern Ireland Assembly will be holding an election before May 2027. All of these elections will take place on different boundaries to their current constituencies and, in the case of the Senedd, under a new voting system. As the boundaries…
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
23 October 2025 @ 8:26 am
Mayoral expenses are a big topic in France just now, in a moment that’s reminiscent of our own MPs’ expenses scandal back in 2009. Chandeliers, luxury TVs and a duck house The UK’s Freedom of Information Act had only recently come into force when investigative reporter Heather Brooke lodged a request for details of MPs’…
TheyWorkForYou voting summaries update: October 2025
22 October 2025 @ 8:30 am
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…
New to TheyWorkForYou: Signatures
21 October 2025 @ 9:57 am
One thing we want to take more advantage of with TheyWorkForYou is the fact that we’re not an official website — and so can pull on multiple official and unofficial sources of information to present a richer picture of how our democracy works. Our trajectory with voting summaries has been to focus on votes that…
New on TheyWorkForYou: browse your MP’s APPG memberships
21 October 2025 @ 9:08 am
If you’ve ever wondered what your MP is interested in outside of their party alignment, a good place to look is All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs). These groups bring MPs and Peers from different parties together around shared policy interests. There’s a real range of causes, of size, and of activity. The groups don’t have formal…
Can better data can help end violence against women and girls?
17 October 2025 @ 10:53 am
This year, we’ve been working with the End Violence Against Women coalition (EVAW). We wanted to see whether we could replicate a successful model that we’ve already established in our work with The Climate Coalition, building the Local Intelligence Hub – we had an idea that the same approach could benefit coalitions of other types,…
AI and government: keeping the human in democracy
6 October 2025 @ 9:26 am
mySociety was founded on one seismic technological change: the arrival of the internet, bringing radical new possibilities to the ways in which we engage with democracy. Now we’re seeing a second upheaval, just as potentially explosive: the wide adoption of generative AI and machine learning tools — particular kinds of artificial intelligence — not least…