You have probably seen that format of tweet or Facebook post before. It is usually about a Conservative MP, though can be applied to Liberal Democrats or the occasional Labour MP, and goes a bit like this: “Oh, you thought this politician was good? Well, check out their voting record on the environment/Brexit/welfare/hugging puppies/delete as appropriate.”

Attached is a screengrab from the website TheyWorkForYou, with a few lines of “MP X consistently voted against free cuppas for the elderly; MP X usually voted in favour of Britain joining an EU superstate ruled by Jean-Claude Juncker himself”, and so on.

It has been a popular genre of viral post for a few years but tends to become even more common when relatively unknown MPs join the centre stage. With the Tory leadership contest currently heating up, even publications such as New Scientist and Wired have joined in on the voting record fun.

It doesn’t seem that controversial; after all, MPs are elected by their constituents, vote on issues, and it is only fair that they are held to account by the public for it. On top of this, parliament works in opaque and mysterious ways, so a website setting out to make the day-to-day life of the House Of Commons more understandable should be welcome.

Still, there is a bit of an issue: the screengrabs from TWFY are often misleading. Take James Heappey as an example. The Conservative MP has, according to the website, “consistently voted against measures to prevent climate change”.

This seems odd. Heappey used to sit on the energy and climate change select committee and currently chairs the all-party parliamentary group on renewable and sustainable energy, of which Green MP Caroline Lucas is also a member. He is heading a project for Carbon Connect, which “seeks to inform and guide a low carbon transformation underpinned by sustainable energy”, and had Ed Miliband as a keynote speaker when it launched.

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In a local newspaper column in April, he praised activist Greta Thunberg, adding that “as someone who talks about decarbonising and arresting climate change all the time, it's very welcome to see it now getting the profile it should”.

Still, according to TWFY, he has voted on climate change issues nine times since getting elected in 2015, and of those nine times he did not vote to prevent climate change once.

So, what’s going on here?

It could well be that Heappey is two-faced and talks the talk without walking the walk; it wouldn’t be a first for a politician. Let’s take a closer look anyway. In all of those votes but one, every Conservative MP voted the same way, and in one of them, two Conservative MPs voted the other way.

There is no record of party whips on TWFY, but we can reasonably assume that those votes were whipped, so all Tory MPs were instructed to vote a certain way. Then, it seems worth pointing out that five of the nine votes were parts of summer budgets and finance bills, so details in much wider legislation set by the chancellor of the exchequer. As with other major votes, it would be extremely unusual for an MP from a governing party to vote against their budget.

This addresses our nine votes, but leaves one obvious question: has there really only been nine votes in five years on anything and everything relating to climate change? That is the most frustrating point for James Heappey:

“Because climate change is an area of quite broad consensus across the House, lots of the statutory instruments [minor changes to legislation] around renewables go unopposed,” he explains. “There’s therefore no vote, so there’s no weight of evidence to say, ‘Here are all the times he voted in favour of this,’ because there was no vote.

“The only time that it gets recorded is when something is pushed to a vote. By definition, when something is pushed to a vote, then there's disagreement between the government and the principal opposition. So these huge swathes of the vast majority of what you do is not recorded at all, and a few very random bits and bolts are.”

We will have to trust his word on this; tracking every single bit of secondary legislation related to climate change that went through the Commons without a vote since 2015 would be theoretically possible, but immensely time-consuming (and dull). There is also the minor issue of the chamber having no attendance records, so we’d find out what passed, but not who was there when it happened, which would bring us back to square one.

Similarly, it should technically be doable to get hold of all the whips’ correspondence for the past four years, thus being able to differentiate between (self-explanatory) free votes, one-line whips where MPs can pretty much vote with their conscience if they want to, and three-line whips, which they would only defy in rare exceptions. It would, however, take some seriously helpful MPs and a tremendous amount of time.

What is straightforward, on the other hand, is the little “share” button at the bottom of the voting record pages on TheyWorkForYou – but how easy is too easy?

Mark Cridge, the chief executive of MySociety, which runs TWFY, is aware of the fine line they tread on: “For a non-expert, your general citizen in the UK, parliament is famously impenetrable, it’s really complicated and difficult to understand,” he says.

“There’s clearly a balance to be struck by making that more straightforward and easily understandable, and then losing the important nuance that comes with understanding the wider workings of parliament, and recognising that voting records of MPs are one of a number of different activities that happen in parliament.”

This very article is a good demonstration of their conundrum: in order to explain nine minor votes, 605 words had to be devoted to further context, as well as broader explanation of parliamentary procedure. Adding this much padding to every sentence on their website would entirely defeat the point.

TheyWorkForYou isn’t the only organisation that has struggled with this; the Institute For Government runs a Parliamentary Monitor, which aims to clearly and concisely explain what parliament has been up to on any given year.

The first one came out in September last year, and making sure that the information was streamlined without being accidentally misleading was tough. One example given by their deputy director, Hannah White, was select committees and their attempt to map out which ones their members attended more dutifully than others.

‘There’s clearly a balance to be struck by making that more straightforward and easily understandable, and then losing the important nuance that comes with understanding the wider workings of parliament’

“When we looked at the data across all select committees, one of the lowest in terms of attendance was the public accounts committee,” she explains. The team found it curious so did some digging.

As it turns out, PAC meets pretty often and has to cover a tremendous amount of ground, so they decided that each member would have one or a few areas of expertise and would only turn up at sessions that were relevant to them, as it would give them more time to learn about the issues at hand and cover them adequately.

It has worked very well for them, and their work (and way of working) has been praised across the board; not that you would know it from the attendance sheets, of course. “So if you try to use parliament data to say, ‘Which are the committees doing their job?’ well, you’d say, ‘Oh, the PAC is rubbish, because they don't turn up’, but actually their attendance is lower because MPs are specialising, which is a really positive thing.”

In the end, they decided to put the PAC aside as they felt like an exception, which they could afford to do as it was only one small part of one vast project, but this doesn’t solve TWFY’s woes.

For a start, the Parliamentary Monitor is not a tool that is now being used to harshen the political discourse online, as opposed to TWFY. Despite the latter having noble intentions, they do admit that times have changed, and perhaps they should change with them.

“We've been thinking deeply over the past few years, especially in a different political climate that is more polarised and much more driven by social media – it's quite stark – so thinking carefully about the role of TWFY, and how we adapt to that, and recognising that MySociety is a small charity which has fairly understandable limitations in what it can and cannot invest in,” says Cridge.

‘We've been thinking deeply over the past few years, especially in a different political climate that is more polarised and much more driven by social media’

“We're trying to understand where we can improve the service to make sure it is as useful to as many people as possible but doesn't further poison the well of political debate.”

Their next step isn’t immediately obvious. A relatively recent addition to the website is a quick line acknowledging that MP X is a member of party Y and so has voted the same as their colleagues on a majority of issues, but it is easy to miss (or dismiss).

Even if they did more, it is unclear that it would help; as he mentioned, the constant screengrabbing of voting records is only part of a wider trend of more entrenched political views and strident partisanship. Mix that in with unhealthy social media habits and the result hardly is conducive to productive debates.

“Maybe you just say to me, ‘Dry your eyes, big lad, that's life,’ but you try to have that conversation in 280 characters on Twitter, when you get a screenshot of your voting record posted every time you say something,” says Heappey.

It may be tempting to, well, tell him to dry his eyes as the votes are his and he must take responsibility for them, but it is worth arguing that even if you disagree with an MP’s voting record, you should at least feel confident that you really do know their record before wading into their mentions.

‘Parliament should be open, understandable by ordinary citizens and this information should be freely available and give the whole picture. That's not the environment we operate in’

He is also far from the only one to have issue with the weaponising of the website; most MPs will privately roll their eyes or launch into an extended whinge if you mention TWFY to them, and they confirmed that MPs from all sides have been in touch over the years to complain about some parts of the project.

Though he is keen to discuss the many ways in which TWFY can and should be tweaked, Mark Cridge remains insistent that those issues, as well as everyone’s reliance on their website, is more of a symptom than anything else.

“It's definitely interesting, how [TWFY] is being used by people with more of an overt political agenda to follow their particular points and it's something that we're definitely conscious of,” he says.

“But I think it's missing the wider context; we shouldn't really need to exist in an ideal world. Parliament should be open, understandable by ordinary citizens and this information should be freely available and give the whole picture. That's not the environment we operate in.”

‘Parliament doesn't take enough responsibility for making itself understood’

This is a very fair point. It is all well and good for several corners of Westminster to be complaining about TheyWorkForYou, but they only exist because someone had to step up and provide a service that Westminster itself did not want to provide.

In an era when trust in elected politicians is low and everything seems chaotic, democratic institutions should take it upon themselves to connect with the public.

“Parliament doesn't take enough responsibility for making itself understood,” says Hannah White. “People who get themselves elected to parliament are people who are, of our population, the most convinced of the worth of parliament and the fact that it is a useful institution. Therefore, they're predisposed not to see its failings and its flaws and not to think that there's an argument to be made. If we're in a world of a battle between representative and direct democracy, who is actually making the case of parliament?”

TheyWorkForYou might be clumsy in their attempt to do so, but at least they’re trying.

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