20 Years of TheyWorkForYou: Parliamentary Transparency at Scale
How mySociety built and scaled the UK's most successful parliamentary monitoring tool, serving millions of users for two decades.
In 2004, a small team of developers launched TheyWorkForYou, a website that made UK parliamentary proceedings searchable and accessible to ordinary citizens. Twenty years later, it remains the gold standard for parliamentary transparency tools.
The Problem
Before TheyWorkForYou, UK parliamentary proceedings were technically public but practically inaccessible. Hansard transcripts were published online, but they were:
- Unsearchable: No way to search across debates
- Unstructured: Raw text with no metadata
- Disconnected: No links between MPs, votes, and debates
- Intimidating: Written in parliamentary jargon
If you wanted to know what your MP said about housing, you’d need to manually read through thousands of pages of Hansard.
The Solution
TheyWorkForYou scraped parliamentary data, structured it, and made it searchable. Key features:
- MP Profiles: Every MP gets a dedicated page showing their votes, speeches, and attendance
- Search Everything: Full-text search across all debates since 2001
- Email Alerts: Get notified when topics you care about are debated
- Voting Records: See how MPs voted on key issues
- Plain English: Annotations explain parliamentary jargon
Scale & Impact
Usage Numbers
- 4 million+ users visit annually
- Peak traffic: 500,000 pageviews during elections
- 400,000+ alerts sent monthly to subscribers
- 20+ years of continuous operation
Technical Architecture
Built with Perl and MySQL (later migrated to modern stack), TheyWorkForYou pioneered several civic tech patterns:
- Daily scraping of parliamentary data
- Structured database of MPs, debates, and votes
- Email alert system for user-defined topics
- API access for third-party developers
Lessons Learned
1. Data Quality Matters
Early on, mySociety realized that raw parliamentary data was messy. They invested heavily in:
- Cleaning OCR errors in older Hansard transcripts
- Matching MP names to constituencies correctly
- Handling recess periods and by-elections
- Dealing with parliamentary naming conventions
Result: TheyWorkForYou became more accurate than official sources.
2. Maintenance is Unglamorous but Critical
Parliamentary procedure changes. MPs resign. Elections happen. TheyWorkForYou has survived because mySociety committed to:
- Daily monitoring of data feeds
- Rapid fixes when parliamentary websites change
- Long-term funding for maintenance work
3. Users Want Simplicity
TheyWorkForYou’s most popular feature is not sophisticated AI or complex visualizations. It’s search. Users want to:
- Type “housing” or “NHS”
- See what their MP said
- Get alerted when it’s debated again
That’s it. The lesson: solve the core need really well before adding features.
Modern Successors
TheyWorkForYou inspired a generation of parliamentary monitoring tools:
- Hansard Society built on the model
- Open Parliament initiatives globally
- Democracy Club for election data
- Fixing Britain for policy analysis
Try It Yourself
If you’re building civic tech, study TheyWorkForYou:
- Visit theyworkforyou.com
- Search for your MP and browse their record
- Set up email alerts for topics you care about
- Check the API docs if you’re building something
Then ask: what can I build that’s this useful and lasts this long?
Want to contribute to TheyWorkForYou? Check their GitHub repository or visit mySociety’s website to get involved.