TheyWorkForYou.com now covers the Senedd

The Senedd has been added to the parliamentary monitoring website, TheyWorkForYou and will now include a list of all Members of the Senedd and cover debates in both English and Welsh.

With this addition TheyWorkForYou, which also publishes proceedings of the UK Parliament, Scottish Parliament and Northern Ireland Assembly, now covers all the law-making parliaments of the UK.

The website works to improve public awareness and understanding of the actions of elected representatives, by using the information and open data provided by these institutions, and bringing it together in one place.

One key feature of TheyWorkForYou is its email alerts. Anyone can sign up for emails on what their representatives are saying, or to be alerted when their topics of interest come up in debates.

Alerts are also indispensable for charities, companies and governments who use them to monitor parliamentary discussions on topics relating to their work.

Alerts

The charity mySociety send millions of these email alerts out per year and following funding from the Welsh Government, the Senedd has now been included in the alerts.

mySociety Chief Executive Louise Crow said: “By extending our coverage – and especially email alerts – to the Senedd, we hope to help people and organisations living and working in Wales stay informed about what is said and done in their devolved parliament.”

When users in Wales enter their postcode into the TheyWorkForYou website, they will see the members of Senedd as well as their MP in the UK’s national parliament.

Users will be able to check when their Senedd Member last voted, and what they’ve been saying in debates; as well as using the site’s powerful search function to access previous mentions of their topic of interest.

More technical users may also use the data for their own projects through TheyWorkForYou’s API.

TheyWorkForYou’s sister site, WriteToThem.com, allows people to send an email to their elected representatives, quickly and easily.

This site already covered members of the Senedd. The two services link together so that, having checked your Senedd Member’s activity on TheyWorkForYou, if you wish to respond to them, you can click through to WriteToThem and send an email.

Support

Louise Crow added: “This is such an important step, and one that we’ve wanted to take for many years. Now, thanks to support from the Welsh Government, we’ve been able to complete the work needed to add the Senedd in TheyWorkForYou’s fully accessible format.

“This is a continuation of our mission to make the UK’s Parliaments easier for everyone to access, understand and engage with. Through the regular publication of debates, plus TheyWorkForYou’s search and alert functions, we want to support Welsh citizens and civil society to play an active part in democracy.”

Mick Antoniw, Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution, said: “We’ve been pleased to work with mySociety as part of our efforts to involve as many people in our democracy as possible.

“Being able to follow topics and receive updates about what happens in the Senedd will help people see how we discuss the issues that matter to them most. We’ll continue to work to increase democratic engagement and open up democracy to more people.”

TheyWorkForYou was launched more than twenty years ago, with the aim of making Parliament more accessible in the internet age.

mySociety, the charity that runs the site, believe that information about our elected representatives should be easily understandable and accessible to everyone, and not just insiders or those who can pay.

Through a 2021 Opinium survey: one in three UK adults have heard of the TheyWorkForYou site, and one in five have visited it. For the last 10 years, TheyWorkForYou has generally had over six million page views per year.