SciTech
The net effect on parliament
Published 20 November 2006
A website that charts your MP's performance is changing democracy
"Who judges the quality of what we do?". It could have been the cry of any public servant, buckling under the pressure of performance indicators, league tables and any of the many other forms of scrutiny modern society subjects schools, hospitals and prisons to. But it wasn't. The speaker was Peter Luff, Conservative MP for Worcestershire. And he was complaining about a website set up three years ago by a group of unpaid civic hackers.
Theyworkforyou.com was born in 2003, when UpMyStreet.com founder Stefan Magdalinski chanced upon a downloadable, hackable html copy of Hansard, the parliamentary record. Launched in June 2004, the result was an accessible record of democracy as practised in Britain. Users of the site enter their postcode, and are connected to a record of all the contributions made by their constituency representative to parliamentary debate. The creators aim for 100 per cent parliamentary scrutiny. Never again, they hope, will there be a good day to bury bad news.
More contentiously, until recently the site ranked MPs' performance with indicators such as how many debates they had spoken in, how many votes they had attended and how many answers they had received to written questions. Earlier this year, an article in the Times showed how MPs had become obsessed with gaming the system: making short interventions in debates to notch up a "speech", or tabling pointless written questions. Then, in June, the matter was raised in parliament. Gaming the new league tables was overwhelming the system.
The theyworkforyou.com team decided to save the MPs from themselves, and removed the straight rankings in favour of generic indicators such as "above average". Last week, they met with MPs and site users to discuss other improvements.
The civic hackers had their own suggestions. If MPs persisted in gaming the system, they could at least be directed to do so in a constructive way. Should theyworkforyou.com gather a pool of requests, submitted by site users, into which ambitious backbenchers could dip anytime they felt the need to up their written questions ranking? The proposal was met with interest.
Alongside Luff was Labour's Emily Thornberry, who believed her record as one of the hardest-working constituency MPs was not fairly reflected by the site's performance indicators. Unlike Luff, Thornberry was circumspect - between running three surgeries a week and sitting on various committees, she didn't have the time to fiddle the system. Many of her constituents did not use the site, and knew her by her hard work on the ground, she said.
Which seems quite sensible. But both Thornberry and Luff should bear in mind that, by the next election, the site could have over two million users.
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