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Free our Bills!

The Nice Polite Campaign to Gently Encourage Parliament to Publish Bills in a 21st Century Way, Please. Now.

What the…?

Writing, discussing and voting on bills is what we employ our MPs to do. If enough MPs vote on bills they become the law, meaning you or I can get locked up if they pass a bad one.

Bills are, like, so much more important than what MPs spend on furniture.

The problem is that the way in which Bills are put out is completely incompatible with the Internet era, so nobody out there ever knows what the heck people are actually voting for or against. We need to free our Bills in order for most people to be able to understand what matters about them.

We need you!

"Why?"

Being the people who run TheyWorkForYou we spend lots of our time taking rubbish, broken information from Parliament and fixing it up so that it makes a nice, usable site so you can find out whether your MP is actually working for you or not. Lots of people seem to like it, nearly 2 million came to visit last year.

It’s time for Parliament to improve its act and start publishing these vital documents properly in the first place. Quite apart from the fact that we’re a tiny charity without many resources to fix this information, you’re paying for them to produce it in a uselessly old fashioned way. Unless Parliament produces better bills:

  • We can’t give you email alerts to tell you when a bill mentions something you might be interested in.
  • We can’t tell you what amendments your own MP is asking for, or voting on.
  • We can’t help people who know about bills annotate them to explain what they’re really going on about for everyone else.
  • We can’t build services that would help MPs and their staff notice when they were being asked to vote on dumb or dubious things.
  • We can’t really give a rounded view of how useful your MP is if we can’t see their involvement with the bill making process.
  • We can’t do about 12 zillion other things that we’re not even bright enough to think of yet.

"Why won’t Parliament do this?"

We tried, my dears, we really did. We had meetings, and heard encouraging words. We wrote a proposal on what they should do, explaining the merits. We wore suits and polished our shoes and used long words to make them feel comfortable. We met lots of nice people who really want Parliament to get better at this stuff

And then we got nowhere.

And you know, we’re really not bad at working with bits of government either. But no dice. Nada. Bupkis.

(There’s some vague notion that it’ll all get done one day, as part of some miraculous project plan to make everything OK, but we understand ‘sod off’, even when spoken in Whitehall-speak.)

"Isn’t it really expensive?"

No. This needs about £10,000 worth of programming to build a tool to convert bills to the right format, and probably a Parliamentary staff member putting between 10% and 100% of their day into operating it, whilst Parliament is actually in session. They can do what they want in the holidays – we aren’t slave drivers. Oh yes, 5,000 people work in Parliament too, over 250 in the computers bit, so we really think they can afford this.

See "Details of the technical changes we want Parliament to make to the way it publishes bills" for more.

"Won’t this disrupt the delicate process of writing bills?"

Nope, the improved publication we’re talking about has nothing to do with the actual legal contents of bills. It’s about how it gets translated into an electronic format once they’ve finished.

"What are your real motives? Who does this benefit politically?"

Dammit, we hoped you wouldn't ask that, and now our secret is blown. Obviously this campaign benefits Gordon Brown at the expense of Tony Blair. No, wait a minute, that was last year. It definitely gives Hillary the edge over Obama though. No, hang on, it isn't partisan at all - that's what I was trying to say. mySociety is based on a charity, you see, so even if we wanted to be partisan, it'd be against the law.

"Isn’t this an embarrassingly obscure thing to be campaigning about? Can’t you campaign about saving puppies or something?"

Hey – you’re the one who just read all the way down to this point. Suck it and sign up, soldier.

We need you!