Project Open Gov continues to develop, with recent work focused on expanding the information available through the website and improving the reliability and usefulness of its existing features.
The aim remains to make the work of Parliament and government easier to follow. This means not only reporting what has happened, but also helping readers understand the wider context, the processes involved and the significance of major developments.
Explaining major government plans
We recently published a detailed article examining the Government’s Defence Investment Plan.
The article brings together information from the plan itself, accompanying government explanations and the Prime Minister’s announcement. It sets out the purpose of the plan, the funding commitments that have been announced and the intended direction of defence investment.
This is the type of longer-form article we intend to publish when similarly significant plans, reviews or policy announcements are released.
Daily summaries remain an important part of Project Open Gov, but some subjects require more space and context than a daily update can reasonably provide. Longer articles will allow important announcements to be examined more carefully, while retaining the same commitment to clear language, neutral presentation and visible sourcing.
These articles will not attempt to tell readers what conclusion they should reach. Their purpose will be to bring together the available official information, explain what has been announced and help readers examine the source material for themselves.
Building the Understand Parliament and Government section
Work is also under way on the new Understand Parliament and Government section.
This part of the website is intended to provide accessible explanations of parliamentary and governmental processes that can otherwise be difficult to follow. It will complement the daily summaries, bill tracker and vote pages by explaining the terminology and procedures that appear within them.
The first new guide explains how parliamentary by-elections work. It covers subjects including how a parliamentary seat becomes vacant, the formal process used to trigger a by-election and the role of the writ.
Further guides are now being developed, including a section explaining parliamentary votes and decisions.
The votes section will help readers distinguish between different types of vote, understand the wording used in parliamentary records and see how a decision fits into the wider parliamentary process. Over time, it will cover subjects such as bill-stage votes, Lords amendments, statutory instruments, Opposition Day motions and procedural decisions.
The intention is to build a connected information resource in which readers can move from a current vote or bill to a clear explanation of the process behind it.
Improving how parliamentary votes are displayed
Several smaller improvements have recently been made to the website’s votes feature.
These changes have focused on how results are presented, how party voting figures are visualised and how unusual features of parliamentary vote records are explained.
Counting votes in Parliament is not always as straightforward as the final totals might suggest. The number announced in the Commons Chamber can occasionally differ slightly from the number of MPs whose names appear in the recorded division list.
This can happen because the tellers’ agreed headcount and the electronic record of individual MPs are produced in different ways. An MP’s name may also be added to the official record later if it was not captured correctly at the time.
The website therefore needs to distinguish carefully between:
- the official result announced for the division;
- the individual voting records available from Parliament;
- and any party breakdown calculated from those recorded names.
Recent changes are intended to make these distinctions clearer and to avoid visual displays that could give a misleading impression when only a small number of MPs are recorded on one side of a vote.
Further refinements will continue as new vote records provide additional examples and edge cases to examine.
The bill tracker is nearing completion
The Project Open Gov bill tracker is also approaching the end of its main development phase.
All bills in the current parliamentary session are now being tracked, and their underlying information is checked daily so that changes can be identified and reflected on the website.
For each bill, the tracker can bring together several related forms of information, including:
- the bill’s current parliamentary stage;
- a plain-English summary of what the bill is about;
- votes that have taken place on the bill;
- appearances in Project Open Gov daily summaries;
- and links to the relevant official parliamentary information.
This is intended to give readers a clearer view of a bill’s progress without requiring them to search across several different pages or services.
Work is continuing on the final administrative and reliability improvements behind the tracker. This includes making the updating process clearer, reducing unnecessary manual review and ensuring that information remains available when a bill moves from one stage to another.
The tracker will continue to be monitored after this development phase is complete. Parliamentary data can change, corrections can be issued and individual bills can follow unusual routes, so maintaining the feature will remain an ongoing responsibility.
Continuing to improve the website
Project Open Gov will continue to develop through a mixture of new content, improved automation and careful review of the features already available.
Not every improvement will be immediately visible. Some work concerns data collection, reliability, mobile presentation, accessibility or the administrative tools used to maintain the site. These changes are nevertheless important to ensuring that the public-facing information remains dependable and easy to use.
Where errors or limitations are identified, the aim will be to correct them and improve the underlying process rather than simply working around them.
Throughout this development, the central principles of Project Open Gov will remain unchanged.
The website will remain politically neutral. It will remain free to access. It will continue to use official sources wherever possible and provide links that allow readers to examine the record themselves.
Above all, Project Open Gov will continue to be developed as a public-information resource for the benefit of everyone who wants to understand the work of Parliament and government more clearly.