Parliament is now in its summer recess. The House of Commons rose on 16 July, followed by the House of Lords on 23 July, and both Houses are due to return on 1 September.
During recess, the chambers do not meet for their normal programme of questions, debates, legislation and votes. This means there will be considerably less daily parliamentary business to summarise over the coming weeks.
Daily summaries during the recess
Regular daily summaries will therefore pause during the summer recess.
The purpose of a daily summary is to identify and explain the most important developments from a full sitting day. Producing a post each day when there has been little or no chamber business would risk creating thin or repetitive summaries simply to maintain a publishing schedule.
Project Open Gov will not publish material for the sake of filling space. The aim remains to provide information that is useful, properly sourced and worth a reader’s time.
The website will remain active throughout the recess. The homepage ticker will continue to show relevant official updates when they are available, and a separate article or briefing may be published if a significant parliamentary or government development warrants one.
Improving the glossary
The glossary will continue to be expanded and refined.
This work will include improving the organisation of existing terms, adding further definitions and strengthening the links between glossary entries and the wider explanatory material on the website.
The longer-term aim is to make it easier for readers to move from a brief definition to a fuller guide when they want to understand a subject in more detail.
Developing the votes tracker
Further improvements are planned for the votes tracker.
Parliamentary votes can be difficult to interpret without knowing what type of vote took place, what question MPs were deciding and how the result fits into the wider parliamentary process.
Planned work includes improving how different vote types are identified and explained, refining the presentation of results and making the archive easier to explore. The votes section will also be connected more closely with the developing guides on how parliamentary decisions work.
Strengthening bill tracking
The bill tracker will also receive further attention during the recess.
The tracker already brings together bill stages, plain-English explanations, related votes and other useful information. The next phase will concentrate on reliability, clearer presentation and ensuring that changes to official bill information and supporting documents are detected and reflected properly.
This is intended to make the tracker more dependable when legislative business becomes busy again in September.
Expanding the guides
Work will continue on the Understand Parliament and Government section.
The current priority is the collection of guides explaining votes and decisions. These will help readers understand matters such as:
- how to read a parliamentary vote result;
- the different types of votes held in the Commons;
- how votes on Lords amendments work;
- how statutory instrument votes work; and
- how votes during the different stages of a bill work.
Further guides will be added gradually, with the same emphasis on neutral language, practical explanations and links to relevant examples elsewhere on the website.
Preparing MP pages
The recess will also provide time to begin the staged development of MP pages.
The intention is to create useful individual pages using reliable official information, including details about an MP, their constituency and relevant parliamentary activity.
This will not become a system for ranking MPs or encouraging comparisons between them. The purpose is to help readers find and understand factual information about their representative and constituency in one clear place.
This feature will be developed carefully and tested in stages before becoming a full public section of the website.
Preparing for Parliament’s return
These improvements will be introduced gradually rather than rushed into service together. Each feature needs to work reliably, use suitable official sources and remain understandable on both desktop and mobile devices.
Regular daily summaries are expected to resume when Parliament returns in September. By then, the aim is for Project Open Gov to be better prepared for the new sitting period, with stronger tracking tools and a growing collection of educational material.
The principles behind the project remain unchanged: clear information, neutral presentation, visible sourcing and free access for everyone.