Where these numbers come from

Every figure on the Watchdog is traceable to a published government source. Here is each one, how often it refreshes, and exactly how the derived numbers are calculated — including the ones that could mislead you.

The sources

Parliamentary data is published under the Open Parliament Licence. Nothing here is scraped from a website; these are the APIs Parliament publishes for exactly this purpose. All of it is cached locally, so reading these pages never makes a request to Parliament on your behalf — including the photographs, which are served from here rather than from parliament.uk.

The scope

Everything is measured from 4 July 2024, the first day of the current Parliament. Comparing across a general election would put MPs elected in different years on the same scale, which would be meaningless. Currently on file: 575 divisions with full lobby lists (of 575 known) and 649 sitting MPs.

How each figure is worked out

Attendance

Divisions the MP voted in, plus those they acted as teller for, divided by the divisions held since the day they took their seat.

Two deliberate choices. Tellers count as present: by convention a teller does not vote, and counting them absent would penalise MPs for doing a job. And the denominator starts at each MP's own start date, so someone elected at a by-election is not marked absent for votes held before they existed as an MP.

What it cannot see: whether an absence was a pairing arrangement, a select-committee sitting, illness, bereavement, maternity leave or a ministerial visit. Parliament does not publish reasons. "No vote recorded" means exactly that and nothing more.

The traffic light

Green: at or above the median. Amber: below the median but not in the bottom tenth. Red: in the least-present tenth. Grey: fewer than 20 divisions, too few to rate.

It is calibrated against the House itself rather than a threshold we invented, so it always means "compared to their colleagues", not "compared to what we think is acceptable".

Two groups are excluded from the rating and from the ranking population entirely, because for them an attendance percentage is not a measure of anything:

• The Speaker and the three Deputy Speakers. On taking the Chair they give up voting. Their attendance is near zero by definition of the job.
• Sinn Féin MPs. They stand on a declared policy of not taking their seats at Westminster and are elected on that basis. Their record is 0% because they said it would be.

Both still have a page, and it says plainly why the figure is what it is. Leaving them in would have produced seven or eight "worst attendance in Parliament" entries that were pure artefact — and would have made every other MP's ranking slightly wrong too.

Ministers and front-benchers are rated, but they genuinely do vote less often than backbenchers for reasons of office, so their current post is printed at the top of their page. A red light is a reason to ask a question, not an answer to one.

Voting against their own party

Divisions where the MP voted one way and most of their own party's MPs who voted went the other, in divisions where at least five of their party voted.

Two honest caveats. Party affiliation is taken as it stands today, so an MP who has crossed the floor has their older votes counted towards their current party's line; and MPs who have since left the Commons are not counted in any party's majority at all, because the roll we hold is of sitting members. Neither is remotely large enough to flip a party majority in practice, but both mean the rebellion count is a good indicator rather than a certified total.

Party whips are not published, so a party's own majority is the only observable measure of the line. Divisions where a party split evenly are not counted either way. Independents and the Speaker have no party line to depart from, so the figure is shown as not applicable rather than as zero — an independent voting differently from other independents is not a rebellion, because they were never a bloc.

Financial interests over £5,000

The largest sterling figure appearing in the text of the entry.

The register is free text, so this is a signpost for the eye, not an accounting total. The full wording of every entry is printed underneath it — read that, not the badge. A declared interest is a disclosure working as intended, not an allegation.

What this cannot show you

• Reasons for an absence — Parliament does not publish them.
• Informal lobbying. Only formal, declarable meetings and interests are recorded anywhere.
• Unreported donations, by definition.
• Committee work, casework and constituency surgeries, which are a large part of the job and are barely recorded as data at all.
• The Lords, devolved parliaments, and local government — different sources, not yet built.
• Government spending and contracts. That is the next thing to build here, not something that exists on this page today.

These gaps are worth being honest about: this is everything the state currently lets you see. The argument for the Dashboard is what it would look like if it let you see the rest.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, it is either wrong upstream or wrong in the arithmetic, and both are worth knowing about. Tell us which and where.