Matching parliamentary bills with votes

[Matt Guy]

Hello there,

Is anyone familiar with approaches to programmatically handle parliamentary bills by associating them with subsequent parliamentary votes. I would ideally like to use the parliament API to fetch bills and track them all the way through to vote. The votes API does not seem to have a bills field https://commonsvotes-api.parliament.uk/swagger/docs/v1 nor the bills a vote field: https://bills-api.parliament.uk/index.html but I might be missing something.

It’s thorny in part because bills don’t have a one-to-one relationship with votes, but I wondered if anyone has any advice on how to approach this to help website users / citizens track the passage of bills and votes.


Thanks!
Matt

[Alex Parsons]

Hi Matt,

You're not missing anything that currently exists - we've got a new votes platform launching next month that *almost* does this and I might see if it's a short task to tie the "extract bill name" function we have to a public tag. This would also cover where relevant decisions are made without a vote so would be good for a bill-based view.

Will drop something back here when we launch that site!

All the best, Alex

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[Matt Guy]

This sounds great! Will the new platform have an API that allows us to fetch this info for ourselves?

Looking forward to seeing it, thanks

[Andy Mabbett]

On Thu, 27 Mar 2025 at 18:09, Matt Guy <theabst...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Is anyone familiar with approaches to programmatically handle parliamentary bills by associating them with subsequent parliamentary votes.

I shared your message with a friend who works in Parliament's support
service, but who doesn't subscribe to this list.

He kindly said I could share his reply here:

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It’s a familiar story but not one I can help with.

There is a problem with the way Parliament’s software is built, but
more of a problem with how it’s commissioned. We’ve tended to
commission software to digitise existing office processes without much
thought about how those processes join up in reality.

So there’ll be a system for tabling amendments, a system for
marshalling amendments, a system for reporting debates (Hansard), a
system for capturing divisions etc. None of those systems know the
other systems exist.

So Hansard knows that someone spoke and what they said, but not what
the debate was about. If the decision is pressed to division the
division system knows how the members divided but not the motion or
amendment they were dividing on.

It’s equally a problem internally, but not one that’s likely to be
solved quickly ☹

Sorry to not be more help.

#~#~#~#~#~#~#~#~#~#~#


--
Andy Mabbett
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk