Historic lords data?

[a.lu...@gmail.com]

Hi there – happy new year in advance!

I’m looking into historic lords data, but with limited success. Can anyone point me to the best source?

The TWFY API / parlparse don’t seem to include historic lords data. I’m not sure how far back the lords data they have goes. In fact, I’m not sure I understand the current lords data there, either. Parliament says there are 810 lords, or which 795 are eligible:

https://members.parliament.uk/members/lords

Wikipedia agrees… But TWFY / parlparse appear to suggest there are more than 900:

https://www.theyworkforyou.com/peers/

Historic hansard is really useful, but it only goes up to 2005:

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/index.html

Any help would be much appreciated!

Andy

[a.lu...@gmail.com]

Answering my own question here…

The source that parlparse uses is the Members' Names Data Platform on data dot parliament.

http://data.parliament.uk/membersdataplatform/memberquery.aspx

It looks as though this is probably fine for the past 15 years of data. Before that, historic-hansard goes back to 1800.

I think there is an issue with parlparse / TWFY lords data, which probably needs updating from source to add some missing `end_date`s and `end_reason`s. I’ve created a ticket for that:

https://github.com/mysociety/parlparse/issues/112

Andy