MPs and Lords attendence and voting: who&#39;s most active?

Thursday, September 8, 2011

MPs and Lords attendence and voting: who's most active?

Can we find Britain's laziest MP or Lord? See what the data says
? Get the data

How do you work out which MPs and Lords are the busiest?

Polly Curtis writes today on Reality Check about The Independent's frontpage which asks: "Is this Britain's laziest MP?" naming Sir Stuart Bell, the Labour MP for Middlesbrough, who has not held a surgery in his constituency since 1997. T

It comes on the day that new research reveals that MPs are continuing to employ their family in their offices, paying them �3m of taxpayers' money, reopening the scar that the expenses episode left on the reputation of politicians.

As Polly writes:

It's impossible to quantify and compare constituency work but it is possible to measure MPs' activity in the Commons by the proportion of votes they attend each year. In the Lords, the number of days each peer has attended is also recorded

One measure of their parliamentary work is the proportion of votes they turn up to - and Richard Taylor scraped Public Whip to work out attendance rates for MPs. There are some caveats. The Speaker and his deputies can't vote. Sinn Fein MPs do not attend Senior members of the government ? Cameron, Clegg and Hague ? are not expected to vote as regularly as others.

The average absence rate for votes across the Commons during January and February is 25.7%. By party, Labour's do not attend rate is 33.9%, the Liberal Democrats 20.2% and Conservatives 17.2%.

With Lords, the average was around 50%, between January and March this year. You can find out more below.

The full data is below. What can you do with it?