Parliament Brief

Parliament Brief is an independent civic-tech tool for MP offices. It brings together public Parliament data such as votes, Hansard contributions, written questions, Early Day Motions, registered interests, bills, committees, and constituency mentions.

The aim is practical: make public records easier to scan, filter, brief from, and retrieve with local LLM tools while keeping links back to the official sources.

Parliament Brief is built by Joe Bower, an IT Security Engineer based in Hampshire. It was initially developed to support a constituency office that needed a faster way to surface parliamentary activity, written questions, constituency mentions, and briefing material from public data.

The project has since evolved into a neutral, cross-party tool to help MP offices access public Parliament data in a form better suited to daily work.

It is independent. It is not an official Parliamentary service, not a party property, and not officially endorsed by Parliament, any political party, or any MP office unless separately stated.

Yes. Parliament Brief is free to use. There is no subscription, paid tier, or charge for MP offices to access the public site.

The underlying parliamentary records are public, and Parliament provides API access to many of these sources. This project is intended to make that public information easier to work with, so the public tool is intended to remain free.

There are no plans to make the public tool chargeable. If hosting or maintenance arrangements ever need to change, any support model would be explained clearly before it affected users.

The parliamentary activity data comes from public UK Parliament sources and APIs, including Members data, Hansard, Commons votes, written questions and statements, Early Day Motions, bills, committees, and registered interests.

Constituency mention features also use public geography sources to help identify local place names and constituency references. Current source metadata includes ONS Westminster Parliamentary Constituency boundaries, Ordnance Survey OpenData products such as OS Open Names and Boundary-Line, and OSNI/Land & Property Services place-name data for Northern Ireland.

No. Parliament Brief is built from public Parliament data and public geography data. It does not include casework, constituent names, private correspondence, office strategy, saved searches, confidential watchlists, or internal MP office notes.

Please do not send confidential material, constituent data, or casework details through the feedback email.

Parliamentary information is used under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0. The required attribution is: Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.

Some geography inputs are public-sector datasets under Open Government Licence compatible terms. The geographic matching uses Ordnance Survey-derived open data, so attribution is included on the site: Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right. Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Data licences are separate from any reuse of the project code or presentation. If you want to run your own copy or reuse more than the public data, please get in touch.

The tracker shows its current data date near the top of the main app. Most bundled activity is refreshed automatically, while older custom lookups may query public sources live for a limited date range.

Official Parliament sites remain the canonical source. If a number differs, treat Parliament's own record as authoritative and use the feedback link to report the mismatch.

It means a recorded Commons division where an MP's recorded vote differed from the majority position of MPs from the selected party who voted in that division.

It is descriptive context, not a judgement about loyalty, intent, whipping arrangements, or whether the vote was right.

Constituency mentions look for Hansard contributions that appear relevant to a constituency. The tool can use the constituency name and mapped local place terms, then separates higher-confidence matches from items that need review.

Place names can be ambiguous. The matching rules deliberately avoid showing low-confidence results in normal views, and users should open the official source before relying on a match.

Differences can happen because of update timing, date-range choices, API delays, source corrections, duplicate handling, or how a feature groups records for office workflow use.

Parliament Brief is designed to help find and organise public records, not replace the official record.

In plain English, Parliament Brief is mostly a static website: pages, styles, and compact JSON data files served from Vercel. Build scripts fetch public Parliament data, turn it into smaller office-friendly files, and generate static MP office pages for people and local LLM tools.

The project uses Python for data collection and transformation, JavaScript for the browser interface and small API routes, GitHub Actions for scheduled refreshes, Playwright for browser tests, and Vercel for hosting.

A scheduled GitHub Actions workflow refreshes the public data, rebuilds the generated files, runs validators and browser tests, and commits updated public data when there are changes.

That means the site is not maintained by someone manually copying rows into pages each day. The process is automated, source-linked, and checked before updates are published.

Parliament Brief generates compact MP office pages, Markdown indexes, and JSON pointers so local LLM tools can retrieve relevant public records without loading the whole tracker.

The LLM-friendly files are retrieval aids. They are not a substitute for opening official source URLs before quoting exact Parliamentary wording.

Modern LLMs trained on general web data can produce confident-sounding parliamentary attributions that are wrong. In a recent test, asking Claude about heating oil discussions in North East Hampshire — without pointing it at Parliament Brief — showed why office research needs source-grounded retrieval.

When pointed at Parliament Brief, Claude returned the correct verified contributions, with a source link to Hansard. When Claude was not pointed at Parliament Brief, it incorrectly attributed statements. The structured, source-attributed data prevents the kind of plausible-sounding confabulation that makes LLM-generated parliamentary research risky for office use.

A note: this protection is strongest when the LLM is asked to use Parliament Brief as its primary source. LLMs that mix Parliament Brief with general web search may still incorporate unreliable sources, so phrasing matters: "using Parliament Brief at [URL], answer..." gives stronger results than "answer this, and you can use Parliament Brief if helpful."

Use the Feedback & About page to email feedback@bower.im. Please include the political party, MP name, page or source link, and a short description of the issue.