Hear, Hear is a free, independent tracker for bills going through the UK Parliament. This is what it's for, what it deliberately isn't, and who's behind it.
When an MP says something the benches agree with, you hear it: a low rumble of hear, hear rolling across the chamber. It's one of the oldest habits in British politics. It's also, if you think about it for a second, a sound made entirely by people who are already in the room.
Everyone else — the sixty-odd million of us on whose behalf all of it is supposedly happening — doesn't get a hear, hear. We get a result, eventually, usually after it's too late to say anything about it. That's the gap this is about.
Parliament isn't hiding anything. Every bill before both Houses is published. Every stage it passes through is recorded. Every recorded vote in the Commons lists, by name, which MPs voted aye, which voted no, and which didn't vote at all. Hansard has the transcripts. There are public APIs serving all of it, free, under an open licence.
The information is right there. It is, in the technical sense, completely transparent.
And yet ask almost anyone what bills are in front of Parliament this week, what they'd actually do, and how their own MP voted on the last one, and you'll mostly get a blank. Not because people don't care — because finding out is genuinely tedious. The bills have titles like "A Bill to make provision about the regulation of financial services and markets; and for connected purposes." The stages have names that assume you already know what they mean. The voting records live in a different system from the bills, and neither of them knows who your MP is.
Published is not the same as accessible. A thing can be fully in the open and still, in every way that matters to an ordinary person, be effectively unknown. That's not a conspiracy. It's what happens when information is organised for the people who work with it every day rather than the people it's about. But the effect is much the same as secrecy, and the fix isn't more disclosure — it's translation.
It shows you what's happening. Every bill currently before Parliament, what stage it's reached, and what it actually does in plain English rather than legislative formula. Pulled directly from Parliament's own data and refreshed automatically, so it isn't someone's summary of the news — it's the primary source, made readable.
It lets you say where you stand. Support or oppose, on any bill still open to change. You can also pick from a short list of the genuine arguments on your side, so it's not just a number but a number with reasons attached. Your postcode matches you to your constituency, and the totals are aggregated per constituency and sent to that MP's office. No names, no individual responses, ever. Just: here's what people in your seat think, and here's why.
It closes the loop. This is the part that matters most. Representation is a claim. Your MP votes on your behalf — that's the deal, that's the whole basis of the thing. But it's a claim that almost never gets checked, because checking it requires you to know both what you wanted and what they did, and nobody keeps both of those in one place.
So this does. Once a bill has had a recorded vote in the Commons, the site puts how your MP actually voted right next to what their constituents said. Not as an accusation — sometimes an MP votes against local opinion for good reasons, and saying so openly is part of the job. But the gap should be visible. You should be able to see it without doing research. That's the difference between representation you take on trust and representation you can examine.
You can tell a lot about a tool from what it refuses to do.
It isn't a referendum. Nothing here binds anyone. An MP is not obliged to follow a constituency tally and shouldn't be — they have information, debate and responsibility that a one-click vote doesn't capture. This is a signal, not an instruction.
It has no comment section. That was a decision, not an oversight. Open comments on political content mean moderation, abuse, defamation risk and legal duties that one person cannot responsibly carry — and worse, they'd undermine the anonymity everything else here is built on. So instead of free text, each bill offers a handful of fair, pre-written arguments for and against, and you tick the ones that match your thinking. You can say why without anyone having to write anything, and without anyone being identifiable by what they wrote.
It takes no side. The arguments for and against each bill are written to be the strongest honest version of each case, not a strawman of the other one. If you can work out the politics of whoever built this from using it, it's been done wrong.
It has no ads and no paywall. Not out of hostility to people making money, but because the moment this site has an advertiser it has an interest, and the entire point is that it doesn't have one.
One person, in their spare time, in Liverpool. No organisation, no funding, no campaign group, no party.
That's worth saying plainly so you know how much weight to give it. This isn't an institution. It's a tool built by someone who thought it should exist. Everything it shows comes from Parliament's own published record under the Open Parliament Licence, so you never have to take anyone's word for it — every bill links straight back to the official page, and you can check.
Running costs are small but real: hosting, a database, a domain. There's a tip link at the bottom of every page if you'd like to help cover them. If not, use it anyway — that's what it's for.
The immediate ambition is straightforward: more people, more constituencies, enough constituents registering a view that the numbers landing in an MP's inbox are hard to wave away. A dozen people in a seat is a curiosity. A few thousand is a constituency.
The longer ambition is local. Westminster is the loudest layer of government but it isn't the closest one — the decisions that change your street are made by your council, and those are, if anything, even less visible. Council voting records are fragmented, inconsistent, and in most cases not recorded by name at all. It's a harder problem than Parliament. The plan is to start with one council and find out how far it goes.
Bring it into the light. See what's there. Say where you stand. Then check whether anyone was listening.
Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0. Hear, Hear is an independent, unofficial project — not affiliated with or endorsed by Parliament — run by one person, with no ads and no paywall. About · Privacy · Support this project ☕