How to Find Your MP and Their Voting Record

Finding Your MP by Postcode

Every UK address is in a parliamentary constituency, and every constituency has one elected Member of Parliament. Your MP represents you in the House of Commons and is your primary point of contact with national government.

The fastest way to find your MP is our free Postcode Profiler. Enter your postcode and the results include your constituency name and current MP. For detailed political data including voting records and petition data, the Political Intelligence API provides comprehensive constituency analysis.

You can also find your MP through parliament.uk, which maintains the official list of members. But the parliamentary website only shows the current MP — it doesn't integrate with voting records, petition data, or constituency-level political engagement metrics that our API provides.

Note that constituency boundaries change. The most recent boundary review (2023) redrew many constituencies for the 2024 general election. If you're using older postcode-to-constituency data, it may be inaccurate. Our API uses the current boundaries.

Understanding Voting Records

MPs vote on legislation, motions, and amendments in the House of Commons. These votes — called divisions — are recorded and published by Parliament. An MP's voting record shows how they voted on every issue that went to a division.

Voting records reveal whether your MP votes in line with their party (most do, most of the time), which issues they feel strongly enough about to rebel on, whether they actually show up to vote (attendance varies enormously), and how their positions align with your own views on specific issues.

The raw voting data is available from Parliament's API and from organisations like TheyWorkForYou, which categorise votes by topic. Our Political Intelligence API integrates this with constituency-level data, petition activity, and engagement scoring.

A caveat: not all parliamentary activity involves voting. Much of an MP's work happens in committees, constituency surgeries, parliamentary questions, and early day motions. A low voting attendance doesn't necessarily mean a lazy MP — they might be heavily involved in committee work that doesn't involve plenary votes.

Petition Data and Local Signatures

UK Government petitions (petitions.parliament.uk) are a useful indicator of local political sentiment. Petitions that receive 10,000 signatures get a government response. Those reaching 100,000 signatures are considered for debate in Parliament.

What makes petition data particularly interesting at the constituency level is the signature distribution. A petition might have 500,000 total signatures nationally, but the signatures per constituency vary enormously — revealing which areas feel most strongly about the issue.

Our Political Intelligence API includes petition data at the constituency level, showing which petitions have the most signatures from your MP's constituents. This is useful for understanding local priorities, campaigning on issues your MP's constituents care about, and assessing political sentiment in a specific area.

For example, a constituency with very high signatures on environmental petitions and low signatures on tax-related petitions tells you something about local priorities that pure demographic data might not reveal.

The Political Engagement Index

The Political Engagement Index is a proprietary score (0-100) that measures how politically engaged a constituency is relative to others. Higher means more engaged.

The index considers: voter turnout at the most recent general election, petition signature rates (signatures per capita across all active petitions), the number of parliamentary questions asked by the MP, committee membership and activity, and local political competition (how close the last election result was).

Highly engaged constituencies tend to have higher voter turnout, more petition activity, and more active MPs. Low-engagement constituencies may have safe seats (where the outcome is predetermined, reducing motivation to vote) or demographic factors that correlate with lower political participation.

The index is useful for: campaign targeting (focus resources on constituencies where engagement is high enough to make a difference), political risk assessment (highly engaged constituencies are more likely to swing on salient issues), and democratic research (studying the relationship between engagement, deprivation, and representation).

Constituency Data and Demographics

Each constituency has a distinct demographic, economic, and political character. Understanding this context helps explain why an MP votes the way they do, what issues resonate locally, and how the constituency might vote in the future.

Our Political Intelligence API includes constituency-level data alongside the MP information: population and demographic breakdown, deprivation indices, labour market statistics, and economic indicators. Cross-referencing political data with socioeconomic data reveals patterns — for example, constituencies with high deprivation scores tend to have lower voter turnout but higher petition signature rates for benefits-related petitions.

For journalists, researchers, and campaigners, the ability to query political and demographic data together in a single API call enables analyses that would otherwise require manual data matching across multiple government datasets.

Contacting Your MP

Once you've identified your MP, you can contact them by email, letter, or through their constituency surgery (a regular in-person meeting, usually requiring an appointment).

Email is the most common method. Most MPs have a parliamentary email address in the format firstname.lastname.mp@parliament.uk. Emails about constituency issues and legislation get more attention than generic campaign emails.

Writing to your MP is more effective when you: identify yourself as a constituent (give your full address so they can verify), are specific about what you want (ask them to vote a certain way, raise a question, or support a particular amendment), explain why it matters to you personally, and are concise (one page, one issue).

MPs receive thousands of emails per week. Campaign group template emails are usually counted but not individually read. A personal, well-reasoned letter on constituency headed paper stands out.

Constituency surgeries offer a face-to-face meeting, usually 15-20 minutes. These are most useful for complex issues that need detailed discussion or for problems where you need your MP to intervene directly with government departments or agencies.