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Methodology

How we calculate the Activity Efficiency Score, what we exclude, and what the score does — and does not — measure.

What the score measures

The Activity Efficiency Scoreis a 0–10 ranking of every eligible UK MP based on the volume of recorded parliamentary activity they generate per month in office, set against their operational spend (IPSA expenses) for the latest financial year.

It is an editorial opinion derived from public-record data. It is nota measure of an MP’s integrity, the quality of their work, the value of their constituency casework, or their suitability for office. It is one signal — recorded activity per pound — among many a voter might consider.

Inputs

All inputs are restricted to the current Parliament (sittings from 4 July 2024 onwards):

  • Votes cast in House of Commons divisions, sourced from the Commons Votes API.
  • Written questions tabled by the MP, sourced from the Parliamentary Questions API.
  • Oral questions tabled by the MP, sourced from the Oral Questions and Motions API.
  • Written questions answered— for MPs holding a government post during this Parliament — counted as a ministerial-activity bonus.
  • Total IPSA expensesfor the 2024–25 financial year, from the IPSA bulk download.
  • Tenure— months served in the current Parliament, used to normalise activity for late-arriving by-election MPs.

How it is calculated

  1. Activity per month.We sum each MP’s votes, written questions, oral questions and ministerial answers, then divide by months served in the current Parliament (minimum one month, to avoid divide-by-zero for newly-arrived MPs).
  2. Activity Z-score.Each MP’s activity-per-month is converted to a standard score against the global eligible cohort.
  3. Expense Z-score.Each MP’s 2024–25 total expenses are converted to a standard score, normalised by country (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) when that country has 30 or more MPs in the cohort, falling back to the global stats when it does not. This stops geographic cost-of-living differences from penalising MPs unfairly, while preventing tiny cohorts (e.g. Northern Ireland’s eleven MPs) from generating volatile country baselines.
  4. Composite raw score. Calculated as 2 × activity_z − 1 × expense_z. Activity is weighted twice as heavily as expenses, reflecting that we want to reward visibly-active MPs more than we want to penalise high-spending ones.
  5. Final 0–10 score.Raw scores are converted to a percent-rank across the eligible cohort and scaled to 0–10. Ties are broken by raw activity-per-month so the order remains meaningful. The percent-rank step is what guarantees the score is evenly distributed instead of clustering MPs at the top or bottom.

Who is excluded

The following MPs are not given a score:

  • Sinn Féin MPs— they take an abstentionist policy position and do not sit in the Commons or vote, so any activity-based metric would penalise them for a manifesto commitment their voters elected them on.
  • The Speaker and Deputy Speakers— chamber neutrality means they do not vote on most divisions or table questions. Scoring them on volume of activity would misrepresent their role.
  • Current Cabinet ministers— their parliamentary footprint is dominated by ministerial duties (e.g. department-running, statements) that are not directly comparable to a backbencher’s individual activity.

MPs in these categories are excluded from the score itself but retain full profile pages with their voting record, expenses, registered interests and other activity.

Known limitations

  • Volume not quality. Tabling many shallow written questions raises the score; one carefully-prepared select-committee intervention does not.
  • Casework invisible. Constituency surgeries, correspondence and casework do not appear in any public dataset and are not captured.
  • Junior-minister activity is partial. The ministerial bonus only counts written questions an MP answered while in post; their wider departmental work is not recorded in the Hansard datasets we ingest.
  • Activity is asymmetric. Government MPs ask fewer questions than opposition MPs by convention. We do not currently adjust for this; expect a mild government-side drag in the rankings.
  • The score updates daily, so by-election winners and freshly-promoted ministers may take a sync cycle or two before their score reflects the change.

Versioning

The score is currently on v5. Each version bump addresses a specific weakness identified in the previous one (excluded categories, country normalisation, percent-rank scaling). When the formula changes materially, scores across the site re-compute on the next daily sync.

Spotted something wrong?

If a specific MP’s score looks miscalibrated — especially if you believe an exclusion has been missed or applied incorrectly — please flag it via the contact form with the MP name and the specific issue. Methodology corrections are prioritised over individual-page corrections.

For the underlying data sources, see Data Sources. For the legal basis on which this site processes parliamentary information, see the Privacy Policy.