Methodology
Vital Signs is built from Hansard, the official verbatim record of proceedings in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, published under the Open Parliament Licence. Every contribution scored here — a speech, a written question, a committee appearance — links back to its source on hansard.parliament.uk.
Scoring covers this Parliament, which began 2024-07-09, and every contribution counts at full weight regardless of how long ago in the term it happened — this is a cumulative “how active since the election” measure, not a rolling recent-activity window. See biggest movers for a recency-weighted view instead.
Topic matching
Each of the 24 topics is defined by a fixed list of keywords and phrases, matched against the full text of each contribution on whole-word boundaries — “SEND” (special educational needs and disabilities) never matches “send” or “sending”, and “care” never matches “career”. A contribution can match more than one topic. Matching runs automatically at ingest time against a fixed keyword list; there is no editorial review of individual contributions, and no AI judgement of relevance — a contribution either contains a matched phrase or it doesn’t.
Scoring
Each matched contribution is weighted by type, then summed per member. A ministerial statement counts for far more than a written answer, because giving a statement is a deliberate, substantial act while a written answer can be a single sentence drafted by officials.
| Contribution type | Weight |
|---|---|
| Statement | 5.0 |
| Bill Reading | 4.0 |
| Commons Speech | 3.0 |
| Westminster Hall | 2.5 |
| Committee | 2.5 |
| PMQ | 2.0 |
| Lords Speech | 2.0 |
| Written Question | 1.0 |
| Written Answer | 0.8 |
Ministers and shadow ministers
A minister answering questions on their brief accrues contributions because that is their job, not because they chose to raise the subject. Vital Signs labels current government and shadow ministers on the leaderboard rather than adjusting their score — their number is the same measure as everyone else’s, just clearly attributed, and the leaderboard can be filtered to backbenchers only.
Limitations
- Keyword matching measures how often a subject is mentioned, not the quality or sincerity of the engagement, and not whether a member subsequently voted in a way that matched their words.
- A member who has never spoken on a topic scores zero here, which does not mean they have no view on it — only that Hansard has no record of them raising it in the chamber, in committee, or in a written question.
- Members are matched to Hansard by Parliament’s own numeric member ID, not by name, so a change of surname or title carries forward correctly.
Data current to 2026-07-23 · 28,249 contributions indexed.