Blog

by Matt Chocqueel-Mangan

You have been asking for it, and we’ve been promising it! Yes, finally you can view all of the policies from every party! You can order them by Issue (all Crime policies, for example) or by Party (all Labour policies), and any policies that you selected are highlighted too.

You can access it via your results page - just scroll to the bottom and you’ll see the Policy Browser link. And don’t forget to let us know what you think.

I’m also pleased to say the policy summaries have (almost) all been updated following the release of party manifestos last week.  For your interest (!) and for the benefit of further transparency, I thought it would be useful to give you some brief insight into how the updates have been handled. It’s been a joint effort, so special thanks go to Edd Moore for his excellent journalistic eye for providing a crucial second opinion.

Obviously being ‘policy summaries’ we’re not trying to include every policy in full detail, but for each party it has been pretty easy to identify their key points, and treat them all in a consistent and fair way. As before, we have pulled out (up to) the first eight main points from the relevant sections, just lifting text as it is and removing any party name references.

A brief note on each party;

BNP: We were told on Tuesday by their press office that their manifesto release has been been delayed until Friday. We’ll have to update this separately as soon as it’s out.

Conservatives: All sections have been changed, although there was no heading / section in their manifesto covering Immigration so this was taken from their website. Possibly some points are too long as we stitched a few together to make sure there was room to cover different subjects. The summaries are with their Deputy Head of Press, so any amends they request will be incorporated immediately.

Greens: They confirmed that there were no changes to make to the policy summaries (which they had previously checked), so there has been no need to update them. That was an easy job!

Labour: Fortunately the layout of their manifesto makes it easy to pull out the key points. I haven’t heard back from their press office after sending the the updated summaries as requested but, as with the Conservatives, we’ll make any amends they request as soon as they come through.

Lib Dems: All previous points that aren’t now in their manifesto have been removed. Their Head of Policy very obligingly edited out non-manifesto points for us and we added extra points from the manifesto where there was room.

UKIP: Quite easy to get the key points out here to. Mainly just re-prioritiesd in accordance with their manifesto, which they have also kindly checked and approved.

By Matt Chocqueel-Mangan

We were delighted to sail past the 250,000 mark today! This is entirely thanks to the incredible support from all of you out there who have shared, tweeted, forwarded, posted, blogged, dug (digged?), emailed and generally just shouted about the Vote for Policies website. Thank you all. Being able to compare policies, it seems, is something we find useful in deciding who to vote for. 

Also pleased to report that the site has never been busier, with over 25,000 surveys being completed today alone! This is also after some really frustrating technical issues over the weekend that we know inconvenienced many of you. Sincere apologies to all of you we haven’t managed to reply to yet - hings are back to normal, so if you have time to try the survey again please do. Thanks also for being so patient with us - it helped soothe the pain of getting no sleep and surviving on little more than bad jokes and Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.

We were also delighted to release a new feature (and the source of our weekend troubles) showing results for specific constituencies. We’re still adding the data from all of the surveys so far, so the full picture will be revealed tomorrow morning. Great to see people are already posting links to for their constituency results!

We’ll be posting here later today and will be keeping you abreast of developments post-election. In the meantime, I hope you’re all as excited about the election day as we are, and looking forward to whatever tomorrow (literally and figuratively) may bring.

Do remember to vote too (I say this mainly for the benefit of our Simon…).

Thanks all ;-)