About our manifesto tracker

Our manifesto tracker monitors the progress of each promise made by the government in their election manifesto.

It’s a great way of staying involved in the issues you care about. That’s why, for each policy, we provide links to useful tools and resources that enable you to make your voice heard – whether you are for, against, or just curious.

In a democracy, every one of us has an equal voice – or at least we should have. In the UK relatively few people vote – in 2019 it was just 32 million out of the 56 million total eligible voters. We know it can be difficult to engage with the issues we care about – either because we don’t know how, or we don’t think it’ll make a difference. ​​

At Vote for Policies we want to change that, and help everyone to make their voice heard in whatever way works for them. So for us this isn’t about politics, or even democracy. It’s about equality.

Available for all…

We’re proud to be following in the footsteps of other policy trackers like ‘Morsi Meter’ in Egypt and Trudeau Meter in Canada. Knowing how crucial these resources are, we want to make it easier for this kind of service to be available in every country. That’s why we’re making the website code open source, so it’s available to anyone who wants to use it.

We have also made our policy data available as embeddable code. This enables other websites or services to use the policy data, without the burden of keeping the policy analysis up top date. Please get in touch if you’re interested in this.

How does the Tracker work?

We extract every single policy from the winning party’s manifesto. We research the progress of each promise, using a combination of online resources and talking to subject matter experts, in order to establish how far each promise has progressed. We write up our reasoning and give a status of either :

  • Not started
  • In progress
  • Broken
  • Done.

Thanks to a growing community of volunteers, the policy verdicts are kept up to date and revised when something significant happens. You can find out more about our approach in this blog post, and we have a Writing Style Guide that describes the consistent structure and tone we aim to achieve. We’ve also answered some common questions in our FAQ page.

It’s a lot of work keeping the site going and the policies up to date, but it’s also a great way to learn about different issues, and how government works. Please join us if you’d like to help.