Debate Interventions (2023)

Response

1) In the past 2 years, who are the MPs that have made the most interventions during parliamentary debates.
and
2) In the past 2 years, who are the MPs who have made the most interventions during parliamentary debates, relative to the number of debates they have attended.

Some information is by the House of Commons.

In the first instance, please note that an intervention during a parliamentary debate can take many forms, and there is no formal or definite way of identifying what constitutes an intervention. Likewise, we do not keep a record of which spoken contributions are interventions. In order to fulfil your request, we would be required to analyse all spoken contributions made in debates over the past two years and make a sophisticated judgement as to which ones constituted interventions. The Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) does not oblige us to carry out this breakdown or create this information. Please also note that we do not keep attendance records for Members who attend debates.

This said, it help may you to know that there may be some indication that a spoken contribution during a debate in an intervention, such as one Member asking another to give way or a Member rising to gain the attention of Mr Speaker, amongst others. Where this is the case however, this will be denoted in spoken contributions by individual Members, and these are already available from a public source. Any information we hold regarding your request is therefore exempt from disclosure in accordance with section 21(1) and (2)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), which removes a public authority from the obligation to provide access to information which is already in the public domain. This is an absolute exemption and the public interest test does not apply.

To be helpful, all spoken contributions in debates are available to view in Hansard, the official report of all parliamentary debates, which can be viewed on our parliamentary webpages.