Vote For Policies - 2015 General Election Update

After what feels like an age of waiting, the site at Vote For Policies has finally updated and now invites you to compete their survey with quite a few differences from their previous site.

The first and most obvious difference is that you are now asked in which of the four constituent countries of the United Kingdom you are completing the survey from. This is because they have included several parties that were not represented in their last edition. The site now includes The Scottish Green Party and the Scottish National Party. Neither of these parties were included previously and although Green interests were represented as the Green Party of England & Wales were included, this was not completely satisfactory as The Scottish Green Party are autonomous.

I have completed the new survey myself and like the new interface they have built. It first asks you, on the front page, what policy areas you would like to consider. Like the last time I talked about this site, I would genuinely advise you to complete them all. For me that gives the best experience.

You thereafter start the survey. A change this time is that instead of just being shown all the policies in that particular policy area and you having to choose which one you prefer, it lists them one at a time so that you can state firstly whether you would "never" consider these policies or if you "may" consider these policies. This allows for policies that are obviously not to your personal taste to be removed from that policy area. After going through the 5 or 6 parties which relate to your area, it then re-lists the policies that you have answered "may consider" to, and then asks you to finally choose which policy you prefer.

You can maybe guess why my results were and yes they are hardly surprising:

Another feature I like about their new interface is the ease that you can see the results that are coming from your own constituency and nationally. Whilst there are only 15 results at present in my constituency, the results were as follows:

I look forward to the database growing over the next few months and seeing how it develops.

The national picture looks interesting from a Green perspective too. To date there has only been just under 14,000 surveys done but the Greens appear to have a reasonable following still. It just shows again that if people voted for the policies rather than the parties, our political landscape would be so different. I live in hope.

As I said in my last piece about this site, go on, give it a go. You might be pleasantly surprised about what you find. Drop me a line if you do complete the survey with what you think about the new interface.