Meet Louie

The Commons Library is in charge of recording the election for Parliament, which means wrangling lots of data. Fortunately, data science lead Louie Pollock is up to the task. We asked him about the work he’s been doing before, during and after the election to make sure Parliament gathers all this data quickly and accurately.

Hi Louie. What’s your role in the Commons Library?

I’m a data science lead, which involves working on a few different things in the House of Commons Library. One of the main areas is helping with enquiries from MPs and teams in the Library, when they need an answer to a question that requires a large amount of data processing or computational research skills.

I also help the Library expand its capability by training researchers in programming and helping them develop applications for the website, like interactive maps or widgets for our Insights. One of the best parts of this job is that I get to try something new every week, or something that’s new to me and the people around me too.

Speaking of trying new things, have there been any opportunities to try new things as part of the general election work?

There have! I’ve been involved in quite a lot of the Library’s general election preparations – even though some of that is just being the guy who is CC’d into the most emails. One of the things I’ve been very closely involved in is the data gathering.

The Library is responsible for getting the official record of results for Parliament, which is the complete data set that describes the election. It’s our job to document and verify every candidate standing for every party in every constituency across the country and find out how many people vote for them. It’s information that no one else is really responsible for producing or making available to the public.

That sounds like a big job! Who makes it happen?

All of this work involves coordinating lots of wonderful volunteers from across the Library and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST). Before the election, they collect the names of all the candidates, identify previous MPs who are standing again, and match candidates to parties.

On the night, we had a different team of people staying up until 9 in the morning, watching the news and collecting the results. The aim was to confirm all 650 elected MPs for Parliament by 9am on Friday, so we could let new MPs into the building.

We’re also unique in that we go back and correct the record of results a few weeks after the election. That makes us a bit different to media outlets who maybe won’t do that once the election has left the news cycle. We verify our information to make sure we’ve properly accounted for the votes for smaller parties and ask the returning officers what their constituency’s electorate was on polling day. This involves speaking to every local authority in the UK to confirm the data, which can take another week, so it’s a very busy two weeks for us.

What’s special about being in the Commons Library for the general election?

It’s impossible not to feel excited. We aren’t right in the middle of things, but definitely closer than your average bear. There’s the sense that this isn’t a standard day in the office.

It’s also nice to work with people from all over Parliament. I’ve been given a bird’s eye view on how Parliament and its teams work together, and all the collaboration and compromise that goes into getting this done. And for me, that means that I get to work even closer with the data that makes Parliament, Parliament.