Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: Innovation showcase, HC 523
Tuesday 24 June 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 24 June 2025.
Members present: Dame Chi Onwurah (Chair); Emily Darlington; Tom Gordon; Kit Malthouse; Jon Pearce; Dr Lauren Sullivan; Martin Wrigley.
Question 24
Witnesses
I: Dr Simon Wallace, Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer, Suffrago; and Rachel Swann, Director and Chief Operating Officer, Suffrago.
Witnesses: Dr Simon Wallace and Rachel Swann.
Chair: Welcome to the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee innovation showcase. The Committee wants to understand how the UK supports innovators and what more can be done. Each week, one member of the Committee selects an innovator to share their story. This week’s innovator is brought by Tom Gordon.
Q24 Tom Gordon: Thank you, Chair. I am really glad that we have Suffrago here today. I am sad that Andrew cannot be with us. He is one of my constituents and I have known him for a number of years. It is worth saying that in the Selby and Ainsty by-election a couple of years ago he stood as an independent and called himself the AI-powered candidate. That is where this sort of thing stemmed from.
Suffrago is a civil tech platform aimed at strengthening the voice of everyday citizens and helping MPs better understand public opinion. With social media often drowning out meaningful conversation and traditional polling falling short, Suffrago uses AI to try to cut through that noise. The platform gives MPs personalised constituency-specific dashboards. It uses AI and an AI bot at the heart of the platform, which MPs can use to query data directly and get tailored insights to our constituencies. Thank you both very much for coming along today. The floor is yours.
Rachel Swann: Thank you very much; I don’t think we actually need to do anything now, Tom. Unfortunately, our CEO—this is a really good example—suffers from various health conditions, so was unable to make it down, and that is one of the things we are looking to try to resolve.
Unlike your next speakers, we are not scientists and we are definitely not rocket scientists—just to set expectations. We call ourselves democracy innovators. Essentially, our core mission is to capture the real voice of people at scale. It is not just the whats; it is also the whys. What are people thinking? That is so that you, as individual elected representatives of constituents, can see what those people are thinking and why they are thinking it, regardless of their political affiliation.
We are a politically neutral tech platform. We are removing the polarisation of vitriol, particularly from social media. We use anonymity as a force for good. It is a moderated anonymity. We look to give everybody a voice, regardless of political affiliation. Essentially, we empower individuals and their representatives and communities by blending cutting-edge tech, which is AI, and our own proprietary AI, into the timeless democratic principles.
Dr Wallace: One of the ways in which we do that is to make sure that you do not have to have a PhD in statistics like me to be able to understand the metric tonne of data that is out there. We use AI to help make it simpler, easy to understand and easy to digest. More importantly, instead of focusing on the 238 million data points we have in our database, it is the 12 million insights that are really valuable and useful to drive action and change.
We use that and it means that we can act quickly. As I am sure you are all aware, and familiar with, things and times move quickly and it is important that we are able to produce those insights in a way that means that they are still relevant by the time they need to be acted on. That is why one of the first things we did, as Tom so kindly mentioned, was to build those 650 constituency specific dashboards. It is not just 650, but actually three times that because we have it for income, property and crime, and there is more in our database that we do not quite yet have on dashboards. It is about being able to give that information, as Rachel said, and not just saying, “Oh, this is what people are saying,” but providing context underneath it to say, “This is why they might be saying it.”
Rachel Swann: Part of why we are doing this is that we think the online conversation is broken, particularly around current social media. It is polarised. The population generally falls into three separate categories. We call them the three Ps—the passionate, the passive and the fed-up; that’s for Hansard.
I take my hat off to you because your inboxes are primarily filled with the individuals who shout the loudest and are filled with vitriol. The whole point is that then leads into polling, and traditional polling is failing because of biased sampling. I am very active on LinkedIn. I am not active on any other social media, only in a passive, reactive form. Frankly, that level of vitriol is not something in which I want to engage on a daily basis. We are looking to bring people like us, who have an interest in our communities, into engaging beyond that so that you, as their representatives, become CEOs of your own constituency dashboard, regardless of whether somebody voted for you or not, with data at your own fingertips that reports directly to your own constituency on a range of different issues.
We use anonymity. Instead of it becoming a shield for dishonesty and trolling, we use anonymity as a shield for good and a shield for honesty.
Dr Wallace: Rachel mentioned the traditional biased sampling in polling, where it is very difficult to get 1,500 people to reflect the mood of a national area but we still claim that it does. What we are looking at is saying, “Okay, we know that we might only have this small group or this area,” but highlighting why they might be saying that and showing that it is still valuable. The real power of what Suffrago does is that we are not a closed panel and we are not a closed ecosystem. If it is more biased in one direction, we encourage the other direction to come in and have their viewpoints heard and said.
One of the key things that we do regarding anonymity is that nobody in Suffrago will ever see how anyone has voted. That is private. Nobody else will see how Rachel or I commented, but we take what we view as a real responsibility for online safety very seriously. You are only anonymous on Suffrago for as long as you follow the law. If you break the law, if you act in an inciteful way or if you are advocating violence, we work with our political neutrality council to say, “Right, should we take action?” If we need to take action, that information will then be passed on to the relevant law enforcement. What we do not want to see is a repeat of tragedies that have happened to the House when we could have done something to stop it.
How we bring that in is by removing the emotion. We make sure that what is being said and the questions that we ask, which we crowd-source from our respondents, reflect the will and the mood of the people. If everyone is talking really positively about an issue, the questions on Suffrago will be positive. If it is negative, they will be negative. We make sure that we are reflecting what people are saying, not just what others believe they want to find out. It is, rather, what is on the real mind of people.
Rachel Swann: We have only been going nine months. I am not, but the business is very young. I am clearly not very young. We are already on our third iteration to make it even more intuitive and more like social media, but still with all that technology in the back.
We have a series of what we call LDRs, or local democracy reporters. There will be one in every constituency. We already have in excess of 35, who, again, are tasked with political neutrality. It would be really useful to bring out real-life examples, such as the Walthamstow transport. This is about hyper-localisation.
Dr Wallace: The reports that we have generated have been used by national newspapers, global companies, charities and market research agencies. The example Rachel mentioned is that my local MP was raising an issue regarding the accessibility of public transport in the Walthamstow constituency. We saw the post that was made and thought, “How can we support that? How can we provide context for it?”
What we looked at and built was a report that looked at the impact of those who may be disabled or less abled in the constituency. While Walthamstow has a relatively low proportion of disabled constituents, that masks a data point, which is that the number of constituents who do not have access to a car and who are disabled is 1.6 times higher than the rest of the UK. In that constituency there were 14,000 disabled residents who were going to be impacted by the lack of public transport. We were able to bring that to the fore.
Rachel Swann: There is another example. We work with MPs, constituencies, commercial organisations and NGOs. One of us has just recently commissioned a report—still embargoed because they are working out how to use it at a charity—on the risk of death by suicide in every constituency. That is not data that already exists. Using AI and using in excess of 238 million data points means that we have in excess of 20 million unique insights for the different constituencies. All the 650 constituencies have been ranked in terms of the likelihood of death by suicide. The “so what?” from that is that people can then start actively campaigning and actively looking at where mental health provision, for example, could kick in and for which age groups and demographics.
There are challenges and opportunities for us. You might have noticed that we are based in the north. We are registered in Harrogate. I live in Sheffield and Simon is from Sheffield. I am not young. I have been running tech businesses for about 20 years. There is no particular affinity with investment into female-led businesses. Likewise with Andrew, our CEO, who is disabled. We have the investment challenge. We are looking for people to use us. We are growing massively.
One of our challenges is that we are almost inundated with some of your colleagues asking us to get involved at various levels. That is fantastic. Because we are politically neutral, we work with people across the political spectrum.
Dr Wallace: The real big thing that we need, and the big challenge we have, is people being willing to try. There is such ennui. Sometimes there is a reluctance to get involved with politics with a big P, as we call it. We are making sure it is trying to drive causes, to make people willing and wanting to engage.
Rachel Swann: Because of the anonymity, we look to ensure that everybody has a verified ID. I recently had to go through Government ID to verify my director status. That would be a brilliant way that we could potentially help each other, because it is a really good system.
In summary, we are not looking to fix broken polling, because this can become a polling tool as well. We look to build something entirely new, which we are calling the ultimate democratic platform. It is a big ambition, and why not? We already have people in India massively interested in it because, obviously, their system is based on ours.
We are about the true voice of the people. We are looking to scale that but to scale it responsibly. We should stop asking what we think people should care about and ask about what they are already saying, and actively listen to them. I take my hat off to people like you. I would love to do your job, but I would not. You all went in to make a difference. We think we could actually help you deliver that change. Thank you very much.
Chair: Thank you very much. You have a huge amount of ambition. It is fantastic to hear about how AI is being used positively to deliver on a promise of better citizen engagement with their elected representatives. It is not an easy job. Thank you very much for presenting Suffrago to us and your journey. Tom, thank you for bringing them to us. We will look at our handouts with great interest.
Rachel Swann: Enjoy your dashboards. Thank you very much.