The Commons average voting participation this Parliament is just under 70 percent, or 69.5 percent once Sinn Féin and the Speaker are excluded. The MPs below are well under it. Some have reasons. Some do not.
Voting participation here is the share of the 558 divisions held this Parliament in which an MP actually voted. Sinn Féin MPs and the Speaker are excluded. MPs elected at by-elections within the last six months are excluded because the sample is too small to be meaningful. Every figure is taken from the official Commons division record and checked line by line.
Before the names, a necessary distinction. Not all absences are equal. An MP representing Belfast or the Scottish Highlands has to fly or take a five hour train to reach Westminster. Votes can be called at short notice on eight minutes of the division bell. Cancelled flights, weather disruption and clashes with constituency work in distant seats are real factors that fall hardest on the MPs furthest from London. Northern Ireland and Highland Scottish MPs will always have lower participation than someone who can walk to the Commons from their flat. That does not excuse every absence. It does explain some of them.
With that said.
No travel excuse
Nigel Farage: 30.6 percent. Clacton is an hour from Westminster. He has missed 77 consecutive divisions. The leader of a party polling at 25 percent nationally has attended fewer than a third of the votes. If Westminster is broken, not turning up does not fix it.
Rupert Lowe: 33.2 percent. Great Yarmouth is two hours from London. The sole MP for Restore Britain, subject to an unresolved parliamentary misconduct investigation. A third of eligible votes attended from a man who says the country needs saving.
Keir Starmer: 6.5 percent. He lives in London. Prime Ministers vote on far fewer divisions than backbenchers, by long standing convention rather than by simple absence, and that explains most of a figure this low. But 36 votes out of 558, from the man who runs the government and whose front door is attached to the office, is a number worth seeing in full.
James McMurdock: 41.2 percent. South Basildon and East Thurrock, in Essex, under an hour from Westminster. Independent since leaving Reform UK.
David Lammy: 20.1 percent. Tottenham. He lives in London. Deputy Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor. Senior ministers miss divisions for government business, which covers a large part of this. Whether it covers four in every five eligible votes is a question only he can answer.
Rachel Reeves: 14.0 percent. Chancellor of the Exchequer. She spends most of her working week in Whitehall, and the Treasury front bench is rarely in the lobby on routine divisions. The second most powerful person in government attending one vote in seven.
Freddie van Mierlo: 40.7 percent, Liberal Democrat. Rachel Gilmour: 42.3 percent, Liberal Democrat. A party of 72 seats that campaigned on holding government to account. You have to be in the room to do that.
Douglas Alexander: 45.9 percent, a minister. Alison Taylor: 45.3 percent, Labour. Ministerial duties explain some government side absences. They do not explain all of them.
Rishi Sunak: 3.2 percent. Richmond and Northallerton is four hours from London, which gives him more of a travel argument than most on this list. But he is a former Prime Minister with no ministerial duties, no government business keeping him away, and a salary of £91,346 for a job that includes voting. Eighteen divisions out of 558. This is the figure with the weakest defence on the page.
Travel is a genuine factor
Sorcha Eastwood: 11.1 percent. Alliance. Lagan Valley, Northern Ireland. A flight is required to attend every division. Alliance argues for Westminster engagement over Sinn Féin abstention, and the voting record makes that argument harder to sustain, though representing a Northern Ireland seat at Westminster is genuinely more difficult than any English one.
Carla Lockhart: 47.3 percent, DUP, Upper Bann. Claire Hanna: 20.3 percent, SDLP, Belfast South and Mid Down. The same flights, the same constraints, and yet one attends more than twice as often as the other. Travel explains the floor under both numbers. It does not explain the gap between them.
Seamus Logan: 25.6 percent. Graham Leadbitter: 28.5 percent. Dave Doogan: 28.3 percent. All three are SNP, all three represent seats five or more hours from Westminster by train, and all three sit within three points of one another. The SNP nine are a diminished group with limited sway over how a division goes. Low attendance from distant Scottish seats is partly logistics and partly the reality of a group too small to change the result.
Ayoub Khan: 37.1 percent. Independent. Birmingham Perry Barr, around two hours from London. Not the most distant seat, not next door. Alex Easton: 44.1 percent. Independent. North Down, Northern Ireland.
The point
The defence is always the same. Constituency casework. Committee work. Ministerial duties. Travel. Some of it is valid. Some of it is not. The MPs on this list who live in London, represent seats within commuting distance of Westminster, or hold no ministerial role that would pull them away have the weakest defence. The MPs who represent Belfast and Aberdeen have the strongest.
Voting is the one act of representation the public can count.
If an MP wants credit for work that does not show in the division record, the data exists to prove it. Speeches delivered, questions tabled, committees attended. This site publishes all of it. The voting percentage is not the whole picture. It is the part nobody can hide from.