A permanent, source-led accountability profile: background, parliamentary activity, voting, public costs, commitments and WATCH scrutiny.
Tom Rutland is the Labour MP for East Worthing & Shoreham. He was first elected on 4 July 2024. Before entering Parliament he worked as a Senior Public Affairs Officer for Prospect trade union.
This profile records verifiable public activity. It is not a scorecard of whether WATCH agrees with his politics.
Current: member of the Speaker's Advisory Committee on Works of Art, from 6 February 2025.
Previous: Culture, Media and Sport Committee, 21 October 2024 to 27 October 2025.
The figures below are the 1 September 2026 snapshot; they have not been recalculated for this update.
UK Parliament voting record retrieved 1 September 2026.
Official Parliament member record.
Official Parliament page; Parliament notes contribution counts can be approximate.
474 recorded votes out of 575 possible divisions in the comparison dataset. This is NOT a measure of physical attendance: MPs can miss divisions for constituency, ministerial, pairing, abstention or other reasons.
WATCH will highlight significant divisions affecting the constituency or major manifesto commitments and link each entry to Parliament's official division record. A vote is recorded as Aye, No or no recorded vote; WATCH will not infer a reason for absence without evidence.
OFFICIAL VOTING RECORD ↗Published IPSA-derived 2024/25 data records approximately £224.7k paid across staffing, office, accommodation and travel-related categories, including about £180,160 staffing, £26.1k office and £14,133 accommodation.
Important: Parliamentary business costs are not personal income. A higher or lower total is not evidence of wrongdoing. WATCH's staffing/accountability case has now reached findings. No evidence reviewed establishes improper expenditure; the requested context was not substantively supplied by the stated deadline.
WATCH STAFFING CASE →His 2024 campaign page said: “No second jobs” alongside commitments to hard work and regular advice surgeries. WATCH will test this against the Register of Members' Financial Interests and later public records.
Campaign commitment to fight for health and social-care investment and lower waits. This is broad and requires measurable local indicators before any delivered/broken label.
Campaign commitment to fight sewage pollution and protect the local environment. Progress will be assessed against identifiable interventions and outcomes, not rhetoric alone.
Campaign commitments included better local school provision, children’s services and apprenticeships. WATCH will separate national Labour pledges from commitments personally attributable to Rutland.
WATCH uses DELIVERED · IN PROGRESS · DELAYED · NOT DELIVERED · UNVERIFIABLE/TOO VAGUE. “Broken” will only be used where a specific commitment, deadline and failure can be evidenced.
Official records show questions or contributions on issues including NHS waiting lists, coastal communities, sewage/chalk streams, building safety, active travel and energy prices. This section records activity, not a claim that an intervention caused a particular outcome.
WATCH has verified public activity by Rutland concerning projects outside East Worthing & Shoreham, including Worthing Lido and attendance at the Montague Gardens opening in neighbouring Worthing West. Cross-boundary work can legitimately benefit his constituents and is not inherently a criticism.
WATCH's scrutiny question is narrower: how much of his publicly evidenced local activity can be demonstrated to serve East Worthing & Shoreham, and how much is centred on neighbouring projects without a clear constituency benefit? WATCH does not describe event attendance or joint campaigning as another MP's constituent casework without evidence.
READ THE FINAL FINDINGS →WATCH sent an enquiry about the committee role, hospitality and Southlands MRI. The office’s automatic reply confirmed receipt. The stated response period has now closed and no substantive response was identified by the deadline. No conclusion about a conflict of interest or misconduct follows from non-response.
The staffing/recruitment enquiry has also moved to findings. A material late response will still be assessed and the record updated where appropriate.
The official paper published on 2 September lists UIN 26303: a question about support for older people entering higher education. WATCH’s ledger records it as tabled on 1 September. No ministerial answer has been verified in this update.
This may matter to older learners locally, but it is not evidence of a constituency funding award or a delivered policy change.
