There was one passage in the recent Senior Salaries Review Body report on MPs' pay that really did annoy me. No, it wasn't anything about pay, pensions or allowances. Rather, it was a reference to constituency casework that concluded rather loftily that most of this was routine stuff, handled by staff, with only the occasional complex case needing the personal involvement of the Member. Now I don't know who the Commission had been talking to (whoever it was, I'd like to wring their neck) but I don't believe that their description corresponds to reality for MPs of any party.
Yes, we do all rely heavily on the hard work of our staff. But every colleague I know takes their constituents very seriously indeed and woe betide a Member who lets a letter drafted by a staffer go through without checking very carefully what he is signing. It's not the researcher who gets egg on his face all over the local media if clumsy words lead to trouble.
I've just finished dictating letters from this afternoon's surgery cases. It was the usual mixture of cases involving housing, benefits, anti-social behaviour and immigration. Unusually, there were no CSA or tax credit cases this week. Most of us in Parliament, me included do sometimes moan about how the pressure of casework eats up the time that we should be spending on monitoring and challenging Bills and Statutory Instruments at Westminster and it is a constant battle to balance the competing demands of different sides of this job. But I still, in the end, stick to my view that the surgery and the mailbox are what best keeps me in touch with what is causing difficulty to the people that I am supposed to represent.
I reckon eight out of ten people who come to my surgeries live in the poorest neighbourhoods in Aylesbury. Surgeries bring an MP into contact with a lot of people who aren't confident writing letters, filling in forms or dealing with officialdom. They help MPs keep our feet on the ground. I remember Douglas Hurd, when Foreign Secretary, once saying to me:
"I fly all round the world, meeting Bush and Gorbachev. Then I come back and spend Saturday afternoon sitting in a draughty church hall in Oxfordshire while people come and shout at me about the Poll Tax. I describe this to my French and German colleagues and they look at me with a mixture of horror and utter disbelief."
Like Douglas, I'm rather proud that local contact is still important to the way that we do politics in this country.
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