MPs’ casework is a good thing. In a parliament ignored by the media, where the government tightly controls every clause of the legislative process, it is the most useful thing backbench MPs do. MPs are taking on an ever-higher number of cases a year, employing more and more staff to service them. Casework is a very Good Thing. Right?
Really? The transformation of MPs from representatives and legislators into social workers is, in fact, a nuisance that could rapidly grow into a problem.
MPs have always championed their communities, and reached out to help those individuals who have been badly let down by government. Traditionally, a constituent would call on their MP if, for example, a family member died abroad and there were problems getting the body back, or if they had suffered gross incompetence from government.
But now, MPs increasingly offer themselves as first points of access to government and local authority services. Or rather, they offer their ever-growing army of nineteen-year-old American interns and recent graduate staffers as points of access.
This raises problems. First, it puts additional pressure on some parts of the public services that are, frankly, struggling. Take the immigration service. We know about their huge backlog, only now finally being overcome. They have had to set up vast bureaus to deal with the massive – and rising – tide of MPs’ letters. Let’s be clear. These letters are not, on the whole, personal interventions from MPs responding to unique cases of incompetence. These are form letters, mail-merged by staffers and interns. They mass-produce special pleading. But they still require an answer and investigation from their addressees, and so they direct staff and staff time away from the core, and often urgent, task of improving the service for all.
Immigration is no special case. Wherever there is most pressure on the public services, a deluge of rote letters from MPs adds to the burden. The head of the hospital, the senior administrator in a hard-pressed office, must stop their work and personally answer the MP, who is essentially asking nothing more than: ‘why can’t my constituents receive special treatment?’ As MPs’ casework becomes more central to their role, they automatically seek out hardest-pressed areas of our public services and increase the burden on them.
Is there any discretion about whether MPs take on a case? How many MPs judge a complaint on its merits and how many simply take it up, often without checking out the facts? Asking politicians to be stern with their own voters is like asking the turkey to decorate the Christmas tree. As a consequence, they often advocate vexatious, spurious constituent cases to public service providers. And what about those constituents who do not like complaining, or who cannot get to Saturday morning surgeries? Are they to be queue-barged on a grand scale, by those fellow constituents willing or able to deploy their elbows to get at public services more quickly?
The problem is one of unilateratism. No one MP can reassert reason on their own – they would be eaten alive. In fact, the indiscriminate growth of casework has been largely driven by Liberal Democrats who make uncritical individual advocacy the basis of their offer to a constituency.
So what is the solution? The right model is provided by the Parliamentary Ombudsman. She takes on cases of misadministration in the public services, referred to her by MPs. Baseless cases are discarded. Substantive ones are pursued. Because the office is national, she can home in on failing government offices, by collating complaints. Rather than endlessly increasing MPs’ staffs to deal with casework, their central resource – the Ombudsman – should be given increased capacity and resources.
This way, constituents get objective and professional help through their parliamentary representative.
So what is left for MPs? Their real role. To advocate their communities. To work in strategic partnership with councils, community groups and charities to lead, to regenerate, to represent their community. Egregious individual cases can still be championed – and given individual attention. But right now, MPs are operating and marketing themselves in exactly the same way as the ambulance-chasing lawyers who urge people to sue the council and the NHS; and they threaten eventually to place a similar burden on our public services.