We have too many MPs and they represent us poorly

I think we have too many Members of Parliament of both sorts but I'd like to focus attention on the elected ones - members of the House of Commons. There are 650 of these privileged individuals each representing a constituency of around 70,000 electors. It all seems a very organised arrangement with representation seen as being at something of a human scale when compared, for example, to the USA where members of the House of Representatives are elected for places with over 700,000 voters.

All this would be fine if we hadn't concluded that MPs (and US Representatives) should do the job full time and receive substantial sums so as to have extensive offices to manage research, communications and casework. Being an MP has become a little industry with a constituency office and a Westminster office all beavering away. But at what do they beaver?

The MP will tell you their offices are handling hundreds- even thousands - of 'cases' and that having "the team" (as they doubtless call it) makes them better MPs. Yet it's not so many years since the days when a Member of Parliament had little more than a secretary and maybe a researcher. The latter were often post-graduates (there seemed to be a lot of Americans) who'd take a year working for an MP, probably for next to nothing, because it looked better on the resumé. Constituency work was handled through the Constituency Party office and most constituencies had a professional political agent.

It may be that MPs do so much better these days but, looking in from the outside, it doesn't seem that way. Instead MPs either run full time 'get re-elected' programmes through these offices, making sure that they 'work' the constituency, something that mostly seems like turning up to the opening of a crisp packet and nabbing casework that would be better done by a local councillor. What many MPs say in Parliament doesn't reflect a considered contribution to the debates around impending legislation or to the good scrutiny of government, but rather the less central need to get in the local paper or TV covering North Grandshire or Big City South East.

The other thing with MPs being full time (and the related expansion in the numbers of ministers, junior ministers, under-ministers and assistant under-ministers) is that the function extends from being a job into being a career. If you every played the Sims then you'd recall the political career ladder there - starting as an intern and through grift, effort and cunning, rising through political assistant to campaign manager to head of the mayor's office to mayor. So it is for (some at least - probably most) MPs. Plenty have observed the seemingly smooth path from researcher to special advisor to MP to minister - whenever there's a "new members to watch" article in a newspaper or magazine, it's filled with bright young MPs who took this path (and probably know the writer personally).

In the olden days (I may be simplifying here but it'll do), MPs didn't have big offices, often had another job, and spent relatively little time in their constituencies. I remember being told about one Labour MP from a Yorkshire constituency that he'd visit the place twice a year (the CLP AGM and the Annual Dinner). Now this may be an exaggerated example but it reflects the essential truth about the role of the MP - they are not elected to spend lots of time in the place that elected them, they're elected to spend time representing those people in Parliament. When I worked in Ted Heath's constituency office (correction - the local Conservative Party's office), the great man would visit for a surgery once a month and we'd persuade him to do a few events and activities on top of this (usually coinciding with the surgery day). Remember that Heath's constituency was about ten miles from Westminster and a fair chunk of his voters commuted into and out of London every day.

The question for me in all this is whether we are better or worse governed for having MPs with constituency offices, westminster offices and access to the wonders of modern technology on top of all that. I don't think we are better governed and that much of the things MPs call work either duplicate other activity or else feed the idea that the main function of the MP is to mollycoddle local residents not represent them in Parliament. I'm sure the offices are very busy but it makes you wonder how MPs coped in the past when they'd just a secretary sharing a cramped room with two other secretaries.

I've always considered that there's a size of electorate above which personal engagement becomes impractical. I represented a ward with an electorate of around 14,000, about a fifth of an average MP, and there is no way that I could really know those electors. Don't get me wrong I knew a lot of them, especially in the village where I live, but those I could put in this category amounted to no more than 10% of the electorate. Because this personal engagement fades as the electorate rises (and I guess our brains have a limited capacity for remembering people any how), the size of a constituency really doesn't matter, at least in terms of representation.

So if we are to have full time MPs and fund extensive office support, we don't need 650 of them. I'm not sure what the right number is here (there's a whole science out there no doubt trying to determine the right numbers) but suspect it is nearer 450 than 650, especially if the size of the cabinet and assorted ministerial hangers-on is also reduced. This change would have two effects - because constituencies would be bigger, MPs might pay more attention to policy and less to chasing casework or opening fetes, and there would be two hundred people doing something more valuable than being a full-time politician.

In an ideal world, MPs would gather for a few weeks each year to agree the government's programme, process necessary changes to the law, and set up oversight for the administration. Then MPs would return to their metaphorical ploughs happy that the job of representation had been done well. But that ideal world has long gone and we're stuck with a state-funded political career path. In which case let's at least make it harder by cutting the opportunities to live off the state as a politician from 650 to 450.

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