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Legislative Process

I particularly want to refer to the communication allowance, as I have been named three times directly in the debate and once obliquely, based on my expenditure on stamps. My response to that is that I would rather be No. 1 than at the bottom—at No. 640, or whatever it is. My position reveals that I have been trying to do my best to keep my constituents informed about what is going on. It is a matter of pride to me to be at the top rather than the bottom of the list. Indeed, I would question what some of those at the bottom are doing to earn their wages—a point that has already been made in the debate. What exactly is the problem we are trying to address? Ours must be the only job in the world where high productivity is seen as something to be criticised rather than praised, as would happen in the real world outside. There is a generational issue: Members who have arrived here since 1997, on both sides of the House, take a different attitude to the job from those who have been here longer. Those of us elected in 1997 and subsequently have more of a constituency focus in our work; we are much more alive to the need to try to keep our constituents aware of what is going on—not just what we have been doing, but what is going on in the House and also in our communities. They often cannot find such information anywhere else. Local newspapers tend to be relatively superficial because they have limited column inches, and the approach of the national press to the issues can only be described as generic. I am satisfied that I perfectly comply with the rules. If I did not, there would be many complaints. I go out of my way to inform my constituents about what is going on, in a non-party political way. I put out material on my website and I try to encourage people to use e-mail whenever possible. I defy anybody to find a party political slant—the accusation that has been levelled at me—in any of that material. Even if I had sent out letters in the numbers talked about in the press, it averages out at rather less than one letter per resident in my constituency, which contains 110,000 people. Other people have sent out annual reports under the IEP. I do not do that. They may have communicated with every person in their community more than once. I do not do that. I respond, in detail, to requests for information that people cannot find anywhere else. I do not use the IEP fund for that. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) raised the important point that the IEP does not go as far in London as in other parts of the country. In fact, most of mine goes on the rent for the hovel we call home—my constituency office. I do not have excess money to spend on leaflets and the vanity publishing to which my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin) referred; I just want to make sure that my constituents are among the best informed in the country about what is actually happening in their communities. That does not mean just writing to people, but going around, as I do, knocking on doors every Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning or on weekday evenings in September—a point to which I shall return. It means having tea parties that people can attend to meet me, constituency surgeries, street stalls and visiting council estates regularly to listen to complaints and take them up, all of which generate a significant amount of work, as do the petitions that I receive almost daily. Constituents in Hendon like writing letters and signing petitions. I can illustrate my point by quoting some of the letters that I have received. Since I knew that we were going to conduct this debate—there were rumblings for several months—I started to ask constituents, whenever I wrote to them, whether they would let me have their e-mail address if they had one and to warn them that there might be restrictions on the amount of correspondence that we could send. I have received a huge sheaf of letters, but I shall refer only to one or two. Mr. Morris said:"““We very much appreciate these reports… We read frequent reports of the drop in the turn-out at elections and the fall in public interest in political matters””." He continued by saying that"““to reduce the budget of MPs’ correspondence with their constituents - which will save a trivial amount of money compared with the wastefulness and mismanagement of… other public expenditure shows a remarkable degree of stupidity. The ‘House of Commons authorities’ must be mad! Please pass this letter to them.””"