Is the House of Commons losing its charm?

Swathes of MPs are leaving at next year's general election, and the demands of being a legislator are deterring people from standing, but change is within our grasp

When the House of Commons as an institution finds itself in the news, I tend to feel anxious: what has someone done, what’s gone wrong, what quirk left unexplained has been branded an “arcane procedure”? Recently, however, a number of issues of what would be referred to internally as “House business” have pushed aside the veil between Westminster and the outside world, and contributed to putting the practices of the House of Commons into the headlines. These have included the condemnation of Owen Paterson for breaking the rules on paid advocacy and his subsequent resignation as a Member; the success of a recall petition against the SNP’s Margaret Ferrier, MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West and an impending new poll in her seat; the whole dismal story knows as “Partygate”, taking in the investigation of Boris Johnson by the Commons Committee of Privileges, its damning verdict and its subsequent attack on those who had attempted to undermine it; and a large and growing number of Members who have decided, for a plethora of reasons, not to contest the forthcoming general election.

Elements of all of these issues have cohered in a sense that, like we are so fond of saying nowadays, the House of Commons is “broken”. This was elegantly articulated in last week’s Sunday Times Magazine by Charlotte Ivers, whose fluent and light-touch prose I enjoy a great deal. The article cowered under the damning headline “Why nobody wants to be an MP any more”, which is obviously a matter of artistic licence, since there are dozens of applications for each candidacy and you could fill every one of the 650 seats in the House of Commons even if MPs had to pay to be there. But I know what Charlotte means, and she touches on a more fundamental point. MPs are leaving in part because they dislike some of the conditions and obligations of the job, and we need to pay attention to this so that we are attracting as high a calibre of candidate as we can. That suggests it is long beyond the time for us to look at exactly what a Member of Parliament does, should do and should not be expected to do.

It is true that an unusually high number of Members are standing down, retiring, deciding not to seek re-election or whatever other formula of words they prefer at next year’s general election. I looked at this in an essay in December last year, and there are many different reasons which are all coinciding: the potential prospect of a Conservative defeat, perhaps a serious one, has made some Tory MPs think that now is a good time to begin a new phase of their lives; the Boundary Commission has issued a revision of constituencies which has left some Members facing an undignified game of musical chairs, for which some lack the energy; some MPs may have seen the more lucrative financial rewards available outside Parliament, especially as an incoming Labour government has pledged to curtail very sharply the ability of Members to maintain paid outside interests; and overall there is a sense that being an MP is stressful, frustrating, thankless, exposes people to insults, threats and worse and, unless one can achieve ministerial office or the chair of an influential select committee, it can sometimes be a role which carries heavy responsibility but very little power.

(In terms of the lure of the private sector, I wrote for Spear’s Magazine a few years ago about the sorts of skills and experience which could make former MPs attractive in the world of business and enterprise.)

I don’t see the situation in quite the gloomy terms that Charlotte Ivers sets out, although I agree with the thrust of her argument. But I do think, with increasing frustration and vehemence, that we as a society, the subset of that which is the commentariat and then parliamentarians themselves too often portray ourselves as passive and impotent observers rather than participants in public life who have agency and have an unusually good opportunity to shape the debate about what MPs should do and what should be expected of them. And we add to this passivity an exaggeration of some of the challenges which MPs face and the degree to which they make the position undesirable or untenable.

To take an example, let me look at the deaths of MPs recently. Now, I would not seek in any way to minimise the tragedy of the brutal murders of Jo Cox in 2016 and Sir David Amess in October 2021. Both were shocking, awful and tragic, and I suspect the fact that both took place in their constituencies, around humdrum weekly surgeries, makes them all the more unsettling. This should, after all, be the most routine of an MP’s tasks, meeting constituents and listening to their problems, yet both had their lives ended bloodily while going about their duties. We also shouldn’t forget Sir Stephen Timms, who was stabbed twice while holding a constituency meeting in 2010 but thankfully recovered, and, in 2000, Lord Jones of Cheltenham who was again attacked in a surgery and whose assistant, Councillor Andrew Pennington, was killed. These tragic events are often cited as making MPs now think that their personal safety could be at an unacceptable risk.

It’s not for me to tell Members they are wrong in that regard, and of course what matters is what they think. But, in terms of reality, were MPs really safer in the 1970s and 1980s, when the threat from Irish Republican terrorists was at its height? Airey Neave, Margaret Thatcher’s shadow Northern Ireland secretary and close friend, was blown up by the Irish National Liberation Army in March 1979; the Rev Robert Bradford, Ulster Unionist MP for South Belfast, was shot dead by the Provisional IRA at a constituency surgery in November 1981; Sir Anthony Berry, a former government whip, was killed in the bombing by the PIRA of the Grand Hotel in Brighton in October 1984; and Ian Gow, a former Treasury minister and Thatcher’s first PPS as prime minister, was killed by a car bomb planted by the PIRA outside his house in July 1990.

Other MPs had narrow escapes or were badly injured—for example, Norman Tebbit, then trade and industry secretary, and John Wakeham, the government chief whip, suffered severe injuries in the Brighton bombing, while a Lancashire MP, Sir Walter Clegg, was left reliant on a wheelchair—and MPs were always aware of a security threat, especially those in Northern Ireland or connected to the province. But I fear we forget history more and more quickly now, and the days before the peace process and the Belfast Agreement seem to a lot of people unutterably distant. What matters is what people can remember or of what they are aware, so the grinding but accepted threat level is discarded, as is the fact that the most senior levels of government were twice attacked (in the Brighton bombing and in the PIRA mortar attack on Downing Street in 1991).

Another consideration I mentioned above which might cause MPs to think of a life and career elsewhere is the financial reward of serving at Westminster. Here there is some blame to go round: the reputation of Members as cupidinous and self-serving was hugely reinforced by the expenses scandal of 2009, which was subsequently handled badly by the House authorities, including the then-speaker, Michael Martin, and which, as I have said before and will keep saying, has caused reputational damage to the House of Commons which I don’t think will ever be repaired. Not all Members were sinners but they were not universally saintly either, and one result of the scandal was the creation under the provisions of the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009 of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), responsible for, among other things, setting pay and pensions for MPs. On the face of it, this was a sensible presentational step; previously, MPs had voted on their own salaries (though it is worth remembering that Members were not paid at all until 1911, it being assumed that they had access to sufficient private means, and the first salary was £400 a year, worth just over £60,000 today).

It clearly looked like a cosy and convenient arrangement for MPs themselves to decide how much they should be paid, and when the whole issue of finance was addressed after the expenses scandal, it made sense to take this function away from the House and transfer it to IPSA. When it was given across, in 2010, the salary was still under £66,000, hardly changed in real terms from its introduction a century before, but in December 2013, IPSA recommended a significant increase to £74,000—effective from 2015—because there was a strong feeling that pay had risen across society, based on figures from the Office for National Statistics, but not for MPs. The prime minister at the time, David Cameron, criticised the decision, given that many public-sector workers had seen pay freezes, and some MPs said they would not accept the increase but rather give it to charity; however, by that autumn, only 26 of the 69 who had made that promise had in fact delivered. Cameron refused, however, to criticise those of his colleagues who did accept the uplift, saying that “the right thing to do is to be paid the rate for the job”.

An MP is now paid £86,584 a year. There are smaller additional payments for ministers, the speaker and his three deputies, a handful of opposition office-holders, chairs of select committees and members of the Panel of Chairs, who preside over legislative committees, Westminster Hall and sometimes Committee of the whole House. But these are not extravagant: the prime minister is entitled to £164,951 (which includes his salary as an MP), while a select committee chair earns £17,354 on top of his or her basic salary. In Parliament, there is no difficulty distinguishing salaries from telephone numbers.

I’m going to say the unpopular bit: I think MPs are underpaid. They are sent to Westminster to represent the electorate on matters of literal life and death, stakes which could not be higher, issues which can have repercussions around the world as well as influencing the everyday lives of all of us, before birth, during life and after death. For that burden, which is accompanied by the virtual elimination of privacy, a heavy weight on personal relationships and a regular reminder of your lack of public esteem, you are paid less than £90,000. Now, when the national median average salary is £33,000 for those in full-time employment (the mean is higher, at £39,996), MPs are clearly doing well.

Context is useful, however. A general practitioner in England will earn £111,900. Headteachers in London can earn anywhere between £51,347 and £131,353, depending on seniority and responsibility, while legal professionals can expect to receive something like £104,000. A director and head of compliance, in London, to take a random profession, earns £151,809. So it depends what you want to compared MPs to, but it is clear that it sitting in the House of Commons as just a route to personal wealth would not be the easiest or most pragmatic solution. It is a common observation of Members, when they seek to emphasise their public spirited nature, that they could be earning much more outside Parliament if they chose. The immediate response is “Up to a point, Lord Coppers,” because this depends wholly on what they were doing before their election. A charity worker might be stepping up from an average of £30-35,000, while a successful KC who does not continue to practise might be forgoing an annual income of anything between £200,000 and £1 million. So “it depends”.

Of course, people do not and should not seek election to the House of Commons as a way to maximise their income. It would be the wrong motivation and would attract the wrong candidates. Nevertheless, if we want highly qualified and able MPs from across the spectrum of employment, we cannot rely on those currently in low paid jobs simply to guarantee their purity of motive. One could argue (though I don’t find it conclusive) that those who have increased their earnings substantially will be the most reluctant to leave, which might complicate their career choices and their willingness to take risks. My fundamental point is that if we want very good people to carry out important and demanding functions like holding the government to account and scrutinising legislation while managing high stress levels and considerable personal disruption and public criticism, we will sometimes struggle to attract them for less than £90,000 a year.

Some political figures agree and risk being pilloried for saying so. Earlier this month, the former cabinet minister Sajid Javid, who is vacating his Bromsgrove seat at the next election, told an audience at the Institute for Government that MPs should have their salaries doubled but be halved in number, having around 300 legislators earning £172,000 a year. He conceded that the current salary was “a lot of money—more than double the national average—but you get what you pay for”, and cited remuneration as “one of the reasons I think either people leave or you’re not getting more diverse backgrounds of people in different professions as well wanting to join parliament”. It is true that Javid is a former investment banker with Chase Manhattan and Deutsche Bank, thought to be worth about £8 million, but that does not invalidate his opinion.

I’m left cold by the argument that there are too many MPs. The average constituency in England is nearly 75,000 people (smaller in the other three parts of the UK), and while that seems a manageable number for an individual representative, I don’t think it’s so small that it could be doubled without any consequences. There are 650 MPs; if we look at other countries of broadly comparable size, the Assemblée nationale has 577 members, the Bundestag has 736 members, the Camera dei deputati consists of 400 representatives, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey has 600 members and the House of Representatives of Thailand consists of 500 legislators. I don’t think the House of Commons therefore is freakishly large; moreover, our whole political system of drawing most of the executive from the lower house of the legislature, with a maximum of 109 paid ministers (no more than 95 of them in the Commons), a roughly equivalent opposition “shadow government”, plus an extensive system of select committees and delegations to international assemblies, would allow for a significantly smaller number of MPs. Given that it costs around £500 million a year to run the House of Commons, the savings from cutting the number of Members of Parliament would be at best modest and at worst nugatory.

Perhaps, then, increasing remuneration would attract more and better candidates. But I regard it as a second-order issue, one that could be considered, reviewed or implemented without any real institutional difficulties. The argument against it is always quickly sketched in and then the idea dismissed in terms of a public unwillingness to support it. After all, we know that politicians in general and the House of Commons in particular have very little goodwill left in the bank with the public. But that is not the beginning and end of the matter, nor does it accord with the way our political community handled, for example extending the franchise to women, abolishing the death penalty, legalising homosexuality, managing the political and security situation in Northern Ireland, deploying military force to intervene in Iraq or, in many respects, paying for and building critical national infrastructure.

There are times when the House of Commons and the government must lead rather than follow public opinion. If politicians believe—and I think the case is persuasive—that paying MPs more would attract a higher level of candidate, and especially if that provided to be a view taken by both government and opposition, then they should seek to persuade and convince, explain why this measure should be introduced, what effect better-paid legislators would have on the functioning of the House of Commons and our political life and culture in general. Voters are not stupid but they are in the strictest sense thoughtless; that is, the average member of the public pays little attention to what he or she regards as “politics”, does not think about it in much depth or with much evidential basis, and tends to reach and cling to knee-jerk reactions. It would be a substantial task to convince the public that MPs should be paid dramatically more than they are, but this is what I mean about passivity and lack of agency. Our leaders are too apt to look at an issue, declare it unpopular and then to lapse lazily into regarding that as an eternal verity over which no-one has any control. If we want to achieve major change, that weary shrug will not do. MPs have got to engage proactively and fight, being willing to take the brickbats which will likely outnumber the bouquets along the way.

All of these issues, however, are subordinate to an underlying, straightforward but profoundly important question: what are Members of Parliament for? The UK Parliament website will provide some ideas:

The UK public elects Members of Parliament (MPs) to represent their interests and concerns in the House of Commons. MPs consider and can propose new laws as well as raising issues that matter to you in the House. This includes asking government ministers questions about current issues including those which affect local constituents.

It’s a description a lot of people, from passing voters to political scientists, would recognise. For obvious reasons, it is couched in very non-technical language: by “considering… laws”, it means scrutinising bills in principle (at Secoind Reading), in detail (Committee stage and Report stage) and then as a whole in the final version from that House (Third Reading). “Asking government ministers questions about current issues” covers oral and written questions, questions after statements and, I suppose, would encompass select committee work too. But the potentially controversial part of the description is right at the beginning, in “represent[ing] their interests and concerns”.

This is a sharply divisive matter. Elected members of an assembly can be, to put it crudely, delegates or representatives. The former are essentially agents or mouthpieces for their constituents, voting as those who elected them wish—what is known as an imperative mandate. It is often found in extreme left-wing polities such as the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Zapatistas in Mexico, and was supported by Lenin in his The State and Revolution (1917). Representatives have a free mandate and are elected by their constituents to use their judgement and act according to their own beliefs, even if it means explicitly defying the wishes of those constituents. Also known as the “trustee model” of representation, this practise was championed by Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish philosopher and statesman who was a Whig Member of Parliament but is now revered by many conservatives as a founding father of their creed.

Burke outlined his notion of representative democracy when he addressed his potential constituents in Bristol in November 1774. After admitting that an MP should be very close in sympathy and well-connected to his electorate, and that he would sacrifice himself for them, he stopped short of believing that they controlled how their Member of Parliament would vote.

His unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Noble words indeed, and they have tended to outline how the House of Commons has operated for the past centuries. Burke had a special reason for emphasising his freedom of conscience: Bristol was then the second city of England, rich on trade which depended on the institution of chattel slavery in the Caribbean, while Burke believed slavery was incompatible with the English tradition of liberty, and would go on to introduce a bill to prohibit slave-owners from sitting in Parliament.

Burke’s conception of the role of a Member of Parliament was echoed by Sir Winston Churchill shortly before he finally resigned the premiership in April 1955. Opening a village hall at Woodford in his Essex constituency, he was asked to speak on the duties of an MP. His response is worth reproducing in full.

The first duty of a member of Parliament is to do what he thinks in his faithful and disinterested judgment is right and necessary for the honour and safety of Great Britain. His second duty is to his constituents, of whom he is the representative but not the delegate. Burke’s famous declaration on this subject is well known. It is only in the third place that his duty to the party organization or programme takes rank. All these three loyalties should be observed, but there is no doubt of the order in which they stand under any healthy manifestation of democracy.

It was typical Winston: sonorous, profound, slightly laboured but essentially wise and true. I wonder, however, how wry the smiles would be on the faces of current MPs if this was presented as a comprehensive summary of their duties.

There is one element of a modern MP’s responsibilities which is deafening by its silence so far: dealing with constituency casework. There has always been a role for the Member of Parliament as a conduit between “interests” in his or her constituency and the centre of authority in London. This was true in the earliest mediaeval parliaments in which dealing with local grievances and having them heard by the king and his advisers was an understood part of the representative role. Today, however, MPs are seen by their constituents as a kind of last resort for hyper-local problems for which they have been able to find no satisfaction in other ways, through local government, regulators or any other institutions.

Casework is now sometimes regarded as the tasks of a “glorified social worker”, and a source of unhappiness for some MPs. From what I observed, the complain of most Members was not so much the type of issues but the scale of it. There are financial resources for MPs to employ full-time caseworkers now, but even so, they are inundated. Last year PoliticsHome ran an article describing the average day of an anonymous caseworker, and the picture was terrifying: a long day, for underwhelming pay, dealing with emotionally exhausting cases for people in desperate need—and none of it really the responsibility of an MP. The caseworker mentions potholes, a delayed visa, benefit payments, a young man in prison feeling suicidal, children playing too close to woman’s house, with the addition of a regular tide of pro forma campaigning emails and abuse about the Member of Parliament.

Some, perhaps most, of these are genuinely moving and tragic cases, appeals from people in desperate need who don’t know where else to turn. The caseworker says “I am an untrained benefits specialist, immigration adviser, housing support worker, therapist”, but he or she maintains genuine compassion and pride in their work. It must be very satisfying to be able to help even a few people, though s/he does note, “Even if the thanks are directed at your boss, who has had nothing to do with the case, there is a real sense of achievement and of a job well done”. I imagine anyone who works for an MP in any capacity has some experience of that feeling.

This explosion in casework is a phenomenon of the post-war period, and really of the 1960s onwards. Oonagh Gay, for many years head of the Parliament and Constitution Centre in the House of Commons Library, wrote for Political Quarterly in 2005 about the development of the casework load on MPs, and her article is typically thorough and enlightening. She highlights the vast increase in the volume of constituency correspondence, and in the 18 years since she wrote, the trends have continued upwards. MPs know that they must pay careful attention to this aspect of their role, not simply because there are people who genuinely need help, but also because they want and need the reputation of diligence and effectiveness. My own experience was that the intake of the 2010 general election was noticeably more concerned with constituency work that its predecessors.

Certainly, it is difficult to imagine now the equivalent of Sir Stuart Bell, Labour MP for Middlesbrough (1982-2012), who was profiled unfavourably in 2011 by a reporter from The Teesside Gazette, Neil Macfarlane; the journalist asked “Are Teessiders getting enough from Sir Stuart Bell?” after calling the constituency office more than 100 times over a three-month period and never having his calls answered or returned. The Independent revealed that Sir Stuart had not held a constituency surgery for 14 years, nor did he have a publicly accessible constituency office, instead using his home, a mile and a half from the town centre, where his wife acted as his (paid) office manager. Sir Stuart declared that the system worked “extremely well”.

If Bell was a throwback (and believe me, he was), it is difficult to regard the current situation as sustainable or desirable. When the outspoken and endlessly self-assured Labour MP for West Ham, Tony Banks, announced in 2004 that he would step down from the Commons at the next election, he highlighted constituency casework as one of his motives. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster, he said:

I most certainly won’t miss the constituency work. It’s 22 years of the same cases, but just the faces and people changing. I found it intellectually numbing—tedious in the extreme. It might sound a little disparaging to say this about people's lives and their problems and we did deal with them… but I got no satisfaction from this at all… And all you were was a sort of high-powered social worker and perhaps not even a good one.

Some felt that Banks, who was ennobled as Lord Stratford in 2005 but died of a stroke the following January, had been a little harsh. Certainly his candour had verged on the brutal, but he will not have been alone in his thoughts.

The point about the heavy volume of casework and the kind of issues which are being handled is that they represent MPs being used as a stick to be wielded when other organs of state are not functioning as they should. I’m not for a moment blaming the individuals who, in exasperation or desperation, turn to their Member of Parliament because they hope that invoking his or her name will intimidate others into action. They are often right. But it is not what MPs are for. It is a symptom of failing systems elsewhere, as almost anyone involved would admit.

If we could resolve this problem, we would take a huge amount of bureaucratic, administrative and emotional pressure off MPs and their staff. But several things need to happen. First, we need to address the systems that are failing: local government, central government bureaucracy, arm’s-length bodies, executive agencies. The most obvious failing organisation is UK Visas and Immigration, a division of the Home Office which, at the end of last year, had a backlog of 132,000 asylum applications. The second action has to be an effort on the part of the House of Commons and MPs to emphasise what their role is, openly and repeatedly.

I have noted before, with regret, that the House does not have a public spokesman. The speaker is its presiding officer, of course, but such power as he has comes from the institution and he must be scrupulously impartial if he is to retain the confidence of the House. The leader of the House is, in some senses, its ambassador, its envoy to government in cabinet as well as the government’s envoy to the House, but she is also a full member of the government like any other minister, has duties apart from the management of parliamentary business and must balance her responsibilities with delicacy. There is no-one who can appear in the media to articulate the role of the House and its Members, to correct misapprehensions, to promote a certain narrative, nor to highlight where the House is doing well.

There is, of course, an education centre, one of Speaker Bercow’s better innovations, which engages closely and productively with schools, colleges and universities; and each MP is, at times, an ambassador for Parliament. It should certainly fall to them to make clear to the public what the role of the House of Commons is, and what MPs are not, and that would be a good start. At any rate, we must get the House to focus on its core functions: to scrutinise draft legislation, to hold the government to account, to debate matters of public policy and to act as a conduit between individual constituencies and the central administration. Those four activities are the heart of a national legislature.

(The purist in me forces me to articulate a fifth, which is to grant supply: that is, to authorise financial resources for the government to carry out its policies. In mediaeval and early modern parliaments, the threat of withholding supply was one of the most potent weapons the House of Commons had against the king, and it is a mark of the position the Commons holds because of its democratic legitimacy that supply bills may only be introduced in the Commons, not the Lords, and the upper house may not amend such financial measures. This is all now a largely formalised process, and debates on supply bills are a procedural technicality, while consideration of the Estimates, the money which the government has requested, are now used as an opportunity to debate the subjects of select committee reports as chosen by the Liaison Committee. But in theory, the House has the power to withdraw the government’s access to money, which is why there are nominally “confidence and supply” deals which are short of a formal coalition but gives smaller parties a degree of leverage over a government absent aa workable majority. The connoisseur’s connoisseur of these matters is my former colleague Colin Lee, now clerk of committees but at one point clerk of supply in the Public Bill Office, who wrote an excellent chapter on financial procedures in a 2017 festschrift in honour of Thomas Erskine May.)

The articulation and reinforcement of these function, as well as the other issues I’ve discussed, would, I think, make a significant difference to the attractiveness of being a Member of Parliament. Making the role more clearly defined and better rewarded would enhance the quality of candidates and therefore MPs. But is is a strange business. There is the option to do nothing, to proceed as we are, and it has no immediate nor existential consequences. There will always be an abundant supply of aspirant legislators, so the 650 seats in the Commons will always be filled. That is, in a way, a safety net. But if we want the best people, with the best qualifications and aptitudes, who will ideally then contribute to the best processes and the best outcomes, we have to change, and change now. It’s not an impossible job. But we shouldn’t deceive ourselves that it will be easy, either.