Do you have to be well off to be a parliamentary candidate?

There is a bit of a hullabaloo at the moment regarding the revelation that Zac Goldsmith has contributed £260,000 out of his own pocket since 2007 to his attempt to win Richmond Park from the Lib Dems at the next election.

This got me doing a bit of reading around though and I came across a very interesting article on ConservativeHome from August 2006 entitled "The costs of being a candidate". It focused on the experiences of Conservatives trying to get selected/elected (17 A-listers and 20 other candidates) and analysed the amount of expenditure to incurred in trying to become a candidate and then win a seat. They also looked at lost earnings and opportunity costs and tried to factor those in too. The information was then analysed and averages were taken. Here are some of the headline figures:

• Total costs for winning candidates (including lost earnings): £41,550
• Total costs for losing candidates (including lost earnings): £34,392
• Direct costs for winning candidates: £22,020
• Direct costs for losing candidates: £16,070

The article itself is well worth a read to see some of the experiences of the candidates involved.

It is not totally clear over what exact time-frame these costs were incurred (perhaps I missed it in the article) but I am assuming it is over say 2 or 3 years in the run up to the 2005 election. Now firstly I should just say that this is a snapshot of the specific experiences of Conservative candidates and the sample may to an extent be self selecting (ConHome asked for candidates to come forward to discuss how much it cost and it may be the ones who spent the most felt most motivated to come forward). It is also not clear how much of the expenditure would apply to candidates for other parties.

Notwithstanding all that, I still think this is a fascinating piece of research and one that should give pause for thought. Can it really be right that we are expecting candidates seeking election to become an MP to spend tens of thousands of pounds of their own money whilst seeking to do so? Surely that will mean that some (perhaps quite a lot of) people will be excluded from the process altogether. Well off people will not need to worry too much about this but for anyone on say average salary (c£25,000 - take home much less than that) you could be looking at spending up to two years worth of take-home annual salary just to be in with a shout.

I know from discussions I have had of people who currently cannot consider trying to become an MP purely for the financial cost and these sorts of figures could be an indication of why.

All of this can only mean that some people who would make great MPs are being filtered out of the process before they even get to try and be a candidate.

The ConHome article does suggest a few measures that might help:

• A reduction in the cost of attending a Parliamentary Assessment Board (candidate approval process).

• An emergency access fund run by a small committee – including an MP and candidate - that can release money to a struggling candidate in particularly pressed circumstances. One candidate who replied to the ConservativeHome survey literally ran out of money ten days before the 2001 polling day. They maxed out their credit card and were afraid to ask local Conservative officials for help. The Conservatives introduced an access fund system at the same time as they introduced student loans in the early 1990s.

• The appointment of a ‘candidates’ protector’ in every Association. The protector would be jointly appointed by the candidate and Association Executive and would be, for example, responsible for prioritising the Conservative functions that the candidate attended so that he/ she had more time for campaigning. Just having such a role should improve activists’ understanding of the costs of being a candidate. CCHQ or the Candidates’ Association might like to consider preparing a briefing paper for Conservative Association executives to alert them to the cost pressures facing candidates.

I'm not sure how many of these suggestions have been taken up by the Conservative Party and even if they have been, how much difference they have made.

I would be interested to hear about the experience of candidates from other parties, how much cost they have incurred and how this compares with the Conservative figures.

Anyone who wants to contact me about this can at the e-mail address in the sidebar near the top of this blog. I will treat anything sent to me on this with discretion.

Perhaps Lib Dem Voice and/or LabourList might want to think about doing something similar?

MPs on Twitter blocking followers

Sara Bedford has tweeted today about how she has been blocked from following an MP. She hasn't said which one (although I can take a wild guess). UPDATE: Sara has done a blogpost herself about this now and it is who I thought it would be - Nadine Dorries MP.

After that I tweeted asking if anyone else has been blocked by MPs and had a few responses both publicly and privately. Sara's case is not an isolated incident. So there are multiple examples of MPs deciding to block members of the public on Twitter from following them. Obviously I can't know all the reasons why these "blocks" might have occurred but I strongly suspect in at least some cases the MP is trying to prevent an opponent from having (easy) access to their Twitter stream.

This seems a bit odd to me. The way Twitter works is that your tweets go into the "public timeline". Anyone can see these either via direct links or just by going to your public page on Twitter. If someone follows you on Twitter, you don't have to follow them back. So to block someone is a bit of a drastic step in my view. Thus far, I have never blocked anyone from following me as I am quite happy for the world to see what I am tweeting about.

Of course people have the right to do what they want on Twitter including MPs. I am sure there are cases (e.g. where someone is being very abusive to you) where you might want to take a step like this, however in the case of Sara above I am sure that was not happening and in the other cases revealed to me I am pretty sure too.

The fact that some MPs are doing this makes me question whether they have understood the nature of the medium. It makes it look to me like they have something to hide or are afraid of allowing their opponents access to their public statements, because that's what Twitter is, a public forum.

(Incidentally it is possible to make all your tweets private but none of the MPs I am talking about here have done that to the best of my knowledge).

UPDATE1: Stu has pointed out in the comments that another result of blocking someone is that it stopping you seeing @ replies which I was not really aware of (probably because I have never blocked anyone). I can understand them not wanting to see @ replies from people being abusive but from people who just genuinely disagree and are questioning them (which I think is the case in the ones I have seen)? That's the Twitter equivalent of having someone kicked out of a public meeting because you don't like their comments or questions.

UPDATE2: Parlez_me_n_Tory on Twitter has also drawn my attention to this blogpost he wrote a couple of weeks ago on a similar theme about former Speaker contended and Labour MP Parmjit Dhanda who has blocked a constituent on Twitter.

MPs should not have outside jobs Mr Parris

Matthew Parris' article in the Times from Saturday this week suggests that MPs should be allowed to have outside jobs, it's just that too many of them have the wrong sort of outside job (by his definition that is things like Company Director, Barrister - i.e. the sort of job that is likely to give them experience of a rarified world that most do not inhabit). On the other hand he claims that MPs doing outside jobs like being a Doctor or participating in charity work are fine.

I am afraid I have to take issue with the redoubtable Mr Parris on this one. As I have mentioned before, I do not think MPs should have any significant outside job. I understand the argument that MPs need to have rounded experience of the outside world of work but I think that should come before they get into parliament, not whilst they are there. I accept that in order to have a decent cross-section in the house there will be younger members who will naturally have less experience but there will be plenty who will have had 10, 20 or even more years of experience in the outside world and doing "proper" jobs. For me, that is the key.

Also, as part of their standard duties MPs are kept in constant contact with their constituents and members of the public and should therefore be in touch with the issues of the day in this way.

MPs are (or should be) busy enough as it is without devoting some of their precious time to outside interests even if they would be worthy pursuits. Representing tens of thousands of people and holding the government to account is more than a full time job and I do not accept that MPs can be giving maximum attention to this if they are off doing other things part of the time.

I should just clarify what I meant above by "significant outside jobs". I understand that some MPs will be directors or owners of companies that they may have started before they became an MP and I would not expect them to completely abandon these. However input should be kept to a minimum and certainly any day-to-day operations stuff should not be their responsibility. But I do not think MPs should take on new directorships after they enter the house.

UPDATE: I thought this post might prove a little controversial and already a couple of other Lib Dem bloggers have voiced their opposition to my comments here. Lady Mark has done so here and Bernard Salmon here.

Can you list all your MPs?

I spent some time yesterday evening trying to work out every MP who had represented me throughout my entire life. Because I have lived in quite a lot of places this was not straightforward. I did not know all my postcodes but with a bit of interwebbing I was able to track them all down and I then used a combination of "They Work For You" with its postcode finder facility and Wikipedia to track the former MPs for the constituencies to see who was MP whilst I lived there. It is also complicated by the fact that one of the places I lived in was affected by boundary changes in 1983 and it proved a bit fiddly to track down who the MP had been when I first moved there in 1982. I got there in the end though.

It threw up a few surprises such as the fact that Runcorn used to have a Tory MP from 1950 - 1983. I had no idea and does not seem to fit the profile of the town. Also I had no idea that from the time I was born until the age of 8 I was represented by Mr Permatan!

Here is my list of MPs (with the constituency in brackets and the party afterwards) in chronological order:

Robert Kilroy-Silk (Ormskirk) - Labour
Mark Carlisle (Runcorn) - Conservative
Gordon Oakes (Halton) - Labour
Robert Litherland (Manchester Central) - Labour
Gerald Kaufman (Manchester Gorton) - Labour
Keith Bradley (Manchester Withington) - Labour
Jane Kennedy (Liverpool Broadgreen / Liverpool Wavertree) - Labour
Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) - Conservative
John Redwood (Wokingham) - Conservative
Jane Griffiths (Reading East) - Labour
John Redwood (Wokingham) - Conservative
Andrew Mackay (Bracknell) - Conservative

Right, well I guess that this is only one for hardcore political obsessives (or those who have not moved very much) but if anyone else who reads this wants to have a crack then please consider yourself tagged for the "My MPs meme"!

UPDATE 1: 7th July 2009 - I originally posted this in April 2009 but having Tweeted about it today it has got a a fair bit of interest so I have decided to bump it seeing as it has got far more interest today than it ever did originally and it is not really topical!

UPDATE 2: Well a few people have taken up this meme. There are some in the comments below and also ones I have come across on other people's blogs:

- Caron's had a crack here (and also Norfolk Blogger has slipped his list into her comments)

- Pete from off of Pete's Politics presents his here

- Stephen Glenn had a quick go here, and a much more detailed go here where in an excellent post he fleshes out each MP's career and life as well as explaining how he has met most of them.

- Jennie Rigg has listed hers here as well.

- Steve Pugh has done his here and has a fair few famous MPs in there including a former Chancellor and Home Secretary. Makes my list look like political pygmies!

- Anders Hanson has also done his here although the fact he lived in another country for a few years complicated things although the fact that it was Sweden with multi-member constituencies gives us a glimpse of what we could have in some utopian future!

MP pastoral duties - Let's have a heated debate!

During a rather frenetic Twitterfest around the subject of potential electoral reform, I tweeted that I thought that the primary function of an MP should be to legislate and scrutinise the government and that the pastoral work could be balanced a bit more with this.

I had a couple of responses from Darrell Goodliffe and Caron Lindsay who both think that the pastoral side of things is very important. I said I would blog about this to explain what I meant a bit more clearly free of the tyranny of 140 character limits!

The dual role of MPs to legislate and hold the government to account while at the same time performing a pastoral role for their constituents seems to me to be a slightly quirky thing. It has evolved over the years to where we are now but with the advent of electronic communications, most MPs nowadays get much more correspondence from their constituents than they ever used to. I suspect with the decline of deference over the last few decades that they also feel more entitled to attend surgeries and discuss their problems with their parliamentary representative.

Now, I need to be careful here so that I am not misunderstood. Keeping in touch with your constituents as an MP is very important. Actually, I would go further than that and say it is a vital part of our democracy. However I wonder if things may be swinging too far and that MPs can sometimes be swamped with case-work and issues that in some cases they are perhaps not the best placed person to deal with. Councillors should and do perform this function and there are lots of other people and agencies who can help but I think that the local MP is the most high profile and visible politician which is why they can become the first port of call.

There are some issues that MPs should and must get involved with if it relates to national issues and/or requires representation to government. I also think surgeries are a very good thing but I wonder if there might be a way to arrange things so that MPs do not necessarily become the first port of call for things and instead only get issues that they are able to help with.

The reason for all of this is because an MP only has so much time and energy and I feel that a good proportion of it should be put into holding the government to account and scrutinising what they are doing as well as contributing to legislation. God knows we need it, especially with some of the half-baked laws that have ended up on the statute books in the last few years!

I am not sure how many MPs agree with me about this. It would be hard for them to say anything I guess because what MP wants to be heard talking about reducing their constituency case-work? I think this is an important issue though and as I say, I am not advocating a massive change, just a rebalancing to the way I thought things were supposed to work perhaps with the public advised better as to where the best place to take their issues to initially is.

I would be interested to hear other people views from all parties about this and am certainly open to persuasion that I have got this wrong and the balance is actually about right.

UPDATE: Costigan Quist has drawn my attention to an article he wrote last November that talks about this issue too.

MP's Salary Dilemma

The story today about Labour peers allegedly being paid for influencing legislation which I have posted about separately here has reminded me of something else I have been meaning to post for a while.

MPs are allowed to have interests outside the house and are allowed to hold down other jobs, consultancies, directorships etc. as long as they declare everything. To many "ordinary" people this seems quite odd as they already have what would appear to be at least a full time job in representing tens of thousands of constituents and also holding the government to account and debating and voting for legislation in the chamber.

The dilemma that many of these MPs face is that although they are currently paid £63,291 (see here for source) this is absolutely huge compared to the average salary (around £25,000 - see here). MPs know this and so they are generally fairly muted when it comes to complaining about their salaries and they daren't try to push it up too much for fear of a voter backlash when they already earn more than 2.5 x average earnings.

The big difference though is that MPs are not really drawn from the "average" population. They are disproportionately represented by lawyers, barristers, business leaders and people from other professions and backgrounds where they could command a salary much higher than £63K. It is unsurprising therefore that there is a feeling amongst some MPs (albeit as I said largely hidden) that they are not very well paid.

They do of course get very generous expenses which to an extent compensates for this. I fully concede that there is a justifcation for some and perhaps a lot of the expenses they are given as it pays for research and admin staff and also accomodation in London which is of course important if the MP does not represent a London seat. However the expenses should only be used for what is necessary. they should not be used to buy plasma TVs and to refit kitchens. The rest of us have to pay for this sort of thing, why should MPs be any different?

My view is that MPs are paid more than enough for the job they do. If they want to earn the sort of money that they could earn outside the Commons then they should apply to be appointed to the office of the Chiltern Hundreds or the Steward of the Manor of Northstead and allow somebody who really wants the job to take their place - there are no shortage of applicants!

I also think that although it is important for MPs to have experience outside the Commons, this should come before they take their seat, not during. This may make it less likely that very young people would become MPs but that may not be such a bad thing as a bit of life experience first is warranted I feel. There would still, I am sure be exceptional politicians who make it there very young.

As for expenses, well I have a few ideas in this area too:

1) MPs researchers and assistants should be paid for directly by the state. There should be monitoring of this to be sure that this is done fairly (e.g. MPs with a particularly "busy" constituency may need more help than some others). The jobs should be given to the best candidate in an open process, not necessarily given to wives, children, friends etc. unless they happen to be the best qualified.

2) The state could purchase (or build, or adapt one or more of its existing buildings) into a large accomodation block for MPs. They would be able to use their flat within this to live in when they needed to be in London and it could operate like a military baracks or halls of residence whereby meals etc. were provided, thus allowing them to concentrate on the busy job in hand that they have. The flats would be furnished to a reasonable standard already. There would be no need to provide money to them for accomodation and they would not realise any capital gains in the end as the property would revert to the state. I understand there are practical problems with this but with the political will they could be overcome.

3) MPs would still be given expenses for things like travel to and from their constituency etc. but all receipts will need to be kept and they would need to put in a expense claim which if necessary may require justifcation like us mere mortals have to.

I realise this may not make me very popular amongst MPs (of all parties) but they have to realise how bad they look to the public and it will take some sort of radical reform like this to restore public confidence in this area.