The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices.
We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take longer to work through. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish blog posts on long running issues where deeper changes would improve how Parliament works.
Previously we’ve written about how it should be easier for MPs to vote, how giving MPs more power over the timetable helps them keep promises to voters, and stand-in (or locum) MPs.
This week our pitch is that Parliament should commission a Citizens’ Assembly to write a job role for MPs and consider how Parliament, MPs and MP support staff should relate to each other.
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A unique role
We think that being an MP should be a more normal and understandable job — and that creating more clarity and structure around the role is good for both MPs and their constituents.
The role of ‘Member of Parliament’ is, for legal and historical reasons, odd. MPs are appointed by 650 elections to 650 separate positions, with a legal status similar to being self-employed. There is no formal connection between an MPs employment and their party, and at the same time no formal idea that they’re supposed to be independent of their party.
While the devolved Parliaments have a requirement that representatives should ‘be accessible to the people of the areas for which they have been elected to serve and to represent their interests conscientiously’, there is no such rule for MPs. This gives a great amount of freedom to MPs, but is in its own way, a trap. In the absence of a clear direction on what they should be doing, it is easy for MPs to be squeezed between party leadership and constituent demands. A clearly defined job role helps evaluate and manage conflicting pressure, and defines the support necessary for the role.
The premise of TheyWorkForYou is in the name — representatives should, in a meaningful way, be understood to be working on behalf of their constituents as a whole, and society in general. But it’s also true that if we’re collectively MPs’ bosses, there are not the structures in place for us to be good employers. If we want to come to a clearer settlement on this, we need a constructive dialogue that goes further than infrequent elections and public polling. We need to meaningfully engage citizens in thought and deliberation about how we can have the best system of representation possible.
Setting standards
We need a way of involving a wider group of people in setting the standards and expectations for what an MP does. One way of doing this would be a Citizens’ Assembly, that brings together a diverse group of people from every part of the country and different ways of life. UCL Constitution Unit’s Democracy in the UK assembly provides a number of useful directions about ethical standards set by MPs (with solid support for a stronger code of conduct); we can go further down this route to explore different ideas of what MPs are supposed to be doing, and give them support to do so.
As a basic task an assembly could be used to define a job description for MPs. What evidence we have suggests this is unlikely to be hugely prescriptive (there is recognition that MPs need to slide between multiple modes of representation) but would be informative about how that better defined role can be supported – and a wider set of questions about the MPs’ role that we could clarify at the same time. Involve have argued that a citizens assembly should play an important part in setting the roles and standards for MPs’ behaviour, and potentially as part of the way that MPs are judged. Introducing deliberative democracy into this process helps fix processes where MPs both set and mark their own homework (seeing deliberation as part of the anti-corruption toolkit rather than a replacement for MPs).
Creating a new conversation
There are wider questions where there are different schools of thought on how Parliament should work. Having citizens weigh in on the balance would help advance arguments and unlock reforms. How much should the government control Parliament? How should MPs fit into that? What is the appropriate scope of casework? What should MPs be spending their time on? How do we make sure they have the resources they need to do that? How can we provide decent working conditions to the representatives and their staff who work on our behalf?
This last point is especially important. While the MP is the only office holder, they have a wider staff to help them support their work. While thousands of people are collectively employed by MPs, they are all employed by individual MPs in small groups. This makes it difficult to impossible for MPs’ staff to raise bullying or abuse issues. Staff groups have proposed staff should be employed centrally, rather than by MPs, but this was rejected by a Speaker’s Conference.
This is a dispute it’d be useful for MPs’ employers collectively to weigh in on. The Democracy in the UK assembly found strong support for the idea that “In the workplace MPs should be subject to the same sanctions as other employees regarding the treatment of staff. Bullying or harassment should not be tolerated.” A Citizens’ Assembly focused on the job role and structures of support would provide direction from the level above MPs on appropriate structures to both be supported and support their staff.
Healthier democratic conversations
For MPs who feel constrained, this is a forum to make the case on how they could be supported to do their job better. For those MPs who use the idea that they are accountable to “the electorate” as a justification that there should be almost no restrictions on their behaviour, citizens’ assemblies are a vital guide to the kinds of standards that citizens will and won’t accept from their representatives.
From our point of view, this would help clarify the approach TheyWorkForYou should take in holding MPs to account — but this would also be helpful as a reset in democratic relations. This debate is often put in “public versus elite” framings that lead to a number of unhelpful attitudes. Views from “the public” of what MPs should do are framed as incoherent and uneducated, in a way that elite discussion almost becomes resentful of the idea that the public are part of the discussion at all.
The ghost of the public is used to justify both underinvestment in democracy, and detachment from the idea the public have anything useful to say on the subject. At the same time, the public has no actual power here. Reforms stall, not because they are popular or not, but because of opposition from those who already have power.
Creating structures to meaningfully involve citizens in this discussion provides a way out of this problem, and could lead to a more constructive discussion on the relationship between citizens and representatives.
Image: Deniz Fuchidzhiev on Unsplash.
