Westminster has a secret... MPs don't do anything

Do you sometimes wonder what MPs actually do? People think the country is in dire straits; over half believe civil unrest is imminent, and things seem to be falling apart. But what is your MP doing about it? While we hear their demands over the airwaves and their gossip in the papers, Westminster has a secret: MPs don’t legislate.

Our Members of Parliament are meant to debate and decide on the laws that govern us. The trouble is, they don’t. First of all, Parliament rarely sits on Fridays, waits till mid-afternoon to start on Mondays, and Thursdays are siphoned off for backbenchers. The time to debate government legislation is already far smaller than it appears. More so, even when they are sitting, very necessary questions take up already precious parliamentary time. Though we are often told the time to pass legislation is the most valuable thing in politics, we don’t treat it that way.

You might think that the state of council funding, the armed forces, or the economy in general would necessitate fervid activity. The truth is that as I write this, in the last 7 days of parliamentary time, only 41% of the time in the House of Commons chamber has been spent debating government legislation.1 The first duty of an MP is to make the nation’s laws, but they spend little of their time doing that.

It gets worse: not only is debating rare, but debaters are harder to find. In the same period as above, 212 out of 650 MPs — less than a third of the total number — contributed to debates in the chamber. That doesn’t include written questions or PMQs etc., but the bread-and-butter work of Parliamentarians has fallen by the wayside. We are often told that we need higher-calibre, better-paid MPs, but the truth is many now are just not doing what their job was originally intended to be.

I haven’t even got to the quality of MPs’ contributions. Most are not very long and are solely clip fodder for constituency Facebook groups. There is also significant evidence of speeches being written by AI. Who can blame MPs for staying quiet when those who speak say so little of worth?

Not everything is the fault of MPs; the current system militates against them doing their jobs. For one, their office budget is swallowed up by staffing costs. Most of these are caseworkers working on local issues, and thus having the breadth to minutely go through bills is difficult. The rise of the MP as a super-councillor, the only person who can get anything done, is a longstanding issue. For various public bodies, a letter from an MP has become the only way to ensure an adequate response. This, along with the continued strain on local councils and public services, means MPs’ attentions have been stretched well beyond what their role originally entailed. There is an irony that devolved parliaments take up much of this strain from MPs, and so separatist legislators like those in the SNP have far more time to consider broader issues of government than their English counterparts.

We spend endless hours on political drama and rigmarole, but the basic fact is MPs aren’t doing their jobs. They might get drinks with journalists, brief stakeholders, and make a speech every 5 years, but when it comes to legislation they are close to irrelevant. We saw a rebellion over the welfare bill, but we haven’t had any legislative news since. What should be the drumbeat of political life has become an embarrassing interruption. Our politicians might be bad, but our legislators don’t exist.