I have always had a lot of time for Leader of the Commons Jack Staw, but today he managed to irritate me greatly.
Staw, who has so far refused to comment on rumours that he is in fact the Demon Headmaster, is reported by epolitix.com as having said that “Researchers” are responsible for writing all the stupid questions, known colloquially as “merkins” that MPs table.
Straw said, “There has to be recognition by members of the House that if the order paper is absolutely overloaded with questions in industrial quantities, by researchers, in some cases never been seen by the members, then there are bound to be logjams”.
He went on to blame the theyworkforyou website for quantifying how hard MPs work.
Recess Monkey will of course welcome comments from Researchers and other staff on their views of MPs’ questions. I for one believe MPs are generally quite capable of thinking up stupid questions without assistance.
Strangely, Jack neglected to complain about the tradition of PPSs trawling through the backbenches with lists of “helpful” questions to be tabled. I’m sure it was just an oversight.
editor[at]recessmonkey.com
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For anyone who wants to help us tweak and improve the data that TheyWorkForYou publishes so that it makes MPs do more good things (like answer constituency mail) and fewer dumb things (like table pointless questions) we’re holding a public meeting on November 7th to discuss the options. Please email beta@theyworkforyou.com to reserve your place, as space is limited. Someone please ask Jack if he’ll come to say something more constructive
Tom Steinberg said this on July 21st, 2006 at 12:23 am
I’ve added a pledge on pledgebank about this and would encourage people to sign up: http://www.en-gb.pledgebank.com/strawman
James Graham said this on July 21st, 2006 at 12:57 am
I work for an MP and find the Table Office and this issue more generally to be an absolute pain in the proverbial. In my experience mps have no time in their day to sit around tabling questions - it is something they ask their researchers to do for them - therefore blaming researchers is a *bit* unfair.
The blind refusal of the table office to deal with anyone but members also creates problems and significant delays. IMHO if the table office and the house rules relaxed for example by discussing questions with researchers you would get fewer, better drafted questions and the system would work more smoothly.
Also, the government needs to take some of the blame - if the answers they gave to questions were not so anal and designed to give as little information as possible, one would not be forced to ask the same question many times in slightly different ways in some effort to get the piece of information you wanted.
Id rather not say said this on July 21st, 2006 at 8:39 am
To be fair to jack straw, Reading the article he seems to have a point. Theyworkforyou and the like do seem to highlight the number of letters answered, questions answered and debates spoken in. There are positivce elements to these sites (voting record on key issues for example) but i dont think you can say that his criticism was unconstructive. He made it clear what he felt the problem with theyworkforyou.com was, to which anyone can agree or disagree.
If he had jsut said theyworkforyou.com is rubbish, then perhaps there’d be more of a point.
Im
Ade B said this on July 21st, 2006 at 9:33 am
There are too many questions, but the fault lies with MPs. It’s not uncommon for staff to be asked to table 50 questions or more in a week, and researchers do their best to meet the targets by dreaming up all kinds of meaningless information to ask for.
I think that Written Questions should have a longer deadline, to make Named Day Questions a higher priority for answer and a more valuable resource.
Red Tamarin said this on July 21st, 2006 at 11:09 am
My boss always does her own PQs and as a result I am sure we are very low on the theyworkforyou.com table. However, as my boss (and us, her staff) deal with constituents queries speedily and comprehensively (in the most part!), take part in debates, be involved in committees and APPGs and speaks at numerous public meetings on her areas of interest, we tend to get very few complaints from the constituency. However, there have been a few people who think the % votes attended, or the number of WPQs tabled according to Theyworkforyou.com directly equates to the productivity and effectiveness of an MP. Jack Straw was therefore right to raise it as an issue of note.
neukenindekeuken said this on July 21st, 2006 at 5:33 pm