Out campaigning yesterday, I bumped into one of the guys who started faxyourmp.com, theyworkforyou.com etc – he’s one of my constituents.

If you don’t know the sites – they make it easy for the public to contact us MPs, find out what we’ve been doing, how hard we’ve been working, how we voted on different issues etc. All good stuff – and I think that even after having become an MP myself!

Having these sites is a bit like being performance managed – and basically it’s good and keeps us on our toes. As with any system of counting, there is a risk that the numbers don’t really tell the full story – or that people adjust their behaviour to come top of the stats. But they do a pretty good job of trying to deal with that – e.g. when mentioning how good MPs are at responding (or not!) to correspondence they also mention the volume they receive – because of course, the less you get, the easier it is to respond quickly to everything. (As for me? I come in the top 1% for volume of work and despite that am in the top 5% of response standard).

However, as I said to him, the only thing I found aggravating was when someone (and there are a few) faxed me every day or twice a day some query or other – because you then either end up giving them huge amounts of time at the expense of other people – or your “performance figures” ended up looking worse. He thought the solution, which they were looking at, was to have some sort of filter that only counted one contact per week per constituent in the performance figures.

He also said that lots of MPs (not me) were really grumpy with the site for measuring them at all! Well – I think that is the wrong attitude in principle. But also – the best way of getting measured sensibly is to engage constructively – as with this example of multiple contacts from one person problem. The team behind the sites do seem to make reasonable efforts to understand how things look from the MPs‘ side of the fence too – for example, I’m pleased that they recognise the vast difference in caseloads between seats like Hornsey & Wood Green (and other similar seats) and say the shires. He said there was no comparison – and yet there is no differential in the funding of all seats regardless of amount of casework. It was just nice to have that recognised by someone who measures such things.

So – if you are a member of the public – do use their excellent sites, and if there are any fellow MPs reading this – embrace the sites, don’t hate them!