On 08/09/2011 14:30, e-mail timothy.mullen wrote:
I stand by my criticism of the league table and the way it's compiled simply because of that unrealistic timetable. If you extended it to maybe a month to five weeks for a reply (which has been the target in the office in which I worked between 1992 and 2010, and remains so today) then the league table would be more credible.
I'm sorry, but that length of time to reply is itself patently ridiculous. I take your point about MPs having a limited number of staff compared to ministers, but responding to constituents should be one of their top priorities. I've only once had to wait more than a week before getting a reply from my MP (both here and in previous constituencies), and the one exception was accompanied by a profuse apology for the delay.
I also appreciate that responding to a letter is more time-consuming than replying to an email (since it needs to be printed, signed, put in an envelope, addressed and posted), so any general league tables for responsiveness would need to take that into account. But the tables on WriteToThem are based primarily on email responses, since that's how WriteToThem sends the message in the first place.
I think that maybe a lot of the problem is that many MPs and their staff aren't particularly email-savvy, and don't realise that most people who send an email will be happy with a short, informal response rather than waiting for a longer, more formal answer. Letter writers, by contrast, tend to have the opposite expectation, partly because if you've gone to the trouble of writing and posting a letter then you expect the same effort in return and partly because, unlike email, postal mail doesn't lend itself easily to a series of short messages which constitute a dialogue rather than a one-off message/reply.
On a more general note, what is the average number of emails, letters and phone calls that an MP's office usually gets from constituents in a typical week?
Mark -- Sent from my Babbage Difference Engine http://mark.goodge.co.uk http://www.ratemysupermarket.com _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
