Mark, Two very quick points, as I have only 20 minutes more online, and an inbox chock-full of other stuff.
1. In my experience it's not a case of MP's not being internet savvy, but more a case of being advised both by House of Commons staff and Party's themselves, not to send anything other than acknowledgements by email (I know this is a bug-bear of groups like Friends of the Earth who actually include a final paragraph encouraging reply by email to conserve paper), but that's the advice MP's (certainly up to the 2005 intake) received. 2. On average, taking into account letters and emails, our office would reckon on 100-120 contacts a day to be average for a weekday; triple that on a Monday. That also does not take into account casework from weekend surgeries (which, yes, most MP's, unlike Sir Stuart Bell *do* still hold in one form or another), and, perhaps equally significantly, time-consuming phone calls, of which one normally breeds three or four others trying to get a resolution to a constituent's often urgent contact. That is me definitely done. Tim On 8 September 2011 14:58, Mark Goodge <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 <http://www.ratemysupermarket.com> > > > ______________________________**_________________ > developers-public mailing list > developers-public@lists.**mysociety.org<[email protected]> > https://secure.mysociety.org/**admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/** > developers-public<https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public> > > Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/**admin/lists/mailman/options/** > developers-public/timothy.**mullen%40ntlworld.com<https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/timothy.mullen%40ntlworld.com> >
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