Slashdot Mirror
MP Wants Official Email Address Kept Private
nk497 writes "An MP in the UK has had his official email address removed from the parliamentary website, because he's tired of getting 'nuisance' emails via online campaign websites. MP Dominic Raab's parliamentary.uk email is currently not listed on the House of Commons' website following a spat with online campaigners 38 Degrees. 'Just processing the emails from your website absorbs a disproportionate amount of time and effort, which we may wish to spend on higher priorities, such as helping constituents in real need or other local or Parliamentary business,' he said, threatening to report the group to the government's data and privacy watchdog if they didn't remove the details from their own website. 38 Degrees says Raab gave them his personal email address during the election: 'it's only since he became a member of parliament with a taxpayer funded email address that he's now said he doesn't want to hear from people,' unless they're willing to shell out for a stamp to write him a letter. The lobby group said Raab likely averaged fewer than two emails from their site each day."
raabd@parliament.uk dominic.raab.mp@parliament.uk
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
To put this in a bit of context:
I have at times worked in a central policy department in the UK civil service. Dealing with correspondence from MPs to our Minister, usually passing along letters or concerns from the MP's constituent, is a large part of the work of many junior (and mid-level) officials. In my most recent post during a Parliamentary term, the relatively small team I managed would usually have in the region of 20 such letters needing replies, with a week to turn each one around (and our policy area isn't even a particularly high profile one). For MPs, dealing with correspondence is a pretty big part of their job; representing their constituent's concerns in Parliament is what they are there to do, and is one of the ways they can show they are "in touch" with their constituency. The degree to which the MP chooses to get involved in the issue varies; sometimes the constituent's letter (or e-mail) is passed along with little more than "can I have some information so I can respond", but in other cases, the MP might request a meeting with one of the Department's ministers to discuss the issue further, or if he feels he is not getting a satisfactory answer, might raise the issue on the floor of the House of Commons. While officials draft the responses in these cases, Ministers always check them before they are issued and sometimes make edits, or ask officials to take follow-up action.
In any event, writing to your MP is the most effective recourse for a UK citizen who has a problem with the political establishment and most MPs take their duty seriously. Obviously, you are more likely to get positive engagement from your MP if you are writing about a tangible issue that wouldn't otherwise have come to light (eg. your small business is having problems with the planning system, or you believe your employer is violating health and safety law but have been ignored, or something of that ilk) than about one of the large and controversial topics (such as the Iraq war, or the bank bailouts) and MPs are always going to be less likely to get involved in a case that is clearly motivated by an ideology they don't share. But the fact remains that writing to your MP is far more effective than writing directly to a Minister (or the Prime Minister), as the latter will usually just yield a response drafted by an official that has never been near a Minister.
The problem is that in recent years, the system has been somewhat under siege by various pressure groups. These groups do direct, regular and repetitive mail-shots to MPs, with many of them even providing tools to make it easy for users of their website to join in on the action simply by filling in a form. They operate on the principle of "if we say something often and loud enough, then MPs will conclude we are important or in the majority". In reality, all they tend to do is gunk up the system with spam, as MPs struggle to identify the letters and e-mails from their own constituents, asking for help with issues where the MP might actually be of some use.
The MP in this case was wrong to have his official e-mail address taken off the Parliamentary website. That's where I'd expect that many of his constituents would start looking for his details to contact him. However, the greater fault here lies with the self-righteous pressure groups who see nothing wrong with trampling over the system by substituting volume for reasoned argument and resorting to the tactics of the spammer.