Too many MPs are treating their job as a springboard to a lucrative sideline (MPs paid £10m for second jobs and freelance work over past year, 6 August). This practice debases the high office they hold and, by extension, parliament itself. It seems we can no longer count on altruism and vocational motivation in our elected representatives. Therefore it’s time we professionalised the role of MP, to make the post-holder accountable to taxpayers and ensure that they provide excellent value for money. After all, we foot the bill for their wages, expenses and premises.
In most jobs, performance management is used, starting with a clear job description and professional standards to be met. For MPs, this should include mandatory attendance when parliament is sitting, participation in debates when important issues are being considered, giving speeches and answering constituents’ letters, making public appearances, and tackling casework. Annual appraisals, from which basic attendance data is made public and performance targets set, would enable constituents to decide whether they had made the right selection at the ballot box.
Those seeking promotion should be offered the right training for the responsibilities involved, including the shadowing of key civil servants prior to appointment in a ministerial role, perhaps with a nationally recognised qualification along the lines of a professional apprenticeship with a grade and certificate at the end.
Yvonne Williams
Ryde, Isle of Wight
• Britain’s MPs have second jobs because being an MP is not particularly demanding. Most of the work is done by the backroom office staff, for whom MPs get an allowance. Compare the UK (population 67 million) with the US (population 340 million), where 435 men and women serve in the House of Representatives. We can see immediately that MPs must feel grossly underemployed. Combined with the unelected House of Lords, we are forced to conclude that our present system of government is no longer fit for purpose.
Sadly, the only people who can improve it are those who benefit most from its chaotic state.
David Diprose
Thame, Oxfordshire
• Owen Jones rightly criticises the propensity of many MPs to have well-paid jobs outside parliament, even though being an MP is itself supposed to be a full-time occupation (Why do Britain’s MPs hang on to their second jobs? Because our tinpot democracy lets them, 7 August). But what I find even more offensive is the spurious justification usually offered – that these second jobs keep MPs in touch with the “real world” beyond the Commons.
If MPs want to keep in touch with real life in Britain today, let them volunteer as classroom assistants, hospital porters or community police officers, or do shifts at a food bank or Citizens Advice bureau. Any of these would be far more educative than a lucrative post in a corporate boardroom or bank. Besides, elected politicians should already understand what life is like in the real world due to the plethora of problems brought to them by their constituents at MPs’ surgeries.
Prof Pete Dorey
Cardiff University
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
