Administration CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Kate Green MP
Many thanks for the invitation to offer views on induction arrangements for new MPs.
These are entirely personal views, and in no way intended to detract from the very warm welcome I received from staff everywhere I went. Everyone seemed pleased to see and meet new members (!), keen to get to know us, and anxious to help us in every way they could. I really want to place on record my appreciation for the friendliness and patience I encountered everywhere I went.
But in 30 years of working life, I have never found myself in such an alien working environment. Not having an office for the first several weeks left me totally disoriented, unable to focus on getting to grips with the job, and very stressed. Emily Thornberry very kindly accommodated me at first, but without her kindness, and had I not inherited experienced and very competent staff from my predecessor, my constituents would undoubtedly have suffered, as I simply wouldn’t have been able to deal in any sort of systematic way with their issues, queries and problems, and would have been left with a terrible backlog. I appreciate the complexities of office allocation, but if anything could be done to speed that up, it would help.
A map of the estate would be useful!
I understand that IPSA have confirmed that, in future, new MPs will not be left ludicrously out of pocket while awaiting reimbursement for accommodation and office set-up costs. This didn’t greatly affect me, but I am conscious of the pressure it put on colleagues. It was frankly intolerable. I hope the committee will ensure the new processes operate effectively so that no new MP is left ever again having to fund set-up costs out of their own resources. It is particularly disastrous for those who don’t have private means.
On staffing, I found, and still find, an exasperating mix of micro management of my staffing decisions (why does IPSA dictate job titles, for example?), complexity (the guidance for MPs section, though improving , is still quite hard to navigate—finding even something as basic as pay scales usually takes me a few minutes to unearth), and poor service design (why can we only call IPSA in the afternoon, and why does it take 24 hours to get an email response to the simplest staffing query). Every time I recruit a new staff member, it takes a huge chunk of my and my office manager’s time to sort the paperwork. Anything that could streamline the process would help both new MPs, and now when coping with changes to existing staff teams.
My fault entirely, but I missed almost all of the early training sessions because I didn’t realise they were happening until too late (a result of living in office chaos, see above!) More advertising of these events, including by personal email to new MPs, would help. The session I did attend (the initial welcome session in the first week, held in the Chamber) was excellent. I especially welcomed meeting the senior staff. The security briefing was useful.
I understand I should have been presented with some sort of information pack by the returning officer at my election. I wasn’t. That’s not the fault of Parliament, of course, but drawing together an essential pack of information, in one place, unfailingly delivered to every new MP, would be invaluable.
Finally, I recommend a process is established for gathering very early and systematic feedback from the 2015 intake. I still think it’s an alien working environment. But a lot of my early impressions have begun to fade. Asking new MPs in their first few weeks about their experiences would I’m sure offer an interesting and useful perspective. It would be great if the Committee could put this in hand.
26 January 2013