Are representatives legally obliged to reply to constituents?
WriteToThem is mySociety’s website that makes it really easy to email your elected representatives, even if you don’t know who they are. Every month thousands of people use it to send messages to their MPs, local councillors, and other reps.
WriteToThem also makes things easy for the representatives who get your messages: when they want to respond, they just click ‘reply’ and their response goes directly to the user’s email inbox.
So that’s all great, hooray for us — now we’ve made communication easier between citizens and representatives, we can rest easy, right?
There’s just one fly in the ointment.
Not every message gets a reply.
We know this because two weeks after you use the site, it automatically sends you a short survey to ask if your representative responded — it’s a way for us to check that everything’s working as it should. In years gone by we’ve collated this data into our responsiveness league tables, most recently in 2015–16, but that’s currently on hold while we figure out a way to present a more rounded picture of everything an MP does, not just their email-replying skills.
What’s the law?
Understandably, most people who take the time and effort to contact their representatives would appreciate a response. We say ‘most’ because we’re aware that not every message needs an answer — but even in such cases, it’s often helpful to get at least an acknowledgement.
And, when WriteToThem’s users don’t get a reply, they often get in touch with us with a specific question: whether or not an MP or other representative has an obligation to reply to their constituents’ messages.
So we did a little digging.
As best we can tell, representatives do not have such an obligation.
Perhaps remarkably, there are no laws stipulating how our MPs and other representatives approach their duties.
In fact, a court case back in 2009 saw a constituent claiming that his MP hadn’t done enough to help him — she’d eventually stopped responding to his letters. The judge returned a ruling that MPs have ‘no duty to their constituents’.
What about guidance?
So, there’s no law. The closest thing to rules binding our representatives is a Code of Conduct.
These differ from body to body: MPs have their own Code of Conduct, as do MEPs and Assembly members, and although there’s a general one for councillors, each council publishes its own version which may differ slightly.
Another layer of guidance is provided by political parties’ own rulebooks, which can be found on their websites.
Generally, all representatives’ Codes of Conduct take, as their foundation, the Nolan principles which call upon anyone in public life to adhere to seven high-level values, from integrity to objectivity.
MPs
The MP’s Code of Conduct deals more in broad generalisations than practicalities, and, where it does go into concrete detail, it’s concerned with setting guidelines around financial interests and lobbying.
As such it doesn’t touch on the responsibility to respond to messages from the general public. At most, it says: “Members have a general duty to act in the interests of the nation as a whole; and a special duty to their constituents.”
Members of devolved parliaments
MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament)’s Code of Conduct states that they must:
“take on a constituent’s case when approached, unless they have a legitimate reason for declining it.” and “If an MSP declines to take on a constituent‘s case, they would be expected to inform the constituent of this.”
And similarly, “it is expected that” Welsh Assembly Members:
“will take on a case when approached although it is recognised that there may be legitimate reasons for a Member to decline a constituent’s case.”
‘Case’ here means an issue or problem, so these clauses do not oblige a representative to respond to every message: for example, they do not require them to answer a question or a request that they vote in a certain way.
We did not find any reference to correspondence from the public in the Northern Ireland MLAs’ Code of Conduct.
Local councillors
The Local Government Association (LGA) sets out guidance on the councillor’s role, which states:
Good communication and engagement is central to being an effective councillor. As a local councillor, your residents will expect you to respond to their queries and investigate their concerns.
Again, note that this is an ‘expectation’ rather than a rule or law.
Here are links to the various Codes of Conduct for different types of representative:
House of Lords Code of Conduct
Members of Scottish Parliament’s code of conduct
Welsh Assembly Members’ code of conduct
Northern Ireland Assembly’s code of conduct
LGA guidance for local councillors (you should also check your own council website for its specific code of conduct)
Scottish councillors’ code of conduct
Welsh councillors’ code of conduct
Northern Ireland councillors’ code of conduct
What are representatives doing when they’re not replying to email?
Any representative has to balance two halves of their job:
- The part where they attend meetings, participate in debates and contribute to the legislative process in their place of work (eg, for MPs the House of Commons)
- The part where they deal with their constituents’ issues (called ‘casework’), in the area they represent
A parliamentary Select Committee report from 2007 indicated that “Members have a number of different and competing roles and considerable scope to interpret them as they choose” — in other words, MPs decide for themselves which parts of their role to prioritise. The same report also noted that due to the rise of communication technologies, constituents have ‘become more demanding’ (and this was before the rise in social media!).
What about my letter?
So, as we have seen, your representative might feel a personal obligation to respond to as many constituents’ messages as possible, but they don’t actually have to. It’s really the social or democratic contract that incentivises responsiveness.
You and your representative both know that when the end of his or her term comes, you the electorate can replace them with someone else. That’s what really motivates them to do a good job and especially to be seen to do a good job within their own constituency.
But that’s not much consolation when you’re awaiting a reply that never comes, so in our next post we’ll be looking at what you can do if you don’t receive a response from your representative.
