By Stephen Holden Bates, Caroline Bhattacharya and Stephen McKay
Just like in Family Fortunes[i] but by chance rather than by design, 100 people responded to our survey[ii] about the importance of different elements of MPs’ work in the UK Parliament.[iii]
From a score of one to five (with five being the most important), respondents were asked to rate the importance of a non-exhaustive list of parliamentary activities. As can be seen in Table 1, contributing to the work of Select Committees is considered the most important aspect of MPs’ work by quite a distance. Next, bunched together quite closely, are, in order, debating in the Chamber, Public Bill Committee (PBC) work and tabling Written Questions (WQs). There is then a bit of a gap to tabling Private Members’ Bills (PMBs) and then another to introducing and to signing Early Day Motions (EDMs).
| Rank | Activity | Average Score (max = 5; min = 1) |
| 1 | Contributing to the work of Select Committees | 4.12 |
| 2 | Debating in the Chamber (including Westminster Hall) | 3.81 |
| 3 | Contributing to the work of Public Bill Committees | 3.60 |
| 4 | Tabling Written Questions | 3.54 |
| 5 | Tabling Private Members’ Bills | 2.73 |
| 6 | Introducing Early Day Motions | 1.70 |
| 7 | Signing Early Day Motions introduced by another MP | 1.43 |
None of this is perhaps particularly surprising. Select committees are often considered both to be Parliament ‘at its best’ and to overshadow Public Bill Committees, and the House of Commons has traditionally been seen as a deliberating parliament par excellence.
Although we don’t, of course, have enough respondents to draw robust conclusions, what may be considered more intriguing results come when we look at the rankings of different types of respondents. For example, female and male respondents both ranked the activities in the same order as in Table 1 but, interestingly, female respondents ranked each activity at least 0.29 and as much as 0.67 higher than male correspondents. Furthermore, as shown in Table 2, while academics, MPs and their staff, and parliamentary staff agree that tabling PMBs and introducing and signing EDMs are the 5th, 6th and 7th most important activities respectively, there is disagreement at the top of the rankings. MPs and their staff appear to place greater importance on the talking elements of Parliament, ranking debating in the Chamber first. Academics, on the other hand, rank debating in the Chamber fourth, seemingly placing greater importance on the working elements of Parliament and, in particular, committee work and WQs.
| Activity | Rank | ||
| Academics | MPs & their Staff | Parl. Staff | |
| Contributing to the work of Select Committees | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| Debating in the Chamber (inc. Westminster Hall) | 4 | 1 | 2 |
| Contributing to the work of PBCs | 2 | =3 | 4 |
| Tabling Written Questions | 3 | =3 | 3 |
| Tabling PMBs | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Introducing EDMs | 6 | 6 | 6 |
| Signing EDMS introduced by another MP | 7 | 7 | 7 |
These results might raise questions about how different groups of people who variously engage with Parliament understand its importance[iv] and place different emphases on the functions that it fulfils – and should fulfil – in our political life. Such differences might perhaps be fruitfully explored in future qualitative work.
[i] Or Family Feuds in the US, or Familien-Duell in Germany.
[ii] The survey was run as part of Stephen Holden Bates’ 2021-22 Parliamentary Academic Fellowship, which was funded by the UKRI/ESRC Impact Acceleration Account, and is part of on-going work looking at specialisation in the UK House of Commons.
[iii] 100 people answered our online survey between 22nd May and 18th July 2023. The survey was aimed at experts, although we allowed anyone to answer, and was distributed via Twitter, the newsletter of the UK Political Studies Association’s Parliaments Specialist Group and through email contacts. Of the 100 respondents, 30 were parliamentary staff in the House of Commons, 15 were academics, 13 were MPs, 12 worked for MPs, and 10 were parliamentary staff beyond the HoC, with the other 20 compromising members of the public, journalists, people who work for think tanks, and ‘other’. Overall, 30 respondents were female, 63 were male and seven preferred not to say; no respondent said their gender was not the same as the sex they were assigned at birth. Seven respondents said they belonged to a group which was considered an ethnic minority in the country in which they worked, 86 said they did not belong to such a group and seven preferred not to say. Two respondents were removed for the analysis presented in this blog, as there were problems with their answers and/or they did not complete the survey properly.
[iv] Left deliberately undefined in the survey because we didn’t want to impose our understanding of what activities were/should be considered important within the UK Parliament on the respondents.