Recognising the role played by MPs’ staff

Emma Crewe, Professor of Social Anthropology at SOAS University of London

UK members of Parliament (MPs) employ staff to support them in their work. As a UCL Constitution Unit report concluded:

“Today it is almost impossible for an MP to fulfil their multiple roles effectively... without the support of staff.”¹

I would go further – an MP with no staff simply could not meet the expectations of constituents, the media, or citizens.

In 2023 just over 3,500 staff were working for MPs with most MPs employing three to five people. All 650 MPs had at least one employee.²

These staff are hired by MPs and funded through IPSA’s staffing budget, while political party staff are employed using “Short Money” (public funding to cover the cost of opposition parties to do their work).

Funding for MPs’ staff was introduced in 1969 as the “office costs allowance”, amounting to £500 to employ one full-time secretary. With an incredible increase in MPs’ workloads in the last five decades, mostly due to a rise in constituency work and 24/7 news and digital communication, so too the allowance has risen.³

The 2024-25 allowance is set at £268,550 for London area MPs and £250,820 for non-London area MPs and the range of salaries allowed by IPSA span from £22,402 to £55,630.

MPs’ staff roles

Since MPs’ staff work in supporting roles, understanding the work that staff do requires an overview of MPs’ multiple work roles.

In the UK MPs between them have five main responsibilities:

Representing a constituency.
Collectively forming a government, administrating government departments and implementing laws.
Collectively forming the opposition, scrutinising the executive and holding the government to account.
Passing laws (including finance bills or budgets into law) and holding policy debates.
Sitting on select committees that hold inquiries into government, law-making and policy issues.

The reality is even more complex, because often these roles overlap, rise and fall in importance during a parliamentary session or even during a week, depending on whether an MPs is in one of the main large parties or a small one, and which party is in government.

The responsibilities change continually and become entangled in ways that make it hard to separate them.

The impression given by media coverage – with its emphasis on Prime Minister’s Questions and policy arguments on political shows – is extremely misleading. Most MPs and their staff spend far more time in the constituency, in select committee meetings, receiving visitors and preparing for parliamentary debates or law-making than they do talking to the media. But the public rarely see what goes on behind the frontstage of parliamentary politics and journalists or pundits prefer to focus on drama, power struggle and scandals.

Most political work is far quieter even if relentless.

MPs’ staff assist with all these functions, except for supporting government, which is accomplished by civil servants and special advisers employed by government, party political work done by those funded on “Short Money”, and assisting select committees, which is the job of parliamentary officials.

MPs’ staff often belong to the same political party as the MPs but are not allowed to undertake any party political or campaign activity while contracted and paid by IPSA.

Although MPs tend to employ three distinct categories of staff:

working on research and policy (34%)
constituency casework (“executive” in IPSA categories) (39%)
administrative (26%)

There is huge variation, and the staff often help each other out across roles, depending on workloads.

Activities carried out by MPs’ staff⁴

Who are the staff?

Caseworkers have often had experience as social workers, citizens’ advice workers or charity support work.

Researchers similarly are often expected to have had policy-oriented research experience.

In 2019 they tended to be relatively young, only 7% people of colour and slightly more often women.

There are more men in the role of researcher (55% male: 45% female) and more women acting as caseworkers (54% female: 46% male) and administrators (72% female: 28% male), resulting in higher pay for men and more opportunities to make use of a research job as an apprenticeship into politics.

As Rebecca McGee explains in her 2023 report:

“These findings raise a number of concerns. Research staff, despite overwhelmingly being young and male, are employed and paid at a higher level than executive or administrative staff (due to the absence of a level 1 for research). In addition, if jobs at Westminster (and particularly in research) are a gateway to a career as an MP, the results show that the pool of talent is skewed in important respects.”⁵

The ratio of men to women as MPs as opposed as staff is very roughly reversed. (With the 2024 General Election bringing in 40% women as MPs, these numbers will have changed but the predominance of women among MPs’ caseworkers and men among researchers is longstanding and is highly likely to be roughly the same⁶).

The work of staff is strongly influenced by the geographical location and political economy of the constituency that the MP represents.

This also influences whether MPs put their staff in their office at Westminster as opposed to their one in the constituency:

5% had all their staff in Westminster
11% had all in constituency
68% had most in constituency
18% had most in Westminster⁷

While staff in Westminster act as administrators or researchers, constituency staff tend to be administrators or caseworkers.

Case work has increased exponentially in particular over recent decades. MPs are caught in a double bind. Their time is incredibly pressured, and they face ferocious demands from multiple groups to be in Westminster. But their heart is often with their constituency, and they want to respond to the increasing requests from constituents for assistance.

Faced with multiple failures of the state, including local government departments, citizens turn increasingly to MPs and not local councillors to intervene on their behalf. MPs can get the attention from local agencies, and certainly from national ones, more easily that local councillors so they often get positive results.

As most MPs become more and more responsive each year, they become victims of their own success – word gets around the constituency about their positive reputation, so still more people contact them.

Although some regret this shift, it has the advantage of educating MPs about the impact of policies and laws agreed by the Parliament on real people over a period of time.

Constituent response

In practice, it is MPs’ staff who respond most often to the visits, letters, emails, phones and even tweets from constituents asking for help at all times of day and night, sometimes with alarming impatience. They then report back to the MPs at regular interviews.

MPs hold weekly or fortnightly surgeries, set up by their staff, to discuss the more complex cases, but mostly it is the caseworker who represents the MP in assisting constituents.

This case work requires an encyclopaedic knowledge of area and the local services (governmental, voluntary, private companies) as well as excellent relationships with key agencies and officers who might agree to help.

Cases are almost never about only one issue – they are complex, with many strands of difficulty, which constituents point out are never adequately dealt with by one local service.⁸

Staff assess cases about housing, immigration, benefits, health, education, or often a mix, and write/speak on behalf of the MP in representing their constituents’ interests, conveying how urgent the case is so that those agencies can prioritise and act fast when needed.

The range of knowledge needed is in evidence in the guides produced by the Commons Library and a website called W4MP, run by MPs’ staff.⁹

Emotional impact

The work of MPs’ staff can be extremely emotionally demanding.

Emma Crewe and Nicholas Sarra interviewed MPs’ staff in a Scottish constituency and found that there were three main aspects to this emotional labour.

First, the constituency office is always suffused with affect and emotion, as constituents present their cases in the hope that MPs and their staff will deal with complex, multiple, interwoven challenges. They are often there as a last resort, having tried many other avenues. The caseworkers will identify and resonate with the constituents’ difficulties but also have to negotiate with them about how to take it forward. With the huge volume of cases each week, they are forced to treat some as more urgent than others. As I wrote elsewhere about MPs, but it applies equally to their staff:

“They aim to treat all constituents, irrespective of whether they are supporters or even voters, as equally deserving of attention and usually take care to avoid assessing the merits of the case explicitly in their conversation with the constituent. Refusing to take any action at all is extremely rare. But when writing on behalf of a constituent an experienced MP will give hints about the severity of the case … MPs would destroy the goodwill of government and voluntary agency contacts if they gave the impression that fast and time-consuming responses had to be made equally in all cases. So they signal the level of urgency without making it explicit to the constituent.”¹⁰

This can cause frustration among constituents which then creates stress for the staff.

Second, the proportion of cases at least partly about mental health is on the increase – we estimated at least half related to mental stress or illness in this constituency and on talking to other MPs’ staff in other places, they did not find it surprising.

Third, the anger towards politicians, or the state more broadly, can be taken out on their staff, so they have to deal with verbal and even sometimes physical violence.¹¹

Ashley Weinberg has carried out surveys with MPs’ staff in collaboration with the Wellness Working Group¹², and also found many are struggling with the vicarious trauma of helping desperate people and a “worrying upturn” in the number of suicidal constituents seeking help. 42% of MPs’ staff are experiencing psychological distress, which is at least twice as high as the national average.¹³ In the words of an anonymous staffer:

“The days often start the same: working through an inbox filled with abuse, pictures of maimed children in war-torn countries, constituents in desperate need of help, and whatever else the issue of the day happens to be. The phone rings and a distressed voice on the end of the line is contemplating suicide. Or perhaps it’s a victim of childhood sexual abuse relaying details of their awful experiences and seeking support for their mental health.”¹⁴

In recognition of the distress of this work, and increasing threats of violence, Mind has produced a guide for MPs and their staff about looking after their own mental health as they try and help others.¹⁵

Quiet contribution

In effect, much of the work of MPs’ staff benefits both parliament and constituents although their contributions often go unnoticed. They are the “unsung heroes of Westminster”.¹⁶

Parliament has been showing more appreciation recently, for example with a Speaker’s Conference on the employment conditions of MPs’ staff reporting in 2023.¹⁷

Among other recommendations they suggested that it is vital that the public understand the value of MPs’ staff to the effective functioning of representative democracy and that allowances do not form part of MPs’ salaries as they are never used by MPs themselves.

MPs’ staff enhance the effectiveness of our elected representatives, and therefore Parliament more broadly, by responding to constituents’ requests, making use of their specialist technical knowledge and emotional skills to deal with immensely complex cases, but they do far more than this.

The research carried out by MPs’ researchers allows them to respond to the specific policy challenges they are negotiating for in their constituency but also in Parliament (whether intervening in a debate or a select committee inquiry).

It means MPs and others they work closely with can also stay up to date with the latest developments in the causes close to their heart, whether local, national or international rather than relying on political party research that all MPs in their party get access to.

Their staff may promote the MP as well, through local press reports or tweeting out images of them working, but the bulk of their time – the most pressure resource in Parliament – is dedicated more directly to the public and matters of public interest.

Endnotes

McKee, R (2023), “MPs’ Staff, the unsung heroes. An examination of who they are and what they do”, The Constitution Unit. Accessed 8 September 2024, p 17.
“What support are MPs given to do their jobs?”, The Institute for Government. Accessed 1 September 2024.
Gay, O (2005), “MPs go back to their constituencies”, The Political Quarterly, 76(1), p 57-66.
McKee, R (2023), ibid, p 68.
McKee, R (2023), ibid, p 63, 77-80, 91.
“Breakdown of MP staff, role and gender”, IPSA Freedom of Information response (RFI-202005-2). Accessed 29 September 2024
McKee, R (2023), ibid, p 72.
Crewe, E (2021), An anthropology of parliaments, London, Routledge.
Working for an MP website (w4mp) guides. Accessed 8 September 2024.
Crewe, E (2021), ibid, p 72.
Crewe, E and Sarra, N (2021), “Constituency performances: The heart of democratic politics”, (eds.) S Rai, S, Gluhovic, M, Jestrovic, S, and Saward, S (2021), The Oxford handbook of politics and performance, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
For an explanation about the WWG see Working for an MP (w4mp) website guide, “Wellness Working Group”. Accessed 29 September 2024.
“42% of MPs’ Staff suffering psychological distress, study finds”, University of Salford, 13 February 2023. Accessed 8 September 2024. See also Weinberg, A, Warhurst, E and Fairweather, T (2024), “Mental health and well-being of MPs’ Staff”, in Lees-Marshment, J (ed) (2024) Political Management in Practice, London, Routledge.
“‘We can’t switch off’: MP’s staff member reveals mental health pressure”, The Guardian, 23 May 2022. Accessed 5 September 2024.
Working in Westminster: A guide to looking after your mental health, Mind (2023). Accessed 8 September 2024.
McKee, R (2023), ibid.
Speaker’s Conference on the employment conditions of Members’ staff: Second Report, HC 1714, 17 July 2023, p 29.