The UK Parliament’s website lists email and website details for all the current MPs. A series of spots checks shows the data to look accurate (though of course there may be one or two errors in there somewhere). So I’ve been counting. And then, of course, I’ve drawn three barcharts.
They show in turn, what percentage of Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs:
- Have no public email address provided on the Parliament website (there’s no Lib Dem bar, because they all have one),
- Have no website addresses listed on the Parliament website (and Parliament is reasonably generous at listing sites that are really sub-sites of something larger), and
- Have neither a public email address nor a website listed.
So without further ado, here are the bars:
Personally, I’m quite surprised at just how many Labour and Conservative MPs don’t have either. For both it’s under 5%, but given the way the internet is so heavily used by the public now, the responsibilities of an MP to make themselves available to people, and not forgetting the staff and other assistance available to MPs (including having a Parliament email address set up for all of them), why would any MP have neither a public email address nor a website?
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6 Comments
Incredible piece of research. No suprise that the liberal democrats lead the way.
Come on, Mr. Younger-Ross, you’re letting the side down!
Well done! Useful to know. Of course, merely having a website (for example) gives no idea about its quality, value or how much effort is being put into it; but trying to evaluate that would be a nightmare indeed!
For well over six years now, I have put a lot of effort into maintaining my own website at local level, and tried to make it far more of a useful resource than a party political instrument. While this is unlikely to ever give me Brownie Points in the world at large, it is of far greater benefit to my electorate.
I mention this purely as a (hopefully!) thought-provoking exercise, as I am such a strong believer in on-line communication that I applaud your efforts and wish for a better quality (rather than quantity) of on-line presence by our elected representatives.
That’s quite a strange bar chart for a Lib Dem blog to be producing.
From the looks of things, it’s a two horse race between Labour and the Tories, with the Lib Dems in a very poor third.
Shome mishtake, shurely? I hope you run this one past Chris Rennard.
Email addresses ought to be compulsory in this day-an-age.
Not sure about the websites though. Have you looked at most MPs websites – dreadful parochial pages of self-publicity, with very little substance and almost nothing on the big questions of the day.
I’d rather they spent their time and MY money either running the Country or meeting the people they are supposed to represent.
With websites, are we asking them to create something for the sake of it? It would be interesting to see what the traffic to them is like. I suspect the likes of Iain Dale, Devil’s Kitchen et al receive more hits in a day than these folks do in a year.
This is not strictly true, Parliament do not check their records regually and when I have tried to update the details of my mp (10-15 times) this has still not happened. Many of the details on the parliament website are inacurate and it seems to be chance whether they get your details correct so to be honest what you have said here doesn’t hold much water. Sorry!