David Amess: Face-to-face surgery chats vital to keep MPs plugged in to voters’ lives

For almost all MPs, constituency surgeries like the one at which Sir David Amess was murdered are a major part of their work which it is difficult to imagine giving up, even in the face of the evident danger which they represent to their safety.

The regular Friday sessions held in church halls, libraries and community centres across the country take them out of the bubble of Westminster and firmly into contact with the day-to-day worries of the people they represent.

Disputes over housing or anti-social behaviour, worries over sickness or access to welfare benefits or joblessness and complaints about the failings of the local council or police force jostle for MPs’ attention with campaigns for new schools, parking schemes and hospitals and rants on Brexit, immigration or crime.

And, unglamorous though it may seem, many MPs were delighted to be able to return to face-to-face meetings over the past few months after more than a year of interacting with constituents by Zoom and Teams video chats.

Some MPs secretly regard the weekly encounters with “real people” as a chore and think the “social work stuff” is no substitute for the alternative attractions of parliament’s green benches and the TV studios and newspaper columns where they can establish a name for themselves nationally.

Others – like Amess himself – seem to thrive on the chance to get to grips with the nitty-gritty of problems which make a tangible difference to their constituents’ lives. Over the past 48 hours, councillors in Southend have recounted how the MP constantly raised cases brought to him at surgeries and would regularly check up later on whether a particular individual’s application for housing or squabble with a neighbour had been resolved.

Ironically, in a period when ever-louder complaints are heard about MPs being “out of touch” with ordinary people, the reality is that they spend more time listening and responding to their constituents than was ever the case in the past.

Historically, many MPs regarded the gripes of constituents as a matter for local councillors to sort out, and would not live in their constituencies or even visit very often. Winston Churchill was said to return to his Epping seat only for “whistle-stop tours and an occasional summer fete”.

It was not until the 1920s that MPs were even provided with expenses for rail journeys to and from their constituencies, which had previously made regular visits prohibitively expensive for some.

Around the same time, the first events that are comparable to modern surgeries began to take place, with east London Labour MPs Will Crooks and George Lansbury recounting in autobiographies how they were visited in their homes by streams of voters seeking advice on anything from dealing with drunken husbands to poverty wages and health problems.

The History of Parliament blog names Liberal MP Frank Gray as possibly the first to organise regular surgeries, with the first of his 6pm Friday slots attracting just three members of the public in Oxford after his election in 1922, but the sessions soon becoming so popular that they spilled over into Saturday.

The term “surgery” was not attached to these constituency meetings until after the Second World War, when they were still unusual enough to attract comment in the press, and as late as the 1960s surveys found that as many as one in five MPs were still not holding them.

But as traditional class-based voting patterns have broken down, making fewer seats safe for MPs of any party, it has become more and more important for them to be seen by voters not just as the red or blue candidate but as a “good constituency MP”. Time spent in surgeries sorting out thorny problems translates into good word-of-mouth which can make the difference in converting a vulnerable marginal seat into a rock-solid hold.

Even prime ministers are not exempt from the routine, with Tony Blair, David Cameron and Theresa May all noting that ideas and problems raised by constituents fed back into their decisions on a national level – though Boris Johnson is said to be less active in his Uxbridge and Ruislip South seat.

If anything, the advent of electronic means of communication seems to have increased the appetite for in-person meetings with MPs. Voters who are used to being able to get an instant response by firing off an email or tweet are far more likely to believe that their elected representative should be getting involved in their problems than constituents of the past who may have waited days or weeks for a reply to a letter.

A typical MP in the 1950s or 1960s may have received only a dozen letters a week from constituents, while today their offices are bombarded with hundreds of emails daily – some of them invariably including threats of violence or death which have to be taken seriously in the wake of the killings of Sir David and Jo Cox.

But it is the advent of video conferencing websites, popularised during Covid lockdowns, which may now spell the end for the MP’s surgery after 100 years.

Faced with the impossibility of absolutely ensuring their safety and that of their staff, even with appointment booking systems, CCTV, panic buttons and  locks, more and more are now considering telling concerned constituents to book an online chat rather than queuing up at an open-to-all session in a community centre.

Not all agree with Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle’s warning that losing the surgery would amount to “smashing democracy”. For veteran Tory MP Sir Bernard Jenkin, the increasing burden of security and the cost implications for police mean there is little justification for a weekly ritual which “frankly isn’t really necessary” in an era when we can see and speak to people all over the world at the touch of a button.