What do MPs do?

Find you a home? Get you off parking fines? Manage the NHS? The role of an MP is frequently misunderstood and it is all our fault. Part of a series on understanding parliamentary politics.

Society is a pressure cooker. You are the safety release valve.

So said a very wise police superintendent soon after I was elected. And he was right. But what do MPs actually do?

Conservative MPs in the House of Commons, before the 2024 election

Judging by the problems brought to me by constituents over 14 years, members of the public believe MPs:

• Allocate housing,

• Process immigration cases,

• Appeal benefit decisions,

• Find school places,

• Overturn court decisions,

• Get the bins emptied,

• Plan housing development,

• Get you off parking tickets and speeding fines,

• Call off the police when you are committing criminal offences, and

• Help you to - and I am not kidding - return unwanted parcels.

This is a tiny selection of the things brought to me and my team as an MP. None of them is the job of an MP, even though trying to help across a wide field is rightly routine when the system fails and people are in distress. I am grateful to my caseworkers that we achieved so much for local people in unlocking bureaucracy and correcting injustice.

And yet the functions I list are not the responsibility of an MP.

If you listened to local political activists, you might add to the list:

• Managing the NHS,

• Directing schools how to run themselves,

• Telling the police their priorities,

• Conducting foreign policy, and

• Influencing legal processes in other countries.

Again, none of these things is the responsibility of an MP or within the power of a back-bench MP. They are mostly not functions even of ministers: conducting foreign policy is the exception.

This post is about what MPs are for and what they do. Once again, I aim to be astonishingly frank to assist readers to understand the fundamental forces driving politics and public policy.