Does Jack Straw not have a point?

Much vitriol has been unleashed on the web today (from all sides) following Jack Straw's comments that websites such as TheyWorKForYou.com are causing a problem by making people's analysis of MP's performance "quantitative rather than qualitative".

The extrapolation being drawn is that Mr Straw objects to the sort of openness and accountability that such sites bring (see our previous story on David Borrow for a good example). This is, I think, slightly unfair. If you read what he says, the point he is making is a perfectly valid one. If we, as the public, decide to measure our MPs on the number of EDMs they submit, or speeches they make, then that is what they will seek to do. Put another way, if you simply measure the effectiveness of a system by how many times it performs "action x" then the purpose of the system becomes "perform action x as much as possible".

This is the same flawed systems analysis that led to the government deciding that waiting lists were the sole measure of a hospital's performance. What happened? The objective of a hospital became to have small waiting lists, as opposed to having short waiting times, or happy patients, or high standards of hygiene.

We we rely completely on numbers to judge the effectiveness of our MPs, then we'll get exactly what we deserve, MPs that submit huge numbers of daft questions, which is the point hidden behind Jack Straw's poorly chosen words.

Comments

[James Graham]

You're missing an important point:

"If we, as the public, decide to measure our MPs on the number of EDMs they submit, or speeches they make, then that is what they will seek to do."

There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that that is what the public do, and that websites like TheyWorkForYou are about providing content first, stats second (complete with disclaimers). The Parliament websites provide neither.

There IS an important debate to be had about metrics. TheyWorkForYou are leading it.

[Aaron 'Teejay' Trevena]

I think mr straw is using a straw man - theyworkforyou provides transparency so you can see how your MP votes, and whether he is one of those pointless sheep who asks toadying questions or asks questions about important local issues.

Seeing this makes your MP accountable, and if like several lib dem MPs you discover they failed to vote on things like ID Cards, etc you can rightly complain.

I only wish we had something similar for our pretty much unaccountable MEPs - I know what my local MEP is doing, but it's impossible to see what our lib dem MEP is doing and last time I looked he was voting for software patents despite there being a party policy against them as well as failing to respond to email requests.

Maybe if we had the same level of transparency for our MEPs we'd actually get responses to emails - the responses statistics for faxyourmp have shown just how responsive MPs really are - some are very good, and some are very poor, and most are mediocre.