How do you calculate the value of an MP? It is a question that many MPs themselves have difficulty answering.

On the one hand, MPs have a phenomenal workload. A Hansard Society report on life as experienced by those who entered the House in 2005 (A Year in the Life, by Gemma Rosenblatt) found that they worked 71 hours per week when the Commons was sitting.

Constituents e-mail them 24 hours a day and expect an immediate response. Half their time is spent on constituency work, and 15 per cent each in the chamber and on committees.

As Greg Mulholland, Lib Dem MP for Leeds North West, put it: “Someone asked, ‘What’s it like living in London?’ I said, ‘I don’t live in London — I’m an MP.’ I explained that I come down on the train on a Monday, come in to the office, put my laptop on and then go to listen to a debate, or committees, or briefings. I go home again on Thursday. In that time I never leave the place, except to go back to my flat, which is 20 minutes away . . . It’s very, very institutionalised.”

The question is what parliamentarians actually do — and what they achieve — rather than how many hours they work. MPs who have had other careers, and particularly those who have been in local government, feel an impotence when they arrive in the Commons.

On the one hand, there is their legislative function. But with a pliant body of MPs and ruthless party machines, the public is entitled to ask whether that amounts to very much. With honourable exceptions — Labour’s Frank Field particularly stands out– MPs do little to apply any individual thought to the legislation before them. Why elect and pay somebody who will obediently troop through the voting lobbies at the end of a whip? Watch an MP go off to vote: he will ask colleagues en route how they are supposed to be voting on this one.

Then there is the constituency role. MPs have little direct control over constituents’ lives — power lies with local councils, housing associations and health authorities — but a letter from an MP can open doors or unblock a bureaucratic jam.

It is a sign of their powerlessness at Westminster that some MPs find this letter-writing the most satisfying part of their job. How much do you think it is worth? I once sat through an MP’s surgery and the only people who came to her for help, in writing to the Home Office, were immigrants and asylum-seekers. None had a vote.

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