The House Article | Casework Crisis: Increase In Constituency Caseload Takes Its Toll

Illustration by: Tracy Worrall

12 min read9 min

None of this is new. Nearly two decades ago the Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB)  expressed concern that MPs’ “casework appears to be growing inexorably”.

At the time MPs’ offices were complaining that they were dealing with a few hundred letters a week, as well as phone calls and the occasional, still relatively novel, email. Today MPs routinely post casework figures on their social media that imply they are dealing with tens of thousands of cases a year.

Some of the drivers are well understood: public services in decline, the pandemic, and technology that eases communication. But also at the heart of the ever-expanding workload is a deep confusion over what MPs, shared in no little measure by the members themselves, are actually for.

The absence of reliable data on casework illustrates the point. Speak to somebody in an MP’s office and they can give you figures on their caseload, now usually drawn from the casework management software that many use.

But – because MPs are effectively treated like 650 small businesses – nobody sees it as their job to collect and collate this data. This makes it difficult to avoid over-generalising about their experiences, especially given that constituencies can vary considerably, as can MPs’ own approaches to their work: some still have earnings from employment outside of the Commons, although the nature of this work varies as well.

Necessary caveats aside, it is clear that many MPs, irrespective of party, are experiencing high workloads that have sharply increased even in the last few years.

When Hollie Wickens first began working for a Labour MP in the late 2010s, the office might expect to receive around 1,000 emails per month. Her current MP’s office, she says, can now receive double that. Ben Lake, the Plaid Cymru MP for Ceredigion Preseli, has likewise noticed an increase. In 2017, when he was first elected to Parliament, he might open 40 new cases per month – compared to 150 per month now. While numbers have been steadily on the rise for decades, “Covid changed everything,” says Lake. Initially, many MPs thought that the rise in casework during the pandemic would eventually subside. But it never has.

Demand has not only increased: it has done so more consistently across the year. The dips in casework that used to happen over the summer have faded, meaning that there is less chance to catch up. “We’re just keeping our noses above water most of the year,” says Charlotte Nichols, Labour MP for Warrington. Estelle Warhurst, an MP office manager with over 20 years’ experience, uses strikingly similar language: “There’s no downtime any more. No chance to catch up. We’re fighting to keep our head above water.”

Within these numbers are two main categories of correspondence: casework, and policy and campaign enquiries. Though they can entail different amounts of work, both are on the rise.

Policy and campaign enquiries – which can range from specific questions about an MP’s stance on a particular issue to mass-generated campaign emails – tend to make up a larger share of the inbox than casework.

Although casework may be a smaller part of the inbox, it usually entails more work. Some pieces of casework can be straightforward to deal with, while others are much more complicated. And it isn’t always easy to initially judge what work will be required. Warhurst points out that the issue a constituent presents with may only be the tip of the iceberg. One piece of casework could generate several email chains, as well as calls and meetings. And it can involve working with government departments, local councils, NHS trusts, or even private companies providing public services. Navigating this is a skill, and some MPs seek out staff with experience in addressing the kinds of issues that crop up time and again in their casework, for example SEND.

Because both casework and policy enquiries are growing so much, MPs must prioritise. Generally – and unsurprisingly – those wanting specific and sometimes urgent help tend to get dealt with first. When it comes to dealing with policy and campaign enquiries, approaches vary. Some MPs will try and write individual responses where they can, especially to specific policy enquiries (rather than mass campaign emails). Lizzi Collinge, who represents Morecambe and Lunesdale for Labour, points out that this is often a helpful way of thinking through policy issues. But, Collinge says, it takes time.

The trade-offs are often not understood by the public. This can drive frustration. Sometimes people assume that they’ve received a “boilerplate” response that has actually been specifically written for them.

Put together, all this can exert a toll on both MPs and staff – even if most will say it can be rewarding. In a 2025 staff survey, more than half agreed it could be “emotionally draining”. Laura Gherman, who previously worked for a senior Conservative MP, says burnout is a growing problem. “Nothing we do ever feels good enough,” adds Wickens. MPs are not immune to this either. It is “relentless”, to the extent that you can begin to question whether you’re doing a good enough job, says Nichols, who estimates that she can have 400 outstanding emails at any one time.

Then there is the nature of some of the work. Warhurst is aware that staff can sometimes find themselves dealing with constituents in the midst of severe mental health crises to the point of being suicidal. This is not the kind of thing that can simply be forgotten about at the end of the working day.

Beyond the impact on staff is the deeper issue of what this rising tide of work is doing to MPs’ abilities to do other work. Almost two decades ago, the SSRB fretted that casework “detracts from [MPs’] other roles of scrutinising legislation and holding the executive to account”. Scepticism about MPs’ roles as ‘super-councillors’ has persisted for years, but have we normalised something that should be aberrant?

Casework has “taken over MPs’ offices”, says Gherman, to the extent that it can make it hard to deal with anything else. Lake agrees that “MPs cannot be omnicompetent”, arguing that “we need more MPs with a bit of bandwidth to think” about legislation, as well as big policy challenges.

Government and public services are often a confusing patchwork… But everybody knows that they have an MP

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The plain truth is that the way that many MPs perform their roles is shaped more by facts on the ground –  in particular, rising casework – than by a broader society-wide debate about what the purpose of MPs is.

Marcial Boo, who headed Ipsa (Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority), for six years, says “every MP has their own view on what should change”. That no one body speaks for MPs makes it difficult to reach agreement – even if one was possible.

Some want more resource, others more flexibility. Others focus on increasing staff pay bands and giving more opportunities for progression in an effort to boost retention. AI might help to some degree – but even if MPs were able to agree on what steps to take, many of these things would only help to manage the growing caseload and its effects, rather than deal with the factors driving it. As Dr Rebecca McKee, an expert on MPs’ staffing arrangements, wrote in a 2019 report, changes “have offered relatively short-term solutions and the evolution of staff funding has lacked an explicit overarching vision of the role of an MP, what support they need, and how it can most effectively be delivered”. A more sustainable approach would be to ask some fundamental questions about what is driving rising caseloads and what this means for MPs.

A key driver of rising caseloads is what the mySociety researcher Alex Parsons calls “failure management”, in which MPs are increasingly first and last resort for constituents experiencing problems from across bits of the state. One MP echoed this, reflecting that their inbox indicates “everybody seems to be under an inordinate amount of pressure” and often deals with people “who have been badly let down” by other services, that are themselves overstretched.

This highlights another driver of ever-higher caseloads: confusion about which bits of the state do what, and where to go to get issues dealt with. Government and public services are often a confusing patchwork in the UK, meaning it is hard to know who has primary responsibility for a particular issue or the power to solve it. But everybody knows that they have an MP. Many of the issues that come up in inboxes, like potholes or planning, are somebody else’s responsibility.

Constituents can think that MPs have more power than they do. Hollie Wickens found when she first began working for an MP that “people think they are Batman and can go and solve any problem”.

These factors are underpinned by the incentives that many MPs face. Clearly, many parliamentarians have a strong incentive to try and help constituents because they went into politics to try and help people – and casework is a direct, tangible way of doing that. This incentive is even stronger given the very difficult situations that can arrive in the inbox. “MPs think they can do everything and want to do everything,” says Gherman.

Alex Parsons has another take on this. He suggests that the ability of the average backbencher to make policy or legislative change is constrained to the extent that it can be more rewarding for them to focus on helping individual constituents. Because there aren’t good mechanisms in place for many MPs to aggregate their casework and use it to bring about broader change, they instead pursue casework as a sort of “fragmented ombudsman” in which they “are poking the big state when it goes wrong, but not doing it in a joined up way”.

But there are also political incentives. Being regarded as a responsive and engaged MP that is active in the constituency can clearly have electoral benefits. The SSRB suggested as much in 2007, stating that “some MPs appear to welcome or accept [rising casework], at least in part because of the opportunity it offers for them to raise their profile with their constituents”. It is hardly surprising that MPs respond to this – but it goes to show once more how important public views and expectations are about what their elected representatives should do. As Lizzi Collinge puts it, an MP is likely “to receive more praise for spending an hour in a church hall than an hour in a select committee”.

There are no easy ways to unravel these problems. If it is hard to get agreement from MPs on practical steps to address the pressures many of them face, then it is likely to be even harder to reach a consensus on how to tackle the underlying causes of those pressures. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try. And much of this is about more than the views of MPs and their staff, though those matter: it’s about what the public wants, expects and needs.

A recent experiment by Ipsa provides one potential starting point for these overdue public debates. In the autumn of 2025, Ipsa ran its first ever citizens’ forum on MPs’ pay and funding, bringing together 23 members of the public to hear from a range of experts about the workings of MPs and Parliament. At the end of the programme, members of the forum published a statement. “We were surprised to learn of the amount that goes on behind the scenes,” it read. “An important lesson… is that, for many people, what MPs do on a daily basis is not at all clear, and this needs to be the starting place for meaningful discussion on MPs’ role, pay and funding.” This was not the first attempt to understand what the public want from their representatives. Several years previously, in 2022, a citizens’ assembly on democracy, run by the Constitution Unit and Involve, recommended that Parliament play a stronger role in scrutinising government policy and legislation. It remains to be seen what effect, if any, these kinds of efforts will have. But both the citizens’ assembly on democracy and Ipsa’s citizens’ forum highlighted the way that better public awareness of what their elected representatives are doing can start to generate useful discussions.

None of this may feel much like a priority when there are so many other urgent challenges to deal with. But we have to question whether a system which often leaves the public frustrated, and is leaving many MPs and staff exhausted and struggling, is serving anybody in the way that they want. As Marcial Boo puts it, “We could carry on like this for decades. But should we?”

Calculating Casework

With the absence of  any consistent data on workload, a more creative approach is required to find hard numbers. One way of getting a sense of the scale of the issue is to trawl MPs’ social media accounts, which many use to provide updates on casework. 

At the end of 2025, for example, some MPs used Facebook posts to sum up their year in casework. Stuart Anderson, the Conservative MP for South Shropshire, posted that he had dealt with over 9,500 cases during 2025. Up in Halifax, Labour’s Kate Dearden wrote that she had resolved 8,925 cases and responded to 16,764 emails. Dearden’s colleague in Portsmouth South, Stephen Morgan, posted that he’d responded to 21,142 inquiries and handled 11,000 cases. Over in St Albans, the Lib Dems’ Daisy Cooper had resolved over 9,630 cases; Andrew Pakes, Labour (Co-op) MP for Peterborough, over 8,200; and the Conservative James Wild, in North West Norfolk, 6,825. 

These were all figures for just one year. Over the course of an MPs’ time in office, the numbers can be eye watering: Luke Evans posted in February 2025 that he had dealt with over 32,500 enquiries since he was first elected Tory MP for Hinckley and Bosworth some 1,900 days before.

Alice Lilly is a senior researcher at The Institute for Government