The Labour Party has just finished having its annual conference by the seaside.
Amidst all of the in-fighting, lunatic fringe groups and hapless idealism there’s a purpose the Party is trying to work towards. It is trying to give the impression it is a party that is electable to Government. The party’s own website states that its aim is “To build a future that everyone in Britain can be proud of.” The party considers itself as a democratic fair-minded social movement as well as a political party.
Let’s take a look at the kind of future that The Labour Party would have us live in by examining the behaviour of one of their MP’s today, and the party’s response overall to the MP’s repeated failures to act on behalf of a constituent. It’s clear that The Labour Party does not like dissenting voices: this can be seen in the way significant numbers of members and their views have been marginalised within the party in the last few years.
I am unfortunate enough to live in the constituency of Yvette Cooper MP. Elected originally in the Labour landslide of 1997 she has been MP for Castleford, Pontefract and Normanton since then. She is married to former MP Ed Balls.
Early warning signs regarding the quality of the representation the constituency was saddled with came in 1998 when The Daily Mail revealed that in her wedding to fellow MP Ed Balls local party members who wished to go to the reception were charged an additional fee on top of their overnight accommodation for their attendance at the wedding. This additional fee was used to pay off the costs of the venue hire. In 2014 it was reported that Balls and Cooper used the unreformed expenses schemes to pay £655,000 for a house in Stoke Newington. The pair were subject to various claims during the expenses scandal, the most notorious of which was the fact they ‘flipped’ the designation of their second homes THREE times within two years. More details on this can be seen here: Microsoft Word – CRC 4th ver Balls-Cooper _Rev_ _4_.doc (parliament.uk)
The pair were also found to have claimed for 375 journeys taken by their children between Yorkshire and London over a three year period, totalling more than £14,000. This exceeded the allowance, which stood at a maximum of 30 journeys per year per child (or 90 journeys as they have three children). They were not sanctioned for this either.
In 2007/08 Yvette Cooper claimed £152,659 in expenses and allowances alone on top of her MP salary.
Now fast-forward to today. If you have a complaint regarding some public services such as the NHS the final destination for the complaint is The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, or PHSO. In order to use the PHSO one has to firstly get a form from the PHSO signed by your MP, who then sends this in to the Ombudsman.
On several occasions in the last few years I have requested Cooper do this. On each of those occasions there has been a very considerable delay, sometimes of several months, before the forms are signed and sent to PHSO. On one occasion lack of communication on the matter this prompted me to attend at her offices where Labour Party members (clearly trained in shouting down complaints of poor service) took a bullish and aggressive attitude. It was amusing to see how they’d been trained in standing one to either side of a complaining constituent to add an element of physical intimidation to the utter nonsense they were spouting justifying delays of several months.
This MP’s is happy to profit from her Parliamentary position but not so keen to assist in the day-to-day business of being an MP. Lethargy towards getting things done for her constituents has become so familiar to PHSO that in May 2021 they forwarded a form to her themselves and requested she sign it rather than the other way around! I note of course that Cooper is also not shy at garnering publicity for extravagant gestures around the constituency, particularly if it means getting her face in the newspaper or on television. And why not indeed as such things greatly assist in re-election? Quiet, patient endeavour on behalf of individual constituents generally does not.
However going back a little further in time; in January 2021 a form for signing and forwarding to PHSO was emailed to Cooper by me. Nothing was heard in relation to this and so the matter was chased in March and more intensively from July onwards. At no point was any response back received from Cooper or her office to either phone calls or emails, which invariably went to answer-phone.
One of the reasons Cooper’s husband Ed Balls was ejected from his seat of Morley and Outwood in 2015 is colloquially said to be because of his deficiency as a constituency MP. Balls used his time in Parliament to strut on the national stage and build his own profile but did little to assist his electors, hence his losing in 2015. Cooper’s present strategy appears broadly similar: to swan around as chair on Select Committees in Parliament and write books on women’s history. Neither of these directly benefit her constituents and if my own experience is anything to go by she’ll shortly be joining her husband on TV dancing shows, only without Ed Balls looks and ability to gyrate unconvincingly.
And so on we went into August with no word from Cooper’s constituency office regarding its intentions in respect of a matter put before them in January 2021. Could this be because the office was unmanned due to lack of funds? The Register of Member’s Interests show Cooper’s constituency office has been the recipient of considerable donations from various persons over the last few years to enable its upkeep and running. These include such as Peter Hearn who backed Cooper in the last but one Labour Party leadership election, but also backed the Tories at the same time. This is called hedging your bets. Some very substantial donations to the running of Cooper’s constituency office total tens of thousands of pounds over the last three years. Is all of this being spent in looking after the needs of constituents? I would suggest not. Clearly however there is enough funding going into the constituency office to make it a viable concern.
Once again in August 2021 I visited the constituency office to ask what on earth was going on. By intercom I was asked to leave before they even knew the purpose of my visit. That’s some customer service!
Consequently I made a formal complaint to The Labour Party of poor service this included a complaint of all the prior occasions I’ve communicated with Cooper’s office when service has been exceptionally poor.
A response came back from The Labour Party on 10.8.21.
Your complaint about Yvette Cooper MP has been assessed and we will be taking no further action at this time. This is because what you have complained about does not fall within what we can accept for investigation under our Complaints Policy, outlined in Appendix 1. Exclusions from the Complaints Policy, iv. Complaints about elected representatives that specifically relate to the way in which they carry out their duties as an elected representative.
To which my reply was:I appreciate your focus is to drop this complaint as quickly as possible without investigation. I refer to the points raised in the complaint, seen again below. Your grounds for non-investigation are that the complaint should refer to the way an elected representative carries out their duties.
Points 1-3, 5 and 8-9 deal specifically with the ability of Ms. Cooper to carry out her duties as an elected representative. Specifically these relate to the requirement for an MP to complete and return complaints for the attention of The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, which cannot be put to PHSO by any other means.
Therefore the complaint falls within the remit of appendix 1, sub para. iv of your complaints policy.
The Complaints Team The Labour Party is based at Southside, 105 Victoria Street, London. They wrote back to claim their own internal rules did not apply to the complaint made.
I wrote back again on 12.8.21 and stated:
“Please produce for me a complete copy of the relevant rules you refer to. This can be sent via PDF or you may wish to provide a link to an online document.”
I kept chasing a copy of this document over the next week. The suddenly… guess what? They wrote back to me again on 20.8.21 and stated:
“Your complaint about Jo Cole has been assigned for investigation. This entails ensuring that all relevant information is gathered to allow a full consideration to be made”
“As we understand it, your complaint(s) is about Bullying, Intimidation and harassment. Please let us know as soon as possible if our understanding is incorrect. It will not be possible to add further complaints once the investigation has commenced.
Once as much evidence as possible has been gathered, it will be passed to a panel of the National Executive Committee (NEC) for their consideration. Based on the evidence, the Panel will make a decision as to whether the complaint is upheld and then what the appropriate sanction should be.”
“The process of investigating and deciding a complaint can take some time but we will update you at relevant points throughout.”
This seems pretty conclusive. Rather that providing a written copy of the articles and memoranda detailing how a complaint is investigated, the relevant rules for so doing and the grounds of acceptable behaviour for party members, MP’s and workers they simply decided to investigate the complaint. Fair enough. Presume Jo Coles is the employee at Cooper’s office who I spoke to on my visit in August.
Not so fast though! This came in a few days later:
“Your complaint about Yvette Cooper MP/ Jo Coles that you raised on 1st March 2021 has been assessed and we will be taking no further action at this time. This is because what you have complained about does not constitute a breach of the Labour Party rules.”
Ignoring the fact that the complaint was actually in August, not in March I requested a copy of those same rules, as I had requested in mid-August. I’m still awaiting a copy. They reverted to the position held in mid-August 2021 that the matter subject to a complaint had not breached their rules but refused to prove a copy of what those rules were. Democratic movement much? Hmmm…
The party has failed to answer numerous emails requesting this data or a more comprehensive explanation as to why they have refused to investigate the complaint.
Why should all this matter?
Presently The Labour Party is attempting to present itself as a party fit to make the next Government. The experience I have had of Cooper is that the normal running of her office is lethargic and indifferent. That matters brought to her which amount to simple requests are delayed for several months and require much chasing before any effort is made on her part. That there should be a wait of the best part of a year on a matter put to her in January 2021 is wholly unacceptable. Yet in a short while Cooper will be again presenting herself to the local electorate as an MP capable of forwarding their interests in Westminster. Much of the clear evidence from the last twenty five years suggests otherwise, however.
My own experience is that Cooper is happy to take part in any event which will bring positive publicity or a photo opportunity but is uninterested in the needs of individual constituents. Since August 2021 Cooper has refused to sign the forms for PHSO sent in January 2021 and has clearly decided in relation to myself that I am not a constituent “worth” helping. The end result of this is that the ability to use the PHSO to resolve a complaint has been lost to me.
The party’s mechanism for dealing with complaints suggests an organisation which is untrustworthy and slippery. Clearly this enables MP’s like Cooper to get away with exceptionally poor service towards constituents and the kind of financial sleight-of-hand described above. Taken together the performance of Cooper and The Labour Party when given the chance to act and put the matter right suggests that neither are remotely reliable or electable.
We Cooper presently has a majority of only around 1,200 enabling her to remain in office and must surely realise that the game is up for her at the next election. Perhaps this is why she is focused on writing books and appearing on Select Committees. Her majority has been whittled down over the years to this very slender margin. This suggests that constituents are indeed waking up to the level of poor service received. She has obtained a very nice living from her position since 1997 and it may well be that the constituents of Pontefract, Castleford and Normanton are now waking to the fact that that they need an MP who is prepared to act on their behalf occasionally
Legal Babble 