#BTColumn – The ‘fine work’ of serving communities

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

A discussion is emerging on the Government’s decision to establish the function of Liaison Officer to support Members of Parliament who are backbenchers (do not hold Ministerial portfolios), and I think it might be helpful to share some thoughts on the duties of MPs and constituents’ expectations of their constituency offices.

Cabinet Ministers are assigned a Personal Assistant (PA), and MPs are assigned a Constituency Assistant (CA). Ministers also benefit from an Executive Secretary in the Ministry, to help with the administrative aspects of their Ministerial roles. This means the following:

i. An MP who is also a Minister has a CA, a PA and an Exec Sec. (3)

ii. A Minister who is not an MP, and therefore not responsible for any constituents, has a PA and an Exec Sec. (2)

iii. An MP on the back bench has only a CA. (1) Now let us turn to the structure, role and expectations of a constituency office, and throughout, I will rely on my own office and experience as an example.

Constituency offices have a single member of staff: the CA, who must remain in office in order to keep it open, but also visit constituents as needed. The CA answers calls and messages (in my case landline, mobile calls, WhatsApp messages and email), welcomes those who walk into the office, hears their queries and gives them basic advice. The CA is also a Case Manager: she must log concerns, draft letters and make calls on behalf of constituents to the relevant Government departments, with the requisite follow-up, since these matters are rarely resolved at one go. Often, the level of problem analysis and simple chasing of the solution requires dogged attention to a single case. For reference, the average number of service cases (as we call them) logged by my office monthly in 2021 was 211 new cases.

The CA is also an event and project manager: many communities have few community-based organizations (CBOs) independently staging events and programmes, including after school and other developmental projects, sporting and recreational events. This was the reason a Ministry of the Third Sector was created along with Labour – to help strengthen the capacity of CBOs to raise resources and execute projects. In the meantime, and where there may not be enough capable CBOs, residents expect community-based programmes to be led by constituency offices. Anyone who has staged an event can tell you that these alone require significant effort, let alone having to execute these regularly while executing the other daily functions of a CA.

Constituency offices may also run their own, unfunded social programmes to support residents’ basic needs where Government response may fall short due to demand or be delayed. The CA also manages such outreach.

Constituency offices are generally open Monday to Friday during standard business hours. I have staggered my hours on Wednesdays and Thursdays to accommodate those who are only free to engage in the evenings.

Once a week, MPs usually run clinics, where constituents come to discuss matters and seek guidance or intervention from their MP. These concerns must be logged for later follow-up.

MPs often do weekend community walk-throughs or attend community events. A walk-through is a canvass in its original definition: it is not election-related; a canvass of your constituents is to hear opinions on issues that matter to them. For example, prior to the Estimates and Budget debate, I sought constituents’ feedback on what they might wish me to raise or was affecting them that was relevant to the Budget process. On these occasions, constituents more commonly raise individual matters, which means that being accompanied by someone who will log these concerns for later follow-up is important in order to make it a meaningful exchange.

This list above is not the half of it for a CA, and for this purpose I will not go into other MP duties within and outside Parliament; these should be published for the public to understand. But all this means that constituency staff are required Monday-Saturday, at least.

These offices have essentially become, then, community service centres, with a single employee and thus no capacity for backstopping. When a CA is unexpectedly ill or called away, the office must close.

Why? (1) There is no facility for short-term temping at short notice. (2) The job is so specific that by the time a temp can be trained, the CA is likely back to work, and (3) Trust is a constituency office’s most important asset.

Residents prefer minimal handling of their information, especially by people they may not see again.

Our current system and resources cannot manage the demand. Barbados is one of the least resourced jurisdictions when it comes to constituency office service to residents. A colleague MP in a similar system has a Chief of Staff, a Parliamentary Assistant and two caseworkers. Elsewhere, MPs get project budgets for which they must show receipts, as they should, but to run programmes that their communities request. During COVID-19, offices in other countries got additional staff, and CAs received special counselling to cope with the caseload.

The Member in the Upper House who raised this issue did so in the same intervention in which she suggested that there is a cost of democracy, while advocating on her own behalf for an increase in her stipend as an Independent Senator. There is indeed a cost of democracy – the processes through which people participate in their country’s governance and decision-making – and as we mature as a Republic, we must confront this.

But there is also, more immediately, a cost of service and representation, and I am far more concerned with providing service that will improve people’s lives. As an MP, I do not always have a ‘yes’ for them, but at the very least they deserve an effort, and an answer, and these cannot be provided with a single, grossly overworked CA in an office.

This job is a privilege: it is character-building and nation-building. So unlike that Member who has no constituents, you will not hear me advocate for more personal remuneration, notwithstanding that backbench MPs make less than half what Ministers do. But you will always hear me call for reasonable resources to benefit the people to whom I am accountable, because that is what they deserve.

Some may suggest that all these functions are too great for a constituency office, and should be passed on to some other community-based body transparently constituted. I agree, and this is the intent of the People’s Assemblies.

And when these Assemblies are responsibly in place and functioning, perhaps the Liaison Officer may be transferred there with the public understanding that many of these simple, service-case issues will now be managed by the People’s Assembly.

Ultimately, there should be less demand or none at all for this incessant intervention just so Barbadians can get simple action: to have lights fixed on a playing field or a response to an application. When services work better for all, when systems are simplified and when we then all make the effort to better understand them, for which we too must bear some responsibility, there will be far less demand for this level of intervention.

Until then, there is no doubt in my mind nor I would dare say that of my constituents who access the services of my office, that a second pair of hands, ears and feet is absolutely required to serve them better. And were it to be a choice, I would far prefer an investment in people’s care at the community level than lofty senior positions at the level of Cabinet.

Finally, I encourage those of us who have not been there, who have not found ourselves having to reach out for help when we felt everything was against us, to refrain from trying to remove resources and further help from those who need it most. If you have not yet needed these services, you may not see the need to keep these offices sufficiently resourced, but I assure you that there are countless people who do. I hope we can resist the political cynicism long enough to spare a thought for them.

Marsha Caddle is the Member of Parliament for St. Michael South Central.