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Tory MP Dominic Raab has become embroiled in a row over his parliamentary email address, and whether or not it should be private.
The spat occurred after a lobby group, 38 Degrees, published his email as part of a voting reform campaign, whereupon he asked them to remove his email address from their “contact your MP” system.
Raab wrote in an email to the organisation: “The point is that there are hundreds of campaign groups like yours, and flooding MPs inboxes with pro-forma emails creates an undue administrative burden.”
“I welcome anyone who feels strongly about AV [the “Alternative Vote”] writing to me in person – rather than copying an automated template – and they would always received (sic) a reply.”
38 Degrees contacted the Information Commissioner regarding the matter, and received a reply which they published on their site, which basically said that publishing an MP’s official email to be used by constituents to address specific subjects should be within any MP’s “reasonable expectation”.
The ICO wrote: “MPs House of Commons email addresses are publicly available. This means that, although they will be considered personal data under the terms of Section 1 of the Data Protection Act 1998, the individuals who the data relates to will have a lower expectation of privacy due to the fact that this information is already within the public domain.”
Raab has since had his email address removed from his personal website, and the public House of Commons site. He has put up a contact form on his personal site instead.
Part of an MP’s job is to respond to the people who voted them in and their concerns, quite obviously. Whether or not a template piece of correspondence has been used in airing that concern, it is still an individual’s choice to send it.
And it’s not like Members of Parliament don’t use blanket templates to respond to constituent’s concerns, either. The last time we wrote to our MP, we received a clear stock response in return; there was nothing personal about it.
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