Official: MPs are scared of your emails

Email your local MP this week about the state of the roads or your council's refuse collection and the chances are you won't get a reply. If you're really unlucky you'll end up on a black list.

MPs are fed up with email. It's official. They already have to sit in parliament and make speeches and hold surgery for their constituents and answer phone calls and write letters. Now they have to empty their inboxes and, guess what, dear voters, they're not going to take it anymore.

In its first report, the House of Commons Information Committee highlights the growing problem of overflowing inboxes, a crisis it attributes to everyone from politically aware pressure groups to over enthusiastic constituents with access to a PC.

That's what happens when you teach the proletariat to use computers. The committee suggests, among its more absurd tips, that MPs restrict the times at which constituents can email and that they make better use of 'intermediaries'.

Intermediaries are already employed in the House of Commons. They receive MPs' emails, print them out and then fax them to the relevant MP, a method of communication which, the report tells us, "all members offices are familiar with". Don't tell us this is the future of e-government Westminster-style.

Apart from the sheer silliness of it and the complete waste of forests, surely the information committee is missing a point.

E-government isn't about an easy life for MPs. It's about providing the public with instant, easy electronic access to government services.

Yet the committee recommends MPs install software that will block emails deemed too long and filter mass email campaigns from particular lobby groups. The report even recommends MPs delete emails sent en masse from lobbyists without reading them.

Such deletion - call it censorship, call it plain lazy - may mean uncluttered inboxes but if flies in the face of all that is good about democracy and technology.

If the best MPs can do to cope with the onslaught of email is to install software that blocks and deletes emails then what hope is there for the 2005 e-government targets?

And in the worst Big Brother scenario, will voter X go to the back of a queue because in 2002 he added his email address to a mass campaign calling for nuclear disarmament or protection of rainforests or better school buses in his district?

We need our representatives to be setting a good example, not crying Luddite tears when faced with a keyboard and mouse.