What is Penny Mordaunt up to?

Does Penny Mordaunt know what she’s getting herself into? One of her most striking promises is to give MPs something called ‘social capital pots’: cash to spend in their constituencies. They are part of her attempt to soothe colleagues by describing them as ‘people who want to serve’ – and to weaken the power of the Treasury. ‘I want to give you more agency to serve your community,’ she said.

This is a fascinating idea, and not just because it flatters MPs’ egos. It’s more than the ‘pork barrel politics’ some critics have alleged of the idea, because Penny Mordaunt would be significantly changing what an MP actually does. Her argument is that members are best placed to know the needs of their local areas and where the gaps in funding are. Well, yes, they do have very good local knowledge from their constituency surgeries, but there’s also this thing called local government which is supposed to be even better at it.

Mordaunt may have forgotten about it, given how much funding for councils has dropped in recent years, but devolution is generally supposed to involve more power going to local authorities, not MPs. Indeed, MPs don’t currently have the power or the budget to do anything other than manage their own offices. Their role as members is ill-defined, but it is largely supposed to involve representing their constituents’ concerns in the House of Commons, scrutinising legislation and the work they do in their surgeries. The latter has grown a great deal over the past few decades, with some complaining they have become ‘glorified social workers’ and are being expected to do constituency work that would better be covered by ward councillors.

To a certain extent, social capital pots would be a logical continuation of where MPs have been heading for years anyway: closer to a councillor than a legislator. But it would come at the expense of their parliamentary duties. MPs currently don’t take scrutiny very seriously at all, and tend to notice problems with bills only once they’re on the statute book and making their constituents’ lives a misery. If they have a spending pot to fling around their area, it’s hard to see where the incentives are for taking any more time to read a bill when it’s before the Commons.

That’s not to say that social capital pots in and of themselves are a bad idea. They might help bring a sense of public service back into the role, both for MPs themselves and for the public. But they’re a much more significant proposal than just a means of charming Tory MPs – if of course Mordaunt has thought this one through and means what she says.