Labour have the busiest new MP… while a Tory is the least active

Labour’s Louise Haigh has been named as the busiest MP from the 2015 intake, after making 90 speeches and asking 471 parliamentary questions in her first nine months in the job.

Independent research carried out by the House of Commons Library also named Tory Royston Smith as the least active of the 177 new MPs. It is not the first time that Smith’s inactivity has been raised – back in 2014 his own local party starting dragging around a cardboard cut-out of him as part of their campaign in Southampton Itchen.

Smith told the Independent On Sunday that his poor speaking record in the Commons was because he didn’t want to “neglect his constituents”, and highlighted the difficulty of securing a slot to speak in the Chamber. However, he has only spoken five times and asked two questions, a record one source told LabourList left him “in a league of his own”.

He also claimed to have very busy constituency surgeries – despite holding a similar number to many other MPs – and appeared to overlook the fact that most MPs are able to manage both constituency and parliamentary work without a problem

Sheffield Heeley MP Haigh, meanwhile, has shown the use of intervening in Parliament: she made headlines exposing the mass deportation of child refugees, challenged Government plans to move jobs from Sheffield to London, and earned praise from Commons Speaker John Bercow for her pursuit of ministers over similar HMRC office closures.

She has asked the most written parliamentary questions of any new MP, and these have revealed Tory plans to avoid paying older apprentices the so-called National Living Wage, exempt universities from Freedom of Information and set privatise debt collectors on families over-paid due to the HMRC error, and exposed scandals such as huge spending on head hunters to replace senior civil servants and the failure to prosecute un-registered foreign-owned corporations.