What happens when you write to your MP?

Step one: the constituency check

The first thing an office does is confirm your address falls inside the seat. This is not bureaucracy for its own sake — MPs are barred by convention from acting for someone else's constituent. A letter with no address, or an address outside the boundary, stops here, which is why we confirm your constituency from your postcode before you write.

Step two: casework or policy

Casework is anything about you: a visa, a benefit decision, a hospital wait, a housing repair, a school place. It gets a case reference and a caseworker, who writes to the department, council or agency on the MP's letterhead and chases it. That letterhead is the whole point; the same query from you goes into a slower queue.

Policy is anything about a law or a position. It is logged against a subject, and the volume and tone are reported to the MP — often weekly. A distinctive, well-argued letter is sometimes quoted directly in a speech or a letter to a minister.

• Acknowledgement: usually within a few working days.
• Substantive reply: typically two to three weeks.
• Departmental reply to an intervention: often four to eight weeks.

Step three: what comes back

You may get a personal reply, a copy of the department's response, an invitation to a surgery, or a standard letter setting out the MP's position. All four are normal. A standard letter on a mass-lobbied subject is not a snub; it means the office answered a hundred letters that week.

If nothing comes back

Write again at four weeks, quoting the date and subject of your first letter and asking specifically for a reply. If a second letter is ignored, you can raise it with the office by phone, attend a surgery, or write to the department directly and copy the MP so the silence is on the record.

We ask everyone who writes through Let Us Say whether a reply arrived, and publish response rates by office. Nothing about your letter is kept: the text is deleted after five weeks, and only the yes-or-no answer about responsiveness remains.