One of the more unusual areas I can support on is understanding MPs’ offices as organisations. Through our research and practical work we’ve looked at how MPs’ offices actually function — workflows, staffing, onboarding, technology, leadership, casework, decision making and institutional constraints. They are the hidden infrastructure of UK democracy: 650 effectively independent micro-organisations, employing over 3,500 staff at a public cost of around £200m a year, and for most citizens the primary point of contact with the state when something goes wrong. Yet they are barely researched, and nobody — not MPs, not Parliament, not the parties — has a clear picture of what a high-performing office would even look like.

Through the Parliament Workflow Study (convened by Campaign Lab and Newspeak House), I co-authored Democracy on Default Settings with Edward Saperia, published by Demos in 2026 and based on fieldwork, interviews and surveys with staffers across all parties. Some of what we found: 73% of staff had no written guidance or handbook for how their office runs; offices recruited for 89 different job titles in a single year; MPs collectively purchased over 275 different software tools since 2020 (including 34 different video editors) while barely 1% claimed for any AI tool; and staff described the job as a "fourth emergency service", absorbing casework that should sit with councils and public services, often without training or mental health support. The pattern throughout is offices running on default settings — personalised, reactive, and dependent on individual heroics rather than institutional design. Ahead of the historic 2024 intake of 335 new MPs, we also produced a comprehensive MP office manual, now hosted on W4MP.

What makes this interesting beyond Parliament is that MPs' offices are a perfect case study in why good ideas fail to get adopted: fragmented authority, restrictive central IT, no shared standards, high turnover destroying institutional memory, and a monopoly casework tool with no competitive pressure to improve. If you can understand how to change an MP's office, you understand something general about institutional reform.

I can help fellows understand questions like: What is an MP's office actually optimised for? How does constituency representation really work, and where are the bottlenecks? Why does £200m of democratic infrastructure run on spreadsheets and WhatsApp? What would better infrastructure look like, and who would have to act to build it? I've run practical sessions on office operations, and this is especially useful for anyone interested in democracy, public institutions, civic products or state capacity.