JUDGING the effectiveness of an MP is never an easy business. There are many ways of trying but all have their flaws. The most crude method is to look at how far a politician has climbed up the greasy pole marked promotion.

Tony Blair is the Prime Minister and must, therefore, be a pretty good MP. Someone else has never even been a Parliamentary aide (PPS) to the Minister with responsibility for buses and cannot, as a result, be up to much.

The obvious problem is that the playing field is not level. It is impossible to say a Liberal Democrat or, to a lesser extent, a Tory is more effective than a Labour MP because one holds a brief and the other does not.

The Lib Dems have only 53 MPs and it is harder not to land a shadow role than to do so. Labour, meanwhile, has more than 400 men and women competing for only 100 or so jobs.

It is also true that not everybody wants to progress through the ministerial ranks. Many see their role as keeping their party in check from the objective distance of the backbenches.

So where else do we turn? Some MPs like to point to the number of written and oral questions they ask in the House of Commons.

At the end of each Parliamentary session a list is published of how many times they have managed to put a minister on the spot. The Parliamentary authorities also release details of how many Early Day Motions have been signed. Yet not all MPs have the same opportunities to excel on this particular stage.

Those MPs who are junior ministers or hold the post of PPS are practically forbidden from signing EDMs or asking questions not related to their job.

Also, putting down dozens of written questions at a time is hardly a worthy criterionfor deciding whether an MP is worth his or her salt. Indeed, it is perhaps a sign they have rather too much time on their hands.

So it was against this background that another method of judging performance managed to cause the odd ripple at Westminster this week. A secret survey of how quickly MPs replied to genuine written concerns raised by constituents.

Not-for-profit organisation Faxyourmp.com studied more than 8,000 faxes sent to 572 out of Britain's 659 MPs over a five-month period.

Between May and September, it forwarded queries on behalf of members of the public, either to a traditional fax machine or converted into email.

Then it compared how many responses were received within 14 days, slightly longer than the ten day target for replies faced by government departments.

Fifty managed a perfect record - including Vale of York MP Anne McIntosh's 100 per cent response rate to her 12 faxes. Next on the local list came Harrogate's Phil Willis - 84 per cent from 19 faxes - and Scarborough's Lawrie Quinn, who scored 80 per cent from ten faxes. Selby's John Grogan replied to 73 per cent of his 15 faxes within two weeks, and York's Hugh Bayley registered 67 per cent from 36 inquiries.

Ryedale's John Greenway was not surveyed. Tony Blair, the prime minister, was given a mark of 44 per cent - but Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith and former Cabinet minister Peter Mandelson were among 26 MPs who failed to reply to a single fax within 14 days.

Again, it is not foolproof - with Hugh Bayley having to respond to almost four times as many constituents as Lawrie Quinn. But it is interesting nonetheless - particularly if your MP was one of those in the Peter Mandelson category.

Updated: 12:37 Friday, November 01, 2002