Meeting your representative face to face

You do not need expertise to meet the person who represents where you live. Being a constituent is the whole of your standing, and it is enough on its own. You are not there to brief them on the history, the region or the law. That belief, that you have to know everything first, is what stops most people ever asking, and it is wrong.

Nobody has to give you permission to make the request. If you have not written to them yet, start with writing to your representative, because a good letter is often how the meeting happens. This page picks up where a date is in the diary.

Before you go. If the meeting is about your own safety, or about something that happened to you, take one other person. That is the one situation where going alone is a genuinely bad idea, and it is covered again below.

Assume twenty minutes, and assume it starts late

Everything on this page follows from that. You may be given thirty, you may be given ten, and something before you will overrun. Plan for twenty minutes beginning five minutes after the time you were told.

That single assumption rules out most of what people naturally do. It rules out opening with context. It rules out a folder of material. It rules out three asks. You have time for one request, one story and a page of paper.

Take an ask, not a subject

A meeting about a subject is a conversation. A conversation is pleasant, and it changes nothing. What makes a meeting an event in somebody’s week is that they were asked to do a specific thing that they personally can do.

The test is whether they could complete it themselves in an afternoon.

Vague	Specific
“Speak out about antisemitism.”	“Say publicly, in your own words, that what happened at the station last month was antisemitic.”
“Do more for the Jewish community here.”	“Visit the community security team and see how they are funded.”
“Support Israel.”	“Put your name to the statement that six of your colleagues have already signed.”
“Take this seriously.”	“Write to the head of the transport authority asking what their reporting procedure is, and copy me the reply.”

The rule underneath those pairs: name the person who does the thing, and name the thing they do. If the sentence does not contain a verb they could perform, it is not an ask.

Beware of asking for more than the person in front of you controls. If they have no role in the body you are angry with, the honest ask is smaller. Ask them to write to it, to introduce you to it, or to raise it where they do sit. An ask outside their power gets a polite explanation of why not, and that explanation consumes your twenty minutes.

Prepare three things and no more

The ask, written as one sentence you have said aloud at least twice.

One story. One specific thing that happened to you or to somebody you know. Not a survey, not a trend, not a list. A named place, a date, what was said, what you did afterwards. This is what survives the meeting. Nobody remembers your argument, and everybody remembers the parent who stopped walking their son to the Saturday morning club.

Telling it can affect you more than you expect. Decide beforehand how much you are willing to say out loud to a stranger, and stop there. A story you can tell steadily lands harder than one that overwhelms you halfway through.

One page to leave behind. At the top, the ask in bold. Then your name, where you live and your contact details, and no more than five lines of supporting fact. One side of paper, printed, because a document that has to be found in an inbox will not be found.

Who else is in the room

Often a staff member sits in and takes the notes. Treating them as furniture is the most common and most expensive mistake people make in these meetings.

That person frequently writes the reply, holds the diary, decides what reaches the desk and remembers you next time. Shake their hand, ask their name, write it down, and address part of what you say to them. Your follow-up email goes to them.

“Sorry, could I take your name as well? I’d like to send the follow-up to you directly.”

Go with one other person, or two at most

Never more than three of you in total. Beyond that the meeting becomes a delegation, and delegations get handled rather than heard. Three people also means somebody is always silent, and silence in a small room reads as disapproval whether you meant it or not.

If you take somebody, agree in the corridor who says what. One person makes the ask, one tells the story, one watches the time. Going alone is entirely workable, with the one exception already stated. For anything concerning your own safety, take a second person, so that somebody else heard what was said.

The twenty minutes

Say who you are and where you live in your first sentence. Not your view, not the background. Your standing.

“I’m Naomi, I live on Hillcrest Road, and I’m here to ask you to do one specific thing.”

Then the ask, straight away. Background belongs after it, never before. If you are cut off at minute eight, you want to have been cut off after the request rather than before it.

Then the story, and start it in one line rather than working up to it.

“The reason I’m asking is my neighbour. In March she stopped walking her son to the Saturday club, and he hasn’t been back since.”

Then stop talking and let them respond. A silence of a few seconds is fine and you do not have to fill it.

Before you leave, whatever has been said, ask this:

“So that I write it up correctly, what will you do, and by when?”

That question is the whole meeting. Ask it out loud, wait for the answer, and write the answer down in front of them.

When they push back

Two different things look identical in the room and want opposite responses.

Disagreement sounds like a counter-argument. Do not win it. You are not going to change somebody’s politics in twenty minutes and attempting it costs you the relationship. Answer once, briefly, then return to the ask:

“I hear that, and we’re not going to agree on it today. The thing I’m asking for doesn’t depend on it.”

Constraint sounds like agreement with no commitment. Warm words, real sympathy, nothing offered. That often means they cannot help publicly, for reasons they will not state. The response is to shrink the ask rather than repeat it:

“Understood. Is there something quieter you’d be willing to do? A letter, an introduction, a question asked privately?”

A private letter from them is worth more than a public statement they never make.

Afterwards, which is where most meetings die

Within one day, send a thank you that restates the ask in writing and records what they said they would do. Copy the staffer. Keep it to five lines. This document is what you will refer back to, and it quietly converts a warm feeling into a record.

Then chase. Set the reminder before you forget: two weeks, then a month.

“Following up on our meeting on 14 September, when you said you’d write to the transport authority. Has that letter gone? Happy to help with anything you need from me.”

Nothing here guarantees an outcome, and some meetings produce nothing whatever you do. What is reliably true is that the ones nobody chased produced nothing at all.

Two lines, with the real names in them

Answer these two first, without scrolling. What is your one sentence ask, said out loud, and is it something an outside observer could watch happening? And what is the thing you send within a day whether or not they committed to anything?

Then write these out properly, with the real names and the real times.

If it is Thursday evening after dinner, then I will write my one sentence ask and read it out loud twice.

If I come out of the meeting unsure whether they committed to anything, then I will send the thank you within a day anyway, stating the ask and asking them to confirm or correct my note of it.

And the obstacle, planned for in advance. If two weeks pass with no reply, then I will send the chaser to the staffer by name rather than assuming the answer is no.