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'MPs should have counselling to deal with stress'

A senior Labour backbencher says MPs should be offered counselling to help them deal with stress.

Jean Corston says this is caused by the long and anti-social hours of their work. She suggests the move as one of many ways in which life at Westminster could be brought more in line with conditions outside.

The chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party also suggests a creche for MPs' children and greater freedom to take evenings off for family events such as parents' evenings at school.

Speaking to political website ePolitix.com, Ms Corston was asked whether conditions in Westminster made MPs lonely and depressed.

She said: "Parliament, with its weird hours, can sometimes make a bad situation much worse, that's true, and I don't see a way round that.

"I do think there's an argument for counselling provision which is in no way stigmatised and which obviously would have to be entirely confidential."

Ms Corston - one of just 60 women MPs when she was elected in 1992 - welcomed recent moves to make Parliament more family-friendly, including an early end to debates on Thursdays, to allow members in far-flung constituencies to travel home for the weekend.

She revealed a Conservative colleague had been "utterly astonished" to hear she had been given permission to miss an evening vote to go to a meeting at her child's school. She said: "A political culture which says you can't have time off to go to a parents' evening betrays a mindset which makes it very difficult for anybody else to do that kind of thing and feel it is legitimate."

Story filed: 16:53 Tuesday 13th November 2001 ANANOVA