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MPs have described a dramatic rise in their workload since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis with traditional casework all but falling away.

In a situation compared to hospitals seeing a drop in attendances at A&E for ailments unrelated to Covid-19, parliamentarians have reported a plummeting in non-coronavirus queries.

With some saying that to begin with they were receiving more than 1,000 queries a day, it has never been a busier time to be an MP, but representatives said they were still there for all queries.

“I’ve never had so many queries where I’ve thought, I just don’t know,” Colne Valley Tory MP Jason McCartney said.

Yorkshire MPs (from top left) Barry Sheerman, Alec Shelbrooke, Mark Eastwood, Jason McCartney, Dan Jarvis, Nick Fletcher, Kevin Hollinrake, Holly Lynch, and Craig Whittaker. Photos: JPI Media

“The ministerial channels are so busy, it’s the busiest I’ve ever been. I genuinely am working every day and constituents will see that they’re getting messages from me on Sunday evenings, at half 11 at night, because it’s people’s health, it’s people’s livelihoods, it’s people’s welfare.”

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Labour’s Holly Lynch, MP for Halifax said there was an “initial tidal wave of enquiries”. She said: “Now what we’re starting to see is that Government made these bold statements about people who they were looking after but they’re almost now that the details are coming out there’s a little bit of backtracking in one or two areas.”

Thirsk and Malton MP Kevin Hollinrake said he was receiving “three to four times as much correspondence”.

The Conservative said: “It is exceptionally busy, a whole range of different issues but almost exclusively related to the current crisis so that might be anything from Universal Credit, to being furloughed or furloughing staff, to business interruption loans.”

Calder Valley MP Craig Whittaker described the first few weeks as “bedlam”.

Many politicians had been dealing with constituents stuck abroad - “Yorkshire people are well travelled,” joked Barnsley Central MP Dan Jarvis - and others had been consumed with supporting local businesses.

Alec Shelbrooke, Conservative MP for Elmet and Rothwell, said: “It was absolutely mad for the first couple of weeks, I mean really mad, now it has quieted off a bit. We spent a lot of time doing two key things - one, helping businesses and two, helping people who are between jobs.

'Bedlam': MPs receive masses of emails daily in clamour for coronavirus answers