The Internet
99. The House has made a huge quantity of information
available through the Internet. In addition to the Official Report
and a wide variety of other parliamentary papers, every select
committee report is available on the Net shortly after its publication
in hard copy. So too is all published written and oral evidence;
and some transcripts of oral evidence by Ministers are now appearing
on the Net the day after the evidence session, before publication
in hard copy. We hope that this last category will be extended
to evidence given by non-Ministerial witnesses.
100. Select committee material on the Internet
represents a massive information and research resource, released
from what are often prohibitively high cover prices for printed
material. It also represents a considerable achievement for the
House (and a more extensive use of the Net than is the case with
government departments).
101. Access to text through the Parliamentary
Web pages is extensive, but it could be made much more user-friendly
- for example by active or "hot" links from footnotes
to source material such as evidence and other reports.
102. But the overall informative and educative
performance of the Parliamentary site is low; public expectations
are ever higher, and the websites of many public and private sector
organisations are much more advanced than our own.
103. The Parliamentary site as a whole is not
our business; but public knowledge and understanding of select
committees is. Whatever changes may be made to the parliamentary
pages, the part of the site dealing with House of Commons select
committees needs to be entirely rethought, to make it attractive,
informative, and fully up to the standard of the best sites elsewhere.
Additional elements in this will be the co-ordinated information
we discussed in paragraphs 96 to 98, and links to related sites
of interest to those following the work of particular select committees
(and, of course, back-links from those sites to ours). Other improvements
might include photographs of committee members and links to their
homepages; the ability to download documents in pdf format, similar
to the printed original; links to more general information about
how select committees work and how to give oral or written evidence;
and better monitoring of the use of the site.
104. We expect IT to play a major part in making
select committees more accessible, both to those who seek information
and those who want to contribute. We see substantial benefits
for committees themselves; for example, submission of evidence
on disk, or by e-mailed documents, has a dramatic effect on printing
costs.
Unfinished business
105. We still have work to do on other issues.
We have already foreshadowed our consideration of the accountability
of the intelligence and security services. We also intend to examine
the powers of committees to send for persons, papers, and records.
We doubt whether these powers are sufficient; and, even where
they are, we are concerned that in cases of difficulty they cannot
be exercised easily and quickly. The application of Crown prerogative
and Crown privilege will also be an important element. We will
report again in due course.
Conclusion
106. It is now twenty years since the setting
up of the departmental select committees. Their establishment
was a major step in making the Executive accountable to Parliament,
and so to the citizen and the taxpayer. Over those two decades,
the committees have done a great deal of valuable work; but their
full potential has still to be realised. In this report we have
set out a programme of reform and modernisation which will do
just that. There are some who see the House of Commons as a toothless
adjunct of an all-powerful Executive. We aim to disprove this.
