Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260
- 279)
TUESDAY 11 JANUARY 2000
DR HELEN
MARGETTS, PROFESSOR
CHRISTINE BELLAMY
AND DR
STEPHEN COLEMAN
260. It is not an issue just about Parliament,
is it, it is the local authority that engages in all kinds of
interesting consultation? At some point having done that, having
got all of this information in, all the interactive stuff that
has gone on, someone has to evaluate all of that and come to a
view on the issue.
(Professor Bellamy) Which is the traditional role
of—
261. The process can be informed by the new
inputs but those essential tasks can surely never be displaced?
(Professor Bellamy) The legitimacy of them and the
vitality of them and the vigour of them can be.
262. But the need for them.
(Professor Bellamy) The function is certainly there
but what I took this Committee to be interested in is the process
whereby that— I will start again. The way in which that
function has been carried out over the last century is highly
dependent upon party politics. Parties are the really true aggregating
institutions in this country. The danger of that is that those
people who are involved in party politics - and the number of
people who are involved actively in party politics is probably
going down quite substantially - can deal with that and they may
or may not think that the outcomes they arrive at are legitimate
or connecting to anybody else's concerns. I thought that the purpose
of this exercise was to try to build stronger connections between
that kind of political arena and the arena, for example, which
is made up at the moment of people getting interested in single
issue pressure groups.
Mr White: So this is another way of getting
PR except it is using technology. This is using the technology
argument to get it. That is what you are saying, is it not?
Chairman
263. I am sorry, I prevented Helen from speaking.
Can we hear Helen first.
(Dr Margetts) It was actually the point before but
it relates to this one. I think the difference between this and
other revolutions in Government administration, like print or
bureaucracy that is a relatively new thing, is that the thing
about bureaucracy and print is that Government was good at that,
it was leading the field in that, and there is the difference.
Here the rest of the world is leading the field and Government
is somewhere behind. That has been true of an awful lot of developments
in information communication technologies, not just the internet.
Why this links to your point is you ask what effect that can have
on the decision making capacity of Government and I think quite
an important implication. Technology is policy critical. Policy
is affected by the kinds of technologies that are used to carry
it out. I know that is not necessarily a very attractive idea
to the legislators but it does happen. If Government organisations
lose control of the technology that they are using, if another
organisation is doing that for them, there are some elements of
decision making which they will inevitably also lose.
Mr Browne
264. I am interested in this discussion because
I think this is a discussion that we should have had at the beginning
of this process of investigation and it would have informed a
lot of the other things that we have met. I have to say that almost
every conversation I have in this investigation is fresh information
as far as I am concerned and I think I am beginning to understand
something that I have not understood up until now and that is
not the threat that this is but the challenge that this presents
to representative democracy. In response to some degree to the
Chairman's point and to encourage you to develop this a bit further,
I think we have got to look at Government as not being homogenous.
There is the Executive, whom I think could comfortably live or
could construct a situation where they could live with the consultation
and controlled involvement of people through some form of e-communication,
and what we actually do in the legislature in terms of bringing
the Executive to account. It is in the implications that this
has for us as Members of Parliament in representing those who
vote for us that I am most interested. I would like you to expand
on that and whether you think that this revolution that is taking
place— I probably should not use these words because you
are probably fed up with them but it seems to me there is a revolution.
I am desperately trying to think of some more contemporary analogy
because I cannot get my head round Lutheran print and doors. It
does seem to me that in this sense in terms of representative
democracy we are living through a sort of fall of the Berlin Wall.
We watched countries throughout Europe becoming liberalised, whatever
that meant. We did not quite know what it meant for them but all
of a sudden overnight they were all liberalised and we have discovered
what it meant for them as it has evolved over ten years. I think
it could be as profound as that in contemporary terms for democracy
here in the UK. Are we in any position to do anything about this?
Can we move quickly enough to respond to this or will this outstrip
us? Will others external to parliamentary democracy use this system
to undermine the parliamentary democratic system to such an extent
that they adopt the Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer, which was
a 1970s film, about consulting public opinion where there are
the people and the Executive and really very little in between
that matters?
(Dr Margetts) Yes, I think you are in a position.
What is different about this sort of technology that distinguishes
it from other technologies is it is a kind of learn and build
technology. It is possible to use it and learn about it and learn
about transactions and citizen behaviour, for example, and then
use it some more. You do not do that by watching what is going
on in the rest of the world and waiting until it has settled down
because it does not settle down, what technology does is it injects
constant pressure to innovate. There is a possibility. These are
the sorts of technologies that you can start using and learn about
them and use them some more in all forms of—
Mr Browne: I am sorry, I do not mean to interrupt
you but we are already in a situation where we cannot modernise
this Parliament to have electronic voting. It seems almost impossible
to do.
Mr White: We cannot even get a creche.
Mr Browne
265. Information is a two-way process. At the
moment the media pressurises representative politicians by publishing
records in relation to what they do: how many times you turn up
to vote annually, how many times you speak or whatever. They decide
what are the measures of being a good Member of Parliament and
ignore lots of the work that is done in this building and publish
raw data. Some people say we do the same with education when we
publish the raw data. Information will be available about our
response to these developments, how many Members of Parliament
have a web site, how do they use it, how quickly do they respond
to e-mails, how quickly do they respond to questions that are
put, how many electronic discussions do they have. Despite our
readiness to do this we will not have the time to respond to this
in the way in which you suggest, to innovate, to experiment with
it. We will be forced by the pressure of people who will realise
the power that they have to mould the way in which we work into
working in their way.
(Dr Margetts) Yes. In fact, that is why I presented
two scenarios, because most of them are ideal types, the middle
way is a tricky one. Doing nothing is doing something in this
area so in that sense I think you are right.
266. How do we respond to that? How do I as
a backbench Member of Parliament with the resources that I have
respond to this? You are the experts.
(Dr Margetts) I do not know. Do you have a web site?
Can your constituents e-mail you?
Mr Browne: Yes, but that is just the beginning
of it. As soon as people start to use that method of communication
with me to the extent that they can do I will not have the resources
to cope with that. How do I control it?
Chairman
267. He was telling us about a video conference
with some of his constituents this morning so he is way down this
road.
(Dr Coleman) When this technology started relatively
recently the immediate political response to it was what I consider
to be a fairly immature one by a lot of scholars who started saying
"we are now into the age of direct democracy" and all
sorts of people started to publish books about the end of Parliament,
Government, Town Halls. There was the Newt Gingrich thing in the
United States, all of which lacked any kind of serious political
sophistication. There was a lack of any connection between the
real culture and technological potential. That blighted this whole
discussion. Not this specific discussion but one of which it is
part. I actually think that this technology, if it is used well,
can strengthen the representative process because parliamentary
representation has always been a matter of convenience. Right
the way back to the Burke-ian defence of Parliament the assumption
was always that one had to appoint representatives to act on behalf
of large groups of people because large groups of people cannot
inform the debate themselves. Even Burke, whilst he said "I
am a representative and not a delegate. I will listen to what
you say but I will not necessarily do what you tell me to do",
did not say "I will not listen to what you say, I cannot
listen to what you say". The process of listening more carefully
to what people are saying is something that is going to become
much easier. How does one do this? I do not think an individual
backbench MP can do very much about that because in terms of Government
and in terms of Parliament this requires a major change of infrastructure.
It is about having policies and having a strategy for developing
web sites or making e-mail available. It should not be the job
of MPs to have to create their own web sites and update them on
a weekly basis. There is no comparable person in a management
position in British industry who would be expected to have to
create their own web site. There is nobody within Unilever or
ICI who would say "I cannot use e-mail because it would take
me too long to answer all of my messages every day". It is
extremely frustrating if that is the particular point at which
this process becomes unmanageable for Members of Parliament. You
have to have a strategy for dealing with that information. In
relation to the traditional media, I think this is very much the
crux of where the changes are happening. In writings of mine I
have referred to this as being a process of movement from virtual
deliberation to direct deliberation. In other words, we are moving
away from a process where the television studio was the locus
of public debate, where what was said on Newsnight was
what formed the agenda, towards the possibility of making that
agenda much more directly open to the public. That is not the
same as direct democracy, that is direct discourse, deliberation,
agenda forming, which is good for democracy and good for representative
democracy. I do not see any conflict between representative democracy
and these new technologies, they can only strengthen it if representative
democratic institutions like Parliament particularly, which is
where it really matters, and local authorities take them up and
use them imaginatively.
268. That was the point of the original discussion
and that is what I am trying to make sense of, as to whether this
is something that you feel is going to blow the traditional methods
out of the water?
(Dr Coleman) You are absolutely right that you have
to have a process of gathering together the benefits of discussion.
I do not believe there is anyone who reads through the whole of
Hansard in the course of a day. Similarly, Christine Bellamy was
talking about sending a student to the library to get a book,
you send them to get a book, not to bring back the library. We
are saying that there is always going to be information overload
and there is always going to be a need for knowledge management.
I think the problems of knowledge management is a problem of metadata—somebody
was telling me recently that a group of school children in London
were asked what number they would call if there was a fire in
their house and nine out of ten of them said they would call 911,
which is the American number, because that was what they had seen
on television. There are real problems about going to the internet
and wanting to find out about the English Revolution and only
being able to get stuff about the American Revolution, wanting
to know about the election and only being able to find out about
the presidential election. All of that is a question of making
sure that knowledge is managed in a way that would benefit democracy
rather than harm it. There is a political role in all of this.
Mr White
269. Does that not come back to one of the points
about the subversiveness of the web which you mentioned earlier?
It is usually talked about in the context of subverting evil regimes
like Iran and China but is it not the case that because of the
way it is a small cartel of non-governmental organisations in
America that control things like domain names, is that not going
to be part of the problem?
(Dr Coleman) At the moment there is a big discussion
about the change of classification of domain names. In a sense,
it changes the politics of traditional media debate as it was
known during the course of the 20th Century because it is not
about who owns the newspaper or whether people own a television
channel, it is actually about the very basis of raw information
in society.
270. You have been talking about the web as
if it is some archaic form of multi-ownership but in reality it
is a small cartel of about six companies that control the web.
Does that not have an implication for our democracy and the kinds
of things that you are talking about?
(Dr Coleman) Yes.
Mr White: What do you think should be done about
it?
Chairman: Just in a sentence.
271. Is not one of the problems that that whole
agenda has not actually been recognised as a political issue?
(Dr Coleman) I think you are absolutely right, I think
it is a fundamental problem. One has to ask whether information
is an ordinary commodity or something which there is a political
obligation to control? If it is an ordinary commodity then there
is nothing you can do about it because it will obviously be susceptible
to the process of monopoly or at least of oligopoly. If it is
going to be something that you can control then the time to control
it is now.
Mr Browne
272. How? No individual government could control
this. It has to be done at an international level by governments
ceding part of their sovereignty to some international organisation
who could regulate this.
(Dr Coleman) Yes, but—
Mr White
273. The problem is that it is not an international
body that is doing it, it is private American companies within
the borders of the United States over which foreign governments
do not have any jurisdiction. That is part of the problem.
(Dr Coleman) I think that is right. The issue is about
establishing public spaces and public services, even if there
is a tendency towards a group of companies owning the rest of
the space. It is even in the interests of those companies to make
sure that that public space is available.
(Dr Margetts) I just wanted to say about this issue
of information overload that there are ways round it. If 5,000
of your constituents send you the same e-mail generated automatically
that one person has generated, yes that is a problem but there
are technological ways around those problems. There are already
software packages which can respond to e-mails automatically without
anybody having to look at them. Those types of control are not
there if 5,000 people send you the letter. Some of the problems
generated by the information overload problem are also capable
of being overcome with the same sorts of technology so should
not be regarded as unbearable.
Chairman
274. I read Christine Bellamy's evidence as
suggesting that we should not seek to do that kind of thing. I
am looking at paragraph seven of your evidence on all these e-mails
that we get that we do not want. You are saying presumably if
we simply filter out our constituents this will filter out wider
expressions of interest on legitimate issues of the day, you want
us to be bombarded by everybody on everything.
(Professor Bellamy) I do not want you to be bombarded.
What I do want you to do is to exercise due care and establish
clear principles and criteria by which you decide that certain
things are managed in certain kinds of ways using certain kinds
of technologies and certain kinds of rules. I was very worried
about the reports that particularly in the American Congress people
were automatically assuming that anything that came from outside
their constituency was something that they would not wish to see;
that rather unthinking assumption that what you are primarily
dealing with there is a problem of overload.
Mr White
275. We chuck them in the bin at the moment
in a non-electronic age so why should that be different online?
(Professor Bellamy) The point I was making earlier
was when you do put things online people start questioning them
rather more and the very act of going online and having to manage
new technologies does provide the opportunity for people to think
in a more systematic way about the way in which they behave with
communications and information. It does tend to have that effect.
For example, if businesses start thinking rather more about the
way in which they are handling e-mails, whether they allow their
employees to deal with post in all kinds of ways, particularly
if they perceive them as junk mail. All I was suggesting was that
allowing people to make those kinds of private decisions without
having to explain them to anybody else, for example to the people
who might be sending them this kind of mail, is rather unhelpful.
Chairman
276. You could make a case for saying that the
world is overfull of information and what it lacks is understanding.
What I would give my right arm for is the names of six people
I could trust whose judgments I know are sound in key areas of
policy who could do the filtering for me. The idea that I am going
to be better off if I spend the rest of my life watching a screen,
receiving information from people I do not know on everything,
surely that is precisely what we need. What we need is the enrichment
of understanding that will enable us to get to grips with some
of these issues.
(Professor Bellamy) That is what you need as an MP.
277. That is what I need as a citizen.
(Professor Bellamy) There are other stakeholders in
this as well. What the people you represent might need is a better,
stronger sense than they have at the moment that they have a way
of joining in and being listened to. It seems to me this whole
discussion is about getting some kind of balance between the two.
Mr Browne: I agree with that, I think it is
about getting a balance between the two of them. I have been a
Member of Parliament since 1997 and was horrified when I was elected
at the amount of unsolicited correspondence I got, buried in which
were letters from constituents that were things that I really
needed to respond to. My concern, to deal with your point, Dr
Margetts, is not 5,000 letters about one subject, that is a godsend
in fact, 5,000 letters from constituents on the one subject about
which I can give 5,000 simple answers and then I know I have communicated
with 5,000 constituents. It is only when you become a Member of
Parliament that you understand the power of the notepaper with
the House of Commons heading on it.
Chairman: That is why you are very grateful
to the League Against Cruel Sports.
Mr Browne
278. Absolutely. I am very grateful to any private
Members who want to move into the area of hunting with dogs. That
is not my concern. My concern is that in resource terms I am already
overstretched without my constituents understanding to the extent
that they will very shortly the power of e«communication.
I do not know how we get from where I am today to where I expect
I will need to be in a comparatively short period of time to respond
properly to people's expectations when they communicate with me
as a Member of Parliament. Never mind how I will then cope with
that information and translate it into how I act as their representative
in voting or policy terms. I do not even know how I will cope
with the logistics of dealing with that. If there are intelligent
agents, whatever you call them, if there is technology out there
that is what I want to hear about. I want to hear about examples
of where it works, if it is Australia or wherever, where people
who are doing my job are further advanced than I am, even if it
is only by a matter of months or minutes, so I can see how they
do it and I can get there before my constituents get there.
(Dr Margetts) It is an organisational point, not an
individual point. It is something that the organisation of Parliament
should be dealing with and cannot afford not to.
Mr Browne: Have any parliamentary organisations
moved significantly? For example, what is the phrase I saw in
here, what is a Dutch digital city and how do we get one?
(Dr Coleman) There is one. There is a place called
Trimdon Digital Village.
Chairman
279. Careful now, you tread near our leader.
(Dr Coleman) Indeed. There are two questions there.
There is a technology which will enable a lot more people to speak
to their elected representative. One question is do you want all
of those people to speak to you anyway or are you more interested
in finding out wisdom from another source? The other question
is about how you manage it. If there is a source of significant
wisdom and information for representatives out there, can representatives
cope with it? I think this Parliament is not equipped to cope
with it but will need to be. In the Canadian Parliament mail filtering
is being used more. In the Welsh Assembly every Member now has
a touch screen in front of them during the course of debates.
That is not about voting primarily but about accessing information.
In the BSE inquiry in this country every person giving evidence
had that evidence transcribed and the people who were on the committee
of inquiry had that on their screen within a short time so they
were able to look at it. Information from select committees could
quite easily be available in the same sort of fashion. This is
very much about organisational matters but that may not be the
main resistance to this. It may well be that there is a resistance
to representatives being more open to this kind of pressure from
the people who elect them.
| 
