Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-88)
24 MARCH 2004
MRS CAROL
DEVON AND
MS ROSEMARY
EVERETT
Q80 Chairman: Does that take a lot of
organisation?
Ms Everett: It does, yes. One
of the key things we are finding is that we need very good contacts
on the ground. In one respect we are lucky that we are operating
in Scotland. We appreciate that you are operating in the context
of the whole of the UK. It is a bit easier for us to target different
communities across Scotland. We are trying now to work with the
community workers' network. There are about 6,000 community workers
across Scotland and we are trying to set up training sessions
with them. We provide the information to them and they can then
filter it out to the grassroots community groups on our behalf.
We try where we can to use established networks to reach people
in that way.
Q81 Mr Tyler: I want to ask about electronic
access. We have previously had witnesses in front of us who said
that your website was a great deal better than ours; yet I read
in your note that your website is currently being redesigned to
assist navigability and to encourage interactivity. So you are
obviously several steps ahead of us. On the basis that I would
not want to be reinventing the wheel in Westminster that you have
already improved twice ahead of us in Edinburgh, as it were, can
you give us some idea of the sort of work that you have already
done and now intend to do in relation to webcasting, for example—given
that we have problems of accessibility and physical presence which
are obviously even worse than yours?
Mrs Devon: Webcasting is something
that we are pioneering. We are very pleased with our webcasting.
Once we move to Holyrood, all the committee rooms as well as the
chamber will have broadcast facilities, and we will be able to
archive, broadcast and webcast all the meetings from the committee
rooms. As to the website, there are currently 800,000 hits a month
on the home page. We are redesigning it. We commissioned market
research last year and looked at who were our main users, and
at who was not using it, why we were maybe not getting to target
audiences, what were the most visited pages, and what were the
comments on the site. The most visited pages after the home page
are the MSP biographical pages. People are looking there to find
out about members and about what members are interested in. We
also found that more than 75% of the people who use the website
use it at work. It is likely that will comprise a lot of lobby
organisations, looking to see what members they should be targeting,
et cetera. Also, at work, one of our largest users are Scottish
Executive staff. They will be looking to see what members are
interested in, why they have asked a parliamentary question, and
that sort of thing. So we are looking to see what we can do with
the members' pages to make them more interesting and more relevant
to the people who are looking at the pages just now. This is very
much partway through consideration. We have a small MSP focus
group, who are helping us redesign the MSP pages. There is a debate
to be had as to what is appropriate to go on Parliament website
pages about members and what should go on the MSPs' own pages.
Those MSPs who have their own pages want a lot more on those.
Those MSPs who are not really interested in setting up web pages
want a lot more on the Parliament's web pages. Whatever we do,
I think that we should be consistent with all our members when
we put something on the web. We are therefore looking at that.
Other feedback we got was that navigability of the site is not
ideal. At the moment, if you look through our pages you will find
that headings, tabs et cetera, have changed location on different
pages. We are trying to get a consistent look and feel to it.
We are also focusing on certain areas. We want to improve the
education pages to make them have more impact, and to have a kind
of youth `fun zone' or something, for very young people there.
Q82 Chairman: A fun zone?
Mrs Devon: Yes. For example, for
£50 you can get software that turns a picture into an electronic
jigsaw that you can pull together on screen. You could have a
picture of the mace, which has symbolic wording on it, and turn
that into a jigsaw. It is interesting for young children. On our
education side we have recently launched some new educational
materials. We are now trying to make them web-enabled. We have
launched a Snakes and Ladders game—"How to get yourself
elected as an MSP"—and you have to answer questions,
then go up ladders and down snakes. We are going to try to get
that on the web as well. We are piloting that with schools just
now. We have launched a cartoon poster on devolution and, again,
we are trying to get that on the web.
Q83 Mr Heald: The Hansard Society and
the Electoral Commission have launched a report today, which is
about their annual audit of parliamentary performance. What it
seems to show is that about 75% of the population want to feel
they have a say in Parliament, and I am sure that it will be the
same in the Scottish Parliament. However, they feel disconnected.
Only about half of them are thinking of voting, apparently. There
really is quite a low opinion of politicians. We were ranked right
at the bottom, along with the journalists. I was wondering whether
in Scotland those figures would be much the same and if you feel
that you have a problem of disconnection of the Scottish Parliament
with its electorate. If so, are you doing any longitudinal research
over a period of time, to see if your AID—Access and Information
Directorate—changes that over time?
Mrs Devon: Yes. The research that
I mentioned earlier was research into public attitudes to the
Scottish Parliament. It looked at where people got most of their
information. It also asked them their views on the Scottish Parliament.
It is quite clear that, if you take the new building out of the
picture—the building has clouded a lot of the opinion about
the Parliament at the moment—once you get over that, there
seems to be a feeling that, "Okay, let them get into the
building and then see what they will do with it, once they are
there". So there seems to be an opportunity to have a second
bite at the cherry, in terms of influencing public opinion about
the Scottish Parliament in Scotland. We then asked people how
they would like to receive information about the Parliament. It
was interesting that only about 10% said that they were not interested
in getting any information about the Parliament. A lot of people
said that they would be interested in receiving direct mailings
about the Parliament—a newsletter or something like that.
We then showed them some of the public information material that
we have. There is a leaflet called Making Your Voice Heard,
which has been very popular—but not popular enough. The
focus groups that we used thought that these leaflets were fantastic
but they did not know about them and did not know where to get
them. We are therefore looking to see how we target our public
information material. We may take the focus away from using partner
libraries as a distribution tool and look to see where people
regularly go, and where we can put information about the Parliament.
Can we target doctors' waiting rooms? Shopping centres? Where
is the best place to get the message across about the Parliament?
The other thing to come out of the research is that there is still
an incredible lack of knowledge about the Parliament: the basics
about how the devolution settlement works. A surprising number
of people thought that Bills still had to be ratified by Westminster
once they were passed by the Scottish Parliament. People were
not sure about what the Parliament did. If you asked them what
they knew the Parliament had done in the last four years, the
classic answers were: free personal care for the elderly, abolition
of tuition fees, and abolishing foxhunting. Those are the three
things that dominated the Scottish media: two because they were
different from England, and the third one because people thought
that it was not a good use of the Parliament's time. So there
is a big information campaign to get across first, before you
start getting people to want to engage. There are two issues,
therefore. The first one is getting basic information across,
and then telling them, "If you want to participate, here
are the ways you can participate". That is from visiting,
from taking part in interactive fora on the website, petitioning,
meeting their MSP, et cetera.
Q84 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Obviously
Carol and Rosemary are very proud of what they are doing. However,
are the people of Scotland and those who are taking an interest
in the Parliament in Scotland interested in it as an institution
or as a place? You have highlighted the fact that, not least because
of its cost, it is in the news, it is an interesting building
and it is new. Do you think that interest will be sustained, or
is there a genuine interest on the part of the people of Scotland
in connecting not just with Parliament, which is an institution
or a place, but actually with politics and politicians? I am wondering
whether the interest that clearly does exist in Scotland is because
it is a relatively small Parliament, with the leading parties
quite evenly balanced. You do therefore direct quite a lot of
attention to people and their needs. I take the example of petitions.
I think that we can learn something, here in Westminster, from
the way in which the Scottish Parliament deals with petitions.
It is more meaningful. Here, you present a petition and, if you
are lucky, you get many weeks later an acknowledgement, but very
seldom any meaningful response. In Scotland, you indulge in petitions
in a major way and also in pre-legislative scrutiny, which involve
people more in Parliament, in politics. Is it Parliament or is
it politics and the Scottish politicians which are generating
what you perceive to be the great interest, and have we anything
to learn from that?
Mrs Devon: It is politics and
it is issues. We can encourage as many people as we want to engage
in the Parliament but, unless they have an interest in an issue,
you will never get 100% of the people wanting to go and speak
to their MSP or wanting to engage with Parliament. It is only
if they have an issue that they have a problem with that they
want resolved. Our challenge is to make it easy for them if they
do have an issue; to tell them, "This is what you do with
your issue. This is the way in. This is the best route, depending
on what your issue is". One of the challenges for us is separating
out in Scotland the roles of local government, the Scottish Executive,
and the Scottish Parliament. I think that we have more of a challenge
than you have at Westminster. Because they have been around for
so many years, people understand the difference between the Government
and Westminster. In Scotland there is a confusion between the
role of the Executive and the role of Parliament. In the last
four years we have dwelt a lot on trying to tell people about
process. That is different about the Scottish Parliament is that
we consult, we engage—"This is the committee process",
"This is how a Bill goes through Parliament", "This
is how you can engage". However, what the man in the street
is interested in is what is the impact on housing and what is
the impact on health. One of the things we are grappling with
just now is where to draw the line in describing what the Parliament
does, as opposed to the executive.
Q85 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Do you not
think that pre-legislative scrutiny, where you are positively
involving people outside Parliament—
Mrs Devon: Is very successful.
Q86 Sir Nicholas Winterton: And the consultation,
which is all part of that, is one of the reasons why people believe
that their MSPs are perhaps more relevant in the Scottish Parliament
than MPs are relevant here in the UK Parliament?
Mrs Devon: Yes.
Chairman: Perhaps I could bring David
and then Joan in together, because we have only a few more minutes
before we need to go on to the London Assembly.
Mr Kidney: I like Rosemary's description
of the partner network approach. You described libraries. Like
Carol, I wonder where are the places you will catch lots of people.
I am wondering whether local government is not the obvious partner.
We are in the same business; our interests coincide. When people
have interests in the democratic process, sometimes the responsibility
is shared between the different levels of governance. What work
have you done with local government so far, and do you think that
you might take it further along a partnered network approach?
Q87 Joan Ruddock: My question is completely
unrelated. I want to ask about the Petitions Committee. Have you
done any research into the satisfaction levels of people who have
used that route to bring up their concerns? We know that the satisfaction
level here is probably zero. Your mechanism is very different,
but it could still end up with people feeling they had done huge
amounts of work, put in huge petitions, and actually they did
not feel any better at the end of it and it had not changed anything.
I wonder if you have done any work on that, because it would be
very interesting to us if you have.
Mrs Devon: I would like to come
back to you in writing on the petitions. At the moment, I know
that we follow up. Anyone who is engaged with a committee gets
a general questionnaire about how the experience has been. If
they have been a witness to a committee, et cetera, we follow
that up. Whether we do anything different with witnesses who have
been before the Petitions Committee—
Q88 Chairman: We might send you a questionnaire
about your experience here!
Mrs Devon: I do not know the answer
as to whether or not we do anything more with people who have
submitted petitions. I will follow that one up for you. As to
local authorities, we have a general agreement with COSLA—the
Convention of Scottish Local Authorities—where we will work
together with them. However, most of that generally takes place
through the Local Government Committee.
Ms Everett: The clerk to the Local
Government Committee went out and gave a whole series of talks
to local authorities over the summer recess last year, which was
a way of engaging with them on information; but we are just beginning
now to hook into that a bit more. We have just done a presentation
with Fife council, who have introduced a system whereby their
members and also their staff can access our Internet webcasting
service live from their desks. Last Friday we sent out our broadcasting
unit and public information staff to help Fife council to launch
that. I think that you are right: there is definitely a community
of interests there that needs to be served. I guess that there
is more that we probably can do. It may be that, in trying to
get information out there, we could start talking to local authorities
about using sports centres or other community places where people
are going. If libraries are not the places that people are going
in, where are they going? Are there opportunities to put up posters
about participating in Parliament in the swimming pool? If so,
we might explore that avenue.
Chairman: We are very grateful to you
for coming down. I think that all of us feel that we would like
to spend another hour with you, probing it all. To help us over
that gap, as it were, I wonder if you would not mind thinking,
on the plane back, about some examples of best practice from your
own experience of what has worked and what has not worked which
you could let us have. Your very helpful memo started us on that
road, but I am thinking of the more hard-headed, "This is
good", "That's indifferent"—which would be
invaluable to us. On behalf of the whole Committee, may I thank
you very much for coming and wish you all the best. Maybe we should
see, as we have discussed with Wales, whether you could act as
an outpost for us. We might consider whether we want to ask you
to tender for doing that—but that is another thought!
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