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I would like to make a brief comment on amendment No. 15. It is strangely interesting that it reflects in reverse a discussion that we had in Committee. We were concerned that social services departments per se would no longer be identifiable when children’s social services were subsumed within children’s services. Certain duties and responsibilities should be clearly specified under the heading of social services and it must be made absolutely clear to the directors of children’s services. I accept the amendment, but I am little concerned about the terminology.
Lords amendments Nos. 11 to 19 agreed to.
delegated legislation
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): I propose to put motions 8 and 9 together.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6) (Standing Committees on Delegated Legislation),
That the draft Pensions Appeal Tribunals (Additional Rights of Appeal) (Amendment) Regulations 2006, which were laid before this House on 5th June, be approved.
That the draft Pensions Appeal Tribunals (Armed Forces and Reserved Forces Compensation Scheme) (Rights of Appeal) Regulations 2006, which were laid before this House on 5th June, be approved.— [Jonathan Shaw.]
BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
That, notwithstanding the practice of the House as to the intervals between stages of Bills brought in upon Ways and Means Resolutions more than one stage of the Finance (No. 2) Bill may be taken at any sitting of the House.— [Jonathan Shaw.]
petition
Post Office (Nunney)
5.24 pm
Mr.
David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD): I wish to present a
petition that I received at the post office in Nunney in my
constituency from Mrs. Caroline Toll, who is a resident of Nunney, and
the postmaster and mistress, Mr. and Mrs. Innes. The petition is signed
by more than 200 users of the post office who wish to express their
concern about the future of small post offices such as Nunney. An
attached list draws attention to what the sub-post office does for the
village—not only its activities as a post office but the other
services that it provides. They include: selling newspapers, magazines
and sweets, prescription delivery for local surgeries, fax transmission
and reception, dry cleaning collection, providing a box office for the
Nunney Players and contact for the Nunney Community Association. It is
a long list of services that would be lost if the sub-post office
closed. The most important point is that it provides a hand of
friendship to people in the village and a sense of community.
To the House of Commons, the Petition of the Users of Nunney post office, Somerset declares
That the post office is under threat of closure because some of its main income sources are being removed. Rural post offices act as community centres, as outlined by the attached list of activities in our own post office.
The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Government to act to stop the closure of any more rural post offices.
And the Petitioners remain, etc.
Written Parliamentary Questions
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.— [Mr. Michael Foster.]
5.25 pm
Peter Luff (Mid-Worcestershire) (Con): I am especially grateful for the opportunity to discuss an issue that I believe to be fundamentally important to Parliament: how we hold the Government to account for their actions, specifically through written parliamentary questions. Of course, you and I know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that Governments have never been keen on telling Parliament what was really going on, despite the ministerial code.
There is a famous story about a senior Minister, lost in his car somewhere in a dense fog in the highlands of Scotland with his permanent secretary. The figure of a crofter looms out of the fog and the Minister’s driver winds down the window and asks the crofter, “Where are we?” “Why,” replies the crofter, “You’re in a car in the highlands, lost in the fog.” The permanent secretary leans across to the Minister and says with pride, “That, Minister, was a perfect parliamentary answer—correct in every particular, but telling you nothing you did not know already.”
Sadly, the techniques used by Ministers to tell one nothing have become cruder in recent years. The answers that they provide are increasingly late, inadequate or simply spectacularly unhelpful—often, I fear, deliberately so. If that trend continues, there is a genuine risk that Parliament will be even more marginalised in our society than it is already, as people who really want to know the answer to questions opt to use the Freedom of Information Act 2000 instead of looking to Members of Parliament to use parliamentary questions—another nail in the coffin of our effectiveness.
A constituent once berated me, saying that she wanted me to do something—“not just words, but actions”, she demanded. Words are the Back Bencher’s only weapons in the fight for our constituents, and they are often best deployed in written parliamentary questions, which is why we must protect their integrity.
My speech seeks to do three things. First, it will illustrate the worrying deterioration in the quality of answers given by Ministers by drawing on my recent experience, although I know that other Members have similar stories to tell. Secondly, it will express serious concern about Members’ tendency to ask unnecessarily large numbers of questions—that is certainly part of the explanation for the declining quality. Thirdly, it will offer three simple solutions to the volume problem, in the hope that Ministers and Departments will respond by offering more timely and helpful replies.
When I
applied for the debate, I considered applying for an hour and a half in
Westminster Hall. I now find myself with the luxury of two hours on the
Floor of the House—an unexpected bonus. If I had known that that
windfall would come my way, I would have sought to say more about
holding replies, named day questions, questions asked near Prorogation
and a host of other matters that are relevant to written parliamentary
questions. [Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Forest
of Dean (Mr. Harper) says from a sedentary position that he will do
that.
Those matters are genuinely important, but I want to focus on quality
and quantity.
In recent months, I have noticed a serious deterioration in the quality and timeliness of answers that Ministers provide to my questions. A question that I asked the Home Office about police mergers was answered six months late to the day. It was tabled on 15 November 2005 and due for answer on 17 November. It was eventually answered on 17 May this year. I could detect no sense of irony in the Minister’s long-awaited reply, which began:
“The House will be kept up to date about the detailed plans for all areas as options for each are refined.”—[ Official Report, 17 May 2006; Vol. 446, c. 1047W.]
At least the Government have taken my advice and delayed the decisions on the merging of police authorities, so at least it was worth waiting for.
There are other questions to the Home Office, flowing from my correspondence with constituents, to which I have not received replies in an acceptable period, including four questions about foreign prisoners at a prison in my constituency, two of which were tabled on 26 April and were due for answer on 2 May, and a question on guidance to staff escorting deported foreign nationals, which was tabled on 3 May with the answer expected on 8 May. I have even followed up the latter with a chaser question asking when the Minister will reply, which was tabled on 8 June with the answer expected on 13 June, but I have still had no reply. I hope that the Deputy Leader of the House will tell the Leader of the House that I appreciate the obvious concern that he has expressed about the delays in answering questions, especially by the Home Office. The Leader of the House gave a particularly helpful response recently connected with a point of order made by my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson), and we appreciate the concern that he has shown.
The problem is not only the Home Office. I have also had strong words with Health Ministers about the inadequacy of an important reply that really called into question the point of tabling questions at all. Earlier in the year, I asked two questions about the NHS colorectal screening programme. Bowel cancer is a disease that has killed two close family members, so I was more than irritated by an answer that simply ignored my question. I asked the Secretary of State for Health the following question:
“why the NHS colorectal screening programme will not now start on 1 April; when she expects the programme to start; and if she will make a statement”.
I also asked about the funding for the programme. The answer was bewildering and suggested that my question had not even been read:
“The Government have stated their commitment to a national bowel cancer screening programme, for which funding has been agreed. On 30 January 2006, the new Health White Paper “Our health, our care, our say: a new direction for community services” reaffirmed that the programme will be rolled out from April 2006.”—[ Official Report, 30 March 2006; Vol. 444, c. 1170W.]
I knew
that the programme would not be rolled out then, as I happen to have a
friend who is closely involved in the issue and who briefed me in great
detail about the delay in the roll-out. The answer did not even
begin to address my question, but blandly assured me that the programme
would be rolled out.
To be fair to the Minister involved, a strongly worded letter of complaint received a sympathetic reply, but letters from Ministers are not on the record. Nor should Members have to rely on letters to Ministers to chase parliamentary questions. I strongly suspect that, like many others these days, the answer was the product of an unwelcome innovation—the centralised parliamentary answering unit—and not of the officials actually charged with the policy. More and more, that unit provides answers to Members’ questions without proper reference to those in charge of developing and implementing policy. It is those officials who develop and implement policy who should normally draft the answers that go to Ministers for approval, because it is those officials who know what is happening on the ground.
On another question to the Department of Health, I recently waited three months to be told that it did not collect the information—an amazingly long time to produce that reply. I was amused by the response to a third question, just this week, on the serious cuts to my local health service, especially in palliative care beds—it was a named day question, given the urgency—which bizarrely included a holding reply and a totally inadequate substantive reply on the same day. I do not know what was going on with that.
The straw that broke this particular camel’s back was the insensitive and totally inappropriate grouping of important questions after this year’s Budget about the precipitate abolition of the home computing initiative. I shall not reopen that debate, but that initiative was a matter of profound importance in my constituency, which is home to a large independent computer manufacturer offering computers under the scheme. I had serious reservations about the principle of abandoning the scheme, and about how that was being done. I think that the scheme should have been phased out and not just abandoned, as there were important implications for the Government’s digital inclusion strategy.
Generally, I have the highest regard for the Paymaster General, but her response to my questions on the subject genuinely shocked me. It was her subsequent refusal on two separate occasions to reconsider her totally inappropriate answers that drove me to seek this debate.
Ten of my questions—all asked in a genuine spirit of inquiry—were arbitrarily grouped together, without any regard for their content. They were dismissively answered in an omnibus reply but, sadly, that omnibus conveyed scarcely any of the passengers invited on board. My 10 questions were published in the Official Report on 3 May 2006, at column 1719W, and were grouped with questions from other MPs. A total of 30 questions from eight MPs—six Conservative and two Liberal Democrat—received just one reply.
Intriguingly, the luxury of
time today has enabled me to notice that there was one additional
question on the home computing initiative that day. It could have been
grouped with the others, but was not. I do not want to make a party
political point, save for the small observation that that ungrouped
question happened to come from a Labour Member. I do not know how that
could have happened, but there we are: perhaps he was asking about a
matter that the Government were
anxious to emphasise, whereas they did not want to
discuss my concerns, such as those that had to do with the level of
consultation with the industry before the decision was
taken.
Eight of my questions were not answered at all in the omnibus reply. One was answered partially, and precisely one—and only one—was answered fully and properly. I needed the answers to be able to find out what was going on so that I could deal with the industry and my constituents, and the Table Office fully shared my concern about the extraordinary way that my questions had been grouped. That is almost unprecedented, but the office was a great help in enabling me to ask two follow-up questions.
My follow-up questions were answered in the same inadequate manner. In one, I asked about grouping decisions and the provisions of the ministerial code. I received the following answer:
“The questions concerned were grouped to enable a full, substantive statement to be made in the House.”—[ Official Report, 16 May 2006; Vol. 446, c. 831W.]
A week later I asked a further question about the considerations taken into account when decisions about grouping were made, and I received a restatement of the previous answer, citing a “full, substantive statement”. In fact, it was no such thing: instead, I am forced to conclude that it was a pretty blatant attempt to avoid giving me information that would probably be available under the freedom of information legislation.
As I say, I like the Paymaster General, and in fairness to her I must say that a letter from her happened to come in the post this morning—I am sure that the timing is accidental. I can only regard the letter as conciliatory, as it invites me to work with the Government on the development of a new digital inclusion strategy. I am grateful for that acknowledgement that the precipitate abolition of the home computing initiative created a hole in the Government’s strategy. That should not have been allowed to happen, but normal relations have now been resumed.
I want to say something—briefly and, I hope, not too pompously—as Chairman of the Trade and Industry Committee. It is a little foolish of the Department of Trade and Industry, which I think shares my concerns about the abolition of the home computing initiative, not to have replied at all to my four questions—three in March and one in April—on the subject. If I were at the DTI, I should reply to questions from the Select Committee Chairman more promptly than that.
Mr. David Lidington (Aylesbury) (Con): Does my hon. Friend realise that his account demonstrates a worrying change in the culture of the civil service when it comes to answering parliamentary questions? When he was in Whitehall—admittedly that is some years ago now—was not the view taken that hon. Members were responsible for phrasing questions succinctly and crisply to elicit specific information, but that it was the duty of the Department to give full, factual and accurate responses, and not to try to conceal information in the way that he has described?
Peter Luff: I am grateful for that point, with which I agree. I am about to offer the Government a case for the defence, because there are issues that the House needs to address, too. In the particular case of the home computing initiative, I think that there was a deliberate attempt to withhold information, but other answers have a more innocent explanation so far as the Government are concerned, and we must look to ourselves for a significant share of the blame, some of which we all must share.
Four years ago, the Procedure Committee conducted a survey of Members’ views on questions and received 167 responses. Broadly, it concluded that the system was generally thought to be pretty effective, but that the speed of answers was not sufficient and there was a problem with the quality of many answers. I submit that those problems have got considerably worse in the four years since then.
The Select Committee on Public Administration has also been monitoring ministerial answers and their quality for several years, but I see no evidence that that important work is having the effect that it ought to have.
Let us put our own House in order, however, before we tell the Government what to do. Members of Parliament are tabling too many questions—far too many questions. This has no doubt led to many Ministers feeling, quite fairly and legitimately, swamped and unable to deal with the deluge in sufficient detail and with sufficient speed. It also leads, I suspect, to the setting up of centralised answering units in Departments, which are an extremely unwelcome development.
The use of the questions procedure has grown significantly. Perhaps some historical perspective will help. In the Session of 1847 there were 129 questions—an average of about one a day. I think that they were all oral questions, as the principle of written questions had not then been established. I have a lengthy exposition at my disposal on the development of the number of questions asked, but I shall cut straight to the more relevant, recent dates. The Table Office has helpfully provided me with figures for the questions tabled in each financial year since the millennium. The House, of course, operates its Sessions over a different year, but these figures are for the financial years because that is the basis on which the House of Commons Commission works, and they are useful.
There were an average of 302 questions each day in 2000-01; there were 460 in 2001-02; there were 463 in 2002-03; there were 472 in 2003-04; there were 456 in 2004-05; and there were 596 in 2005-06. Those figures include orals, which account for between 20 and 30 a day. There is a different procedure for orals—the shuffle, in which only those that come out on top are printed—and orals are a constant, and a small proportion of the total. The figures give a measure of growth—from 300 to 600 over that period.
Those figures are described in the House of Commons Commission annual report as
“dealt with by the Table Office each day”.
They represent
questions that appear on the Order Paper, so refer to orderly
questions. For questions offered to be tabled, including those that are
“carded”—the procedure by which a question
challenged at the Table Office will bring the Member a card asking him
or her to go to discuss it with the Clerks—the figure for
2005-06 was 656 per day. The overall trend is sharply up. At the end of
that year, the Table Office was receiving 33 per cent. more questions
every day than it had just 12 months
previously.
I have not done my research in detail, and I shall not name and shame anyone this evening, but it seems that the increase is caused by a relatively small number of Members. For example, on 15 June last year, of the 367 ordinary written questions that appeared in the blue pages of the Order Paper—not including 73 named-day questions and 25 orals—some four Members accounted for 174, or 47 per cent. of the total. It is not always the same four Members, of course, but I understand that there is a pretty strong pattern identifying 20 or so Members who make a significantly greater use than the rest of us of written questions.
What are the reasons for that increase in question numbers? First, it has become too easy to ask a question. The Procedure Committee found that there was overwhelming support for electronic tabling of questions: something like 74 per cent. of those who responded were in favour, with 24 per cent. against. I say, however, that popularity is not always a good guide to propriety. Although questions may be received only if a Member signs up for e-tabling and uses the dedicated system, when a question comes to the Table Office by that route there is no way of determining whether there really is a Member at the other end. Strictly speaking, of course, a Member will use the system personally and not give his log-in details or his password to anyone else. But we live in the real world, and we know what really happens.
The use of e-tabling has increased sharply. At present, 310 Members are signed up for the system. In May, 176 Members tabled one or more questions by that method and the top tabler tabled 197 e-questions. Over the whole year 2005-06, the percentage of all questions e-tabled was 29.6, but the proportion is increasing, and hit 40 per cent. for the first time in February 2006. E-tabling has made things too easy.
I shall be even more controversial by saying that another reason for the increase in questions is pure and simple laziness. There has been a significant change in the character of parliamentary questions. More than ever, they are used for acquiring large chunks of statistical information or general knowledge, not to inquire into aspects of Government policy, which I consider to be their prime purpose. One might think that a Library, a website or a reference book would have provided the Member with an answer more easily and much more cheaply.
Some Members
do not first check whether the information is already in the public
domain; Departments provide a great deal of information online; I have
reservations about their use of websites—but that is the subject
of another debate. Members do not need to ask parliamentary questions
to find the information but, without betraying any confidences, I can
tell the House that I have heard Members engage in exchanges, often
robust, with Table Office staff about their right to ask questions,
after they have been called in because their question was
carded. I have also seen Members happily throw away significant numbers
of carded questions without a second’s thought. Obviously their
commitment to those questions varies—probably in inverse
proportion to their authorship. A question drafted by a Member has more
emotional capital invested in it than one drafted, and tabled, by a
researcher.
When I asked how many carded questions drew a Member into the Table Office to discuss them, I was really surprised by the reply. Detailed records are not kept so the figure is only a guess, but the order of magnitude is right: the Table Office estimates that only about 30 per cent. of questions carded as not being in order and needing to be discussed are actually followed up by the Members who tabled them. The other 70 per cent. just lapse and go into the wastepaper basket. Not much commitment there, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
I shall make an enemy with my third accusation. Why are we so obsessed with volume? It is a matter of keeping up with the Joneses, and the danger of performance indicators. I put much of the obsession down to a desire on the part of some MPs to provide tangible evidence that they have been working. Some MPs table long lists of questions in an attempt to appear active, just as some Members table and sign large numbers of early-day motions to pretend the same thing. We all know that early-day motions are usually parliamentary graffiti, and many written questions are not much better these days. Researchers are often drafted into helping with the task of giving the appearance of usefulness. The questions are then submitted, with no scrutiny at all from the Member, on pre-signed forms, and dropped into the box outside the Table Office or tabled electronically.
Chief among the villains is a well-meaning website, www.theyworkforyou.com, which provides numerical rankings of MPs’ parliamentary activity, referred to as “performance data”. For example, to choose a Member at random, the website includes the revelation that my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) has received answers to 35 written questions in the last year—323rd out of 644 MPs. It also states that he has attended 36 per cent. of votes in Parliament, coming 628th out of 644 MPs. Those are hardly high scores, although I suspect that they are much higher than those of one or two members of the Cabinet—I name no names—but they are certainly not an accurate reflection of the work done by the Leader of Her Majesty’s official Opposition. Those activities are not the best use of his time.
More obscurely, the website lists such bizarre things as how often my right hon. Friend
“has used a three-word alliterative phrase (e.g. ‘she sells seashells’)”.
He has used such a phrase 208 times in debates in the last year, placing him 119th out of 644 MPs.
Such websites do,
to some extent, help people to engage with politics, but it is entirely
misleading to imply that an MP’s performance can be judged
simply in terms of the numbers of questions asked, votes participated
in or even alliterations uttered. Numbers are a very crude indicator of
effectiveness. One good question is better than 100 bad ones. Indeed,
often one short question—particularly in oral
questions—is better. The single word “Why?” can
often floor a
Minister much more effectively than anything else. However, we are now
in an arms race in which what can be measured will always count for
more than intelligent analysis of what has been achieved. That is very
worrying.
Mr. Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con): At the risk of making lots of enemies, may I suggest that the media play a part in that? The other aspect is the publication of Members’ allowances. A number of media organisations do the crude sum of dividing one’s allowance by the number of times one has spoken or the number of questions one has tabled. In that way, they work out a value-for-money indicator. If that is how we are judged, Members will be driven to focus on quantity, not quality.
Peter Luff: I absolutely agree. My hon. Friend has made a valuable additional point. We have to be extremely careful about that. I see the Deputy Chief Whip on the Government Front Bench. He is not allowed to participate in our debates or to ask written parliamentary questions, so he scores zero on all those things, but he is a very effective Member of Parliament. He has more access to Ministers and more influence than I do, and can probably achieve as much or more for his constituents. However, that is all entirely invisible. On the performance indicator that my hon. Friend has just identified, the Deputy Chief Whip would do extremely badly, but that would be a monstrously unfair representation of his contribution in the House.
The problems with asking too many questions are very simple. I do not want to repeat myself. My main concern is the long delays in answering questions, as they stack up in Departments, and the reduced quality of the answers that inevitably flows from that. Interestingly enough, a witness before the Procedure Committee, a former colleague of ours, Andrew Bennett, said:
“We have gone for quantity rather than quality. There is a major problem that some junior ministers spend all their time rushing around...here there and everywhere. They do not have time to think about the answers, particularly to written questions, so they just sign off whatever the civil servant puts in front of them. There are far too many questions and it would make a big difference if there were fewer but there were far better answers to them.”
The answer is not the artificial rationing of questions. If the questions matter, they should be asked and there should be no arbitrary limit on them. The trick is to make sure that they do matter. Effective scrutiny and effective defence of our constituents depends on our unfettered ability to ask the questions that must be asked to get to the bottom of an issue, whatever that issue may be. There have been occasions—at the time of foot and mouth disease, and when there was a proposal for an asylum centre in my constituency, which raised interesting questions—when I have asked large numbers of questions. An arbitrary cap would have inhibited my ability to serve my constituents properly.
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