Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
MR DOUGLAS
CARSWELL MP, ANDREW
MILLER MP AND
MR RICHARD
ALLAN
28 NOVEMBER 2007
Q1 Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you for
coming. You know what we are looking into. The House itself has
already expressed its support in principle for e-petitions and
has asked the Procedure Committee to draw up a scheme with a number
of key elements: firstly, that Members should be as engaged with
e-petitions as they are with written petitions; e-petitions should
be open for the addition of e-signatures for a certain period
before they are formally presented; and once presented they should
have the same status as written petitions. The Government has
accepted our earlier suggestion that as a general rule all petitions
should be responded to by the minister. We discovered in the earlier
part of our inquiry that up to 25% of petitions were not being
answered at all, and we are pleased that the Government has joined
us in regarding that as totally unsatisfactory. Do any of you
wish to make an opening statement or do you want us to just start
the questions?
Andrew Miller: Chairman, I think
all three of us are on the same wave length as the Committee so
on a personal level I think it would be better and more constructive
if you went into questions.
Q2 Chairman: Do you agree with that,
Douglas?
Mr Carswell: Yes.
Q3 Chairman: Richard?
Mr Allan: Happy to respond to
questions.
Q4 Chairman: We do have a sceptic
on the Committee, Roger Gale, who needs to be convinced that this
is a good idea, so we are not necessarily completely united in
our view on this. I take it from what Andrew said that the three
of you do support the principle of an e-petitions system and feel
that the Commons should embrace this; would that be a fair summary
of your opinion?
Mr Carswell: Correct. Chairman,
I think we should go even further and not merely allow e-petitioning
but e-initiatives so that what we debate and vote on in the House
can be determined by the people we are supposed to represent.
Mr Allan: Chairman, I would put
a caveat on that. I think that if you are going to open up an
e-petitioning system, which I think essentially could be a useful
democratic tool, the most important thing is absolute clarity
and transparency with the citizens about what they can expect
from it. I am not sure we have had that necessarily with all the
e-petitioning systems to date. One thing that still worries me
is that I do not believe there has been a full evaluation of the
Number 10 e-petitioning system in terms of what the users of it
actually think. We have got some numbers from it but nobody has
gone out there and said to people, "Do you feel that the
Number 10 e-petitioning system has enhanced democracy or has it
in some way actually left you disappointed?" I think those
questions do need answering before we go any further.
Andrew Miller: Following from
that I would argue that an important precursor to e-petitions
is to establish the principle that you described yourself that
ministers should respond so that the petitioning process does
have a relevance and at least people can see as a result of the
X thousand people pressing for the improved railway on the Wrexham-Bidston
line, or whatever it might be, they can see what the Minister
for Transport has said about it precisely. I think that would
be an important prerequisite to have that really well-embedded.
Q5 Chairman: And if we were to embrace
an e-petitioning system, do you see this as an extension of our
current petitioning system, in other words using new technology
to present what has always been presented to Parliament in a new
and different way, or do you see it as a totally new procedure
and therefore not akin to what has happened in the past really
for anyone who wants to respond?
Andrew Miller: We may have different
views on that, I do not know, but my view would be that it should
start off as a process that supports the existing procedure. It
does enhance the procedure because it empowers those people and
it is an increasing number of people who may have access to IT
in their homes but are actually themselves house-bound. Mr Gale
has heard me at previous meetings talk about my 87-year-old mother
for whom the Internet is a window to the world, and for her to
engage in things with her Member of Parliament (not me, I hasten
to add, it is a colleague on your side, Chairman) would be something
that she would find quite refreshing, and that actually does mean
that we are providing a tool to a part of the country that currently
very rarely gets the opportunity to engage in any petitioning
process.
Q6 Chairman: Before you come in on
this, Douglas, the reason I asked the question was we had a very
clear steer when we spoke to Members of the Scottish Parliament
that if they were doing it again they would have much preferred
to roll out a new system and do it incrementally, and they felt
that they went too far too soon, which caused all sorts of problems
which they could have addressed if they had moved the system slowly
to where it now is.
Mr Carswell: I hope that any change
would be an improvement and would support the status quo of representative
democracy. After being two years in this institution, I believe
that the system sorely needs revitalising, but I do also hope
that in making the change it would be a step towards a system
of democracy in the age of YouTube, where you are not simply using
modern technology to petition your rulers and beg that they take
note of your concerns, but you are actually able to materially
affect an outcome, so I would hope that e-petitioning would be
the start of something much greater and actually put the voter
in the driving seat and not the Sir Humphrey politician types.
Mr Allan: I think you will have
some real problems if you take the existing system and then try
and put it online because you are going to be trying to get a
round peg into a square hole. The reality is that the old-fashioned
petitioning of Parliament had certain characteristics; it is small
scale, by definition, it is hard to get up to big scale; it is
localised, petitions are generally on local issues; and it has
become subservient where the public comes and says "Please
sir; yes sir." The Internet is not localised, by definition
it is global, not even just outside the constituency, it is literally
global and people want to access it from anywhere in the world
if you have a system; it is very large scale; and it is not the
subservient relationship, people's expectation is that it is much
more a relationship of equals. I think the way people will want
to use it will be contrary to the way you want them to use it
if your expectation is that it is going to be like the old-fashioned
petitions. The road pricing dispute is a classic example here.
That is not a constituency petition. Whose is the road pricing
petition? When two million people in the country sign a petition
to whom does that belong and how do you deal with it. It is orders
of magnitude different from almost any other historic paper petitioning
exercise so I think there are some real issues that need to be
addressed.
Q7 Chairman: You could deal with
the "anywhere in the world" point by requiring the person
signing the petition online to put their postcode. If they were
not a registered voter in the UK you could actually prevent them
from adding their name.
Mr Allan: You may do but I think
what I am saying is you will spend a lot of time fighting the
way people want to use it. You will be spending your time fighting
them off rather than including them and that reputationally could
be difficult for Parliament. There is another way and that is
to see petitions as more of a public EDM, so the way an EDM is
where MPs associate themselves with a statement, an e-petition
to Parliament could be like an EDM where anyone could sign. It
is a different way of thinking of it. In that case what is the
problem with anyone signing it from anywhere? As long as you know
and you are able to respond to them accordingly, why limit access
to that?
Q8 Chairman: In terms of language
then, do I take it that you would not want to see an e-petition
necessarily bound by the same rules as to how a point is phrased?
Mr Allan: I think something like
an EDM is much more appropriate than the old petitioning forms.
So what you are really saying is, if I am a member of the public,
I am coming along and I am saying, "I want the UK Parliament
to discuss this issue of importance to me and this is why it is
important." It is much more equivalent to what you do as
MPs with an EDM than it is to say, "I humbly beseech you,
please sir, yes sir," which I do not think would work in
the Internet climate.
Mr Carswell: I have come to the
conclusion after two and a half years I have worked here, that
an EDM is just gesture politics; it is a way of me engaging in
a pointless gesture. I do not think that a disaffected and justifiably
disillusioned electorate is going to be satisfied by just being
able to engage in their own form of electronic gesture politics;
they will want to actually know what it is going to achieve. Signing
a petition and having it raised or addressed by a minister is
all very well but I think you need to go further than that and
actually initiate debates and votes in the House of Commons, some
form of systems initiative beyond simply public EDMs.
Andrew Miller: I would plead for
caution about Richard's ambitious project for two reasons. One
is the same problem as one sees from time to time on the Number
10 website, you can put something up that is ever so simplistic
and it will attract lots of signatures but the practical application
of whatever it is is enormously complicated, so it does drive
you towards that kind of simplified politics, and I would counsel
against that. I agree with Richard that you cannot simply pick
up the rules governing the existing petitioning process and plant
them onto an electronic system but, on the other hand, whilst
I am sure all Members in the room would support the continuation
of the concept of our relationship with our constituents in our
constituencies, I think we do need to find a mechanism that will
enable the constituency-based petition to be conducted online.
You are right, the base tool that is already in place, the use
of postcode information to identify the legitimacy of the person,
is increasingly becoming easy to cross-reference with the electoral
database, and over time that will become more simplified as the
major political parties move towards common approaches to management
of data and the electoral register, so it would be possible to
have in place a cross-reference to the postcode and confirm that
that person is registered as part of the petitioning process and
therefore you could maintain the constituency-based model of current
petitioning. The detailed rules—I would bow to some of the
expertise from PICT and so on to work out how in practical terms
it would be implemented within the framework of the interface
between Parliament and the public that exists in their bailiwick.
Chairman: Thank you. Roger Gale?
Q9 Mr Gale: I am not entirely certain
that Mr Allan is correct in his assertion that the petition is
by implication local. I think most of us can recall badge messengers
carrying boxes and boxes of signed forms into the Chamber where
the subject has warranted a national approach, but each and every
one of those, whether they were a handful of signatures or a truckload
of them, has been under the guidance and management of a Member
of Parliament. Do you feel that with an e-petition the parliamentary
management—and I hesitate to use the word "sponsorship"
because it is more a facility—the parliamentary facilitation
of an e-petition should remain?
Mr Carswell: I profoundly disagree
with the culture whereby politics has to take part under the patronage
and guidance of an MP; I find that bizarre. People want to and
should be able to engage in politics without the permission or
say so of their local MP or some member of the political caste
in Westminster. Deference has gone and people, I think quite rightly,
should be able to initiate these things with or without a politician's
say so.
Andrew Miller: I am not on the
same wave length on this one. I made the observation earlier about
the wording of a petition. I think the wording of a petition has
to have some credibility in terms of what the petitioners are
seeking to achieve. It has to be written in language that a) is
understandable and b) is meaningful in terms of something that
can be delivered. I think it is the responsibility of the Member
who is managing the petitioning process, as it is now, to be able
to stand up in the House and present their petition and, if necessary,
be subsequently challenged about, "Well, Mr Gale, you have
presented this petition and it is your wording on the petition
but it is a meaningless gesture and how would you actually expect
us as the relevant government department to respond to you, there
is no procedure?" It would be an irresponsibility to do that,
but having listened over the last 15 or 16 years to a number of
people presenting petitions, I think we can all find examples
where it has been gesture politics on the part of the Member.
I actually think that tying it to an accountable Member is a way
of strengthening the process. It is not a question of patronage;
it is a question of you need a champion and a manager of the petition,
and the Member should be the champion of that cause and should
have thought it out thoroughly and made sure that the words that
people are signing up to are actually deliverable within the framework
of our system.
Q10 Mr Gale: Do you want to add anything
Richard?
Mr Allan: I think it very much
depends on your expectation of who is going to initiate the petitions
and what they are going to be like. In a sense, we are all guessing
slightly what the public wants to do but we have some evidence
from what they have done at Number 10 of the public saying, "This
is what we want: to tell the Prime Minister about something."
It is going to be much more complex in the Parliamentary environment.
I agree entirely that historically you have national petitions
sponsored by an individual Member, for example a Member who was
leading the All-Party Autism Group and through that network bringing
signatures from across the country on autism. There was a comfortable
working relationship between the Member and the community that
was petitioning. I think with an online petitioning system that
comfortable relationship will break down and will be quite different,
and if we want to come to it to challenge Parliament—so
if we take something like the road pricing example again if people
come here and want to have a go at road pricing—who is going
to own that petition? If the MP and the person who initiated the
petition was on the Government side and happened to support road
pricing, are they supposed to own that petition even though two
million people have come to say, "We hate the Government
for doing X,Y and Z"? I should think the way people will
use it will be quite different from the historic petition. That
was the point I was trying to get at earlier. If we know that
and we can anticipate that then we need to have a system that
would be responsive to the way people want to use it rather than
the way we historically have done petitions.
Q11 Chairman: Of course it has always
been the case that a Member presenting a petition now does not
necessarily have to support the views of the petitioners. He is
a facilitator rather than a champion.
Mr Allan: I agree but I think
in most cases the interests of the Member and the petitioners
are broadly aligned. I think there are very few cases where there
may be evidence to the contrary, but I suspect certainly where
a Member is actively involved in the petition, there is normally
a coincidence of interest between themselves and the group making
the petition.
Chairman: I think that is the usual position.
Mr Gale: I am surprised that what Richard
has said has so profoundly misconstrued the management of petitions.
The reason that the bag rather quaintly hangs behind the Chair
is precisely to enable a Member of Parliament who wishes to receive
or is required to receive a petition but does not wish to endorse
it to put it in the bag and have it published in proper fashion
on behalf of the constituents without having to make a speech
in favour of it. The Chairman used the word "facilitator".
Let me come back to you on this. What we are talking about is
effectively a parliamentary duty. It does not matter to me if
a Labour Party member comes to me and says, "Here's a petition;
will you present it?" The answer is "Yes", in exactly
the same way as if a Member of Parliament brings a referral to
the Ombudsman which has to be counter-signed by a Member of Parliament.
I do not have to agree with it; I act as the facilitator. I cannot
see the problem. I find it slightly perverse that Mr Carswell
should on the one hand say he does not want Parliament involved
with it having a few moments ago castigated what he and I have
both regarded as the parliamentary graffiti that is early day
motions. What we are in danger of doing, unless we inject some
parliamentary management into this, is extending the parliamentary
graffiti to an ever-widening platform.
Q12 Chairman: Right of reply!
Mr Carswell: What I am advocating
in the paper I submitted to the Committee[1]
is that you go much further than merely the right of e-petitioning
and you have a right of citizen's initiative so that instead of
collecting signatures which would mean a headline in your local
paper, you could actually collect signatures that would initiate
the second reading of an Act of Parliament. The facilitator in
that case would be the Queen in the State Opening of Parliament
where her Speech would not merely recite the agenda of the ruling
establishment but would actually recite the laws the people of
this country would like to see debated. That is what I am arguing
for.
Q13 Chairman: Any further bites?
Andrew Miller: Just on Mr Gale's
comments, I endorse his view about the parliamentary graffiti
of EDMs. Just in my time here their value has gone right down
because any old subject that takes somebody's fancy this evening
is tabled and some pretty irrelevant non-parliamentary issues
appear as well. Whilst I totally understand the historic role
of the bag behind the Chair and all the rest of that, the simple
reality, Mr Gale, is that more and more Members are using the
petitioning process as a vehicle to help promote their relationship
with their constituents, and whilst you are absolutely right that
most Hon and Rt Hon Members would present a petition even if they
profoundly disagreed with the content of it, the majority of petitions
do have a strong correlation with the perceived interests of the
Member.
Chairman: Thank you. Siân?
Q14 Mrs James: I just wanted to tease
a little bit more out on this, gentlemen. The Committee considers
that those accessing the petition website would submit a petition
and would be advised to first contact their constituency MP. It
has been very interesting to hear what you have had to say and
I would like to hear a little more on that. I would also like
to hear a little bit more on the role of the MP as a facilitator
in this case because it appears to me as a very active constituency
MP (as we all are!) that this link is vital, and I would not want
a petition suddenly appearing online which I did not know about,
or where I had not reacted in the proper way to it. I would like
to be part of that if something was that important in my constituency.
Andrew Miller: Well, in practical
terms I am with you on that but obviously Mr Carswell takes a
profoundly more radical view. We do have a relationship with the
people we represent. I do not believe it is one of subservience
and people being subservient to us at all; quite the other way
round, they are the only ones that can fire us, so I think we
do need to retain that relationship. I think it is one of the
strengths of our democratic process that ties it together and
has done for a considerable amount of time, and that is the fact
that we do have a structured relationship between us and the constituency.
I think it is a healthy thing. Of course there are complications
when issues start to cross constituency boundaries, cross jurisdictions.
I referred to the Wrexham-Bidston line earlier on and that is
an issue that Ian Lucas and I are both working on. From presenting
a petition point of view, that is rather a difficult issue, but
you have to have a vehicle/mechanism by which you could deal with
those cross-border issues or indeed national issues. That is not
impossible but I think I would still have the link with the individual
as part of the system.
Mr Carswell: Mrs James, if every
Member of Parliament was as diligent a constituency MP as you
are then I do not think there would be a problem. The reality
though is we have 60 or 70% of Members of this Chamber who inhabit
something called safe seats. This means that realistically they
stand very little chance of ever actually being voted out by the
electorate. We have this curious system because we have a parliamentary
system that arose in the 19th century where everything was parish
based and local. We had a 19th century system where it made sense
when the fastest thing in the country was a steam train to send
representatives down to this building to make decisions on behalf
of people. We live in a totally different age. I am sure members
of the Committee are familiar with the tail theory of the Internet
where if you are selling books or music or political ideas there
is an almost infinite demand for very niche points of view. I
do not really see how you can maintain the old idea that you have
to have a constituency patron in the form of an MP who is there
to know what is best for you. I find it curious and I think for
the 60 or 70% of people who live in seats with no realistic chance
of changing their MP, it is not a particularly fair or democratic
system.
Mr Allan: There are lots of different
channels that a constituent now has and we should not try and
make it one-size-fits-all. I think there is a very strong role
for a local petition which is between individual constituents
and their Member of Parliament saying, "We, 10,000 people
in constituency X, would like you on our behalf to take action
on this particular issue." They may choose to do that through
the parliamentary petitioning system or they may set up a group
on Facebook or there can be a party political petition, which
we are all using, every party is doing petitions. Equally, they
might want to come along and have a petition on a great national
issue: should we or should we not go to war with country X or
Y?—which really is not anything to do with constituency
and is actually not directed at the constituency member, it is
directed at government. They could choose not to use a petition
but use another vehicle called WriteToThem.com so they can come
on to different websites and write you a letter.
Q15 Mrs James: They do.
Mr Allan: 200 or 300 of them could
come that way, so in a sense the expectation of the citizen nowadays
is that they should have some clear signposts to the appropriate
channel to use to achieve a particular objective. If Parliament
should do anything, Parliament should be giving them those signposts
and giving them the range of tools and encouraging and helping
them to use the right tool for the right job. A petition would
be the right tool for the right job in certain circumstances and
in some cases that will be an individual Member petition. Absolutely,
when it is local or crossing local boundaries it should be the
individual Member or Members. In other cases, I would argue that
that probably is not the right vehicle for them. If you can signpost
and offer them a range of tools then I think you will have helped
that democratic engagement to take place.
Mrs James: I do occupy something that
is considered to be a safe seat but I do not treat it as a safe
seat; I would be taking the electorate very much for granted if
I did that.
Q16 Mr Gale: To some extent, Mr Allan,
you have already touched on this but there clearly is an emerging
view that there are effectively two kinds of issues, national
issues and local issues. I do not have a problem with that because
I think the written petition system has handled that perfectly
adequately by in every case having a lead Member, if you like.
However perhaps you might consider the possibility of there being
two categories of petition: one is a national petition and the
other is dealing with the local school, the local hospital, planning
issues that are contentious, out-of-town supermarkets and things
like that, which might fall into a different category. I just
wonder what you think of that possibility as a way of separating
the truly local from the truly national or international, as in
the case of the war in Iraq?
Mr Allan: I think it is sensible
to separate them out. Again, if we look at what has actually been
happening, I know there is this negativity around EDMs as parliamentary
graffiti and I can share that scepticism from being in here and
seeing how they are used, but if you look at what people have
been doing on the Number 10 website they have been doing something
like that in most cases on most of those petitions. Clearly there
is an appetite amongst the public because millions of them are
going there to do this. There is an appetite for them to go and
collectively express themselves on a national issue in a forum
which they see as being official: the Number 10 website. What
is on the parliamentary website carries a cachet and a status
out there, believe it or not, for people that they have gone and
registered on the Parliament website. Newspapers will take you
seriously and you will get reported and you are encouraged to
go along and add your name to it. I think there is an appetite
for that. The expectations of what happens to it are different
obviously because people are not stupid and they know that if
they go and argue against Government policy, and the majority
of MPs by definition are in the Government, it is not instantly
going to cause a turnaround, but then there is still a sense of
effectiveness by having gone and done it. In this whole argument
I am trying to put, if you go back to thinking the person sitting
out there and what their expectations are and you create systems
that meet those expectations, then I think you will have done
something useful.
Q17 Mr Gale: I think that two of
you appear to have accepted the thesis that the petition should
remain within the facilitation of a Member of Parliament, one
of you clearly has not, but that being so, the Committee took
a view, without discussing this really other than amongst ourselves,
that at the very least, given that there is always one lead petitioner
and somebody's name comes top, whoever it is, that that person's
constituency MP should be offered a chance to take it on board.
I have already indicated my view is that it is a parliamentary
duty and whether I like the petition or not is absolutely immaterial,
and I would not have any hesitation in facilitating the petition
whether or not I agree with it. If there is to be any choice in
this at all, and I personally am not sure there should be, but
if there is, would it be sensible to say that in each and every
case whoever is the number one name on the list should approach
their constituency MP and if this person says, "No thank
you, I am not having anything to do with this at all," then
there is the freedom under parliamentary convention to go to another
Member of Parliament to say, "My own Member of Parliament
has refused to take this on board; will you help me?"
Andrew Miller: I think when you
are dealing with the local issue, the planning issue or whatever
in your own constituency, it would be rather difficult to envisage
the circumstances where a Member would not at least act as a facilitator
and I think in most cases actually act as a champion, as has been
indicated in my earlier remarks to you. If some mischievous group
brought forward a petition that said: "Mr Roger Gale should
resign immediately," I cannot imagine, with the greatest
respect Mr Gale, you being terribly enamoured of the idea of being
required to act as a facilitator for that and there is a danger
that the system could be trivialised. One of the strengths that
I see about keeping the link with the individual Member is that,
as I say, the Member would be accountable to the House for presenting
petitions which are credible and are deliverable and are not frivolous
and vexatious and beyond the reasonable duties.
Q18 Chairman: Of course the Member
may advise the potential petitioners that there is a better way
of dealing with the problem, that he is prepared to go and see
a minister, for example, on their behalf. I think we very much
take the point you have made. Do you want to add anything?
Andrew Miller: Just simply that
on the bigger issues, the regional or national issues, I would
certainly accept Mr Gale's observation that it may be that the
first person on the list is from my constituency and I say to
them, "Well actually on that particular issue my neighbour
Ben Chapman has far more expertise than I have; it might be a
good idea to have one of Ben's constituents as the lead petitioner
and create the link that way." We do this, as colleagues
know, even across political boundaries. There is a degree of co-operation
on things where there is a mood in a region, so I could certainly
see a mechanism evolving that would work. Perhaps one of the rules
ought to be, if it is a pan-constituency issue, that the lead
petitioner would have the responsibility of making sure that their
MP is prepared to act as the facilitator or perhaps point them
towards someone else.
Q19 Chairman: Richard, do you want
to add anything?
Mr Allan: I am just thinking about
this filtering notion. The numbers for the Number 10 Downing Street
website: over 29,000 petitions have been submitted since the thing
started so it is getting on for 100 a day being submitted. Just
a note of caution not to underestimate the potential job you may
have doing that. The thought also just occurred to me that if
I was sitting in the Prime Minister's constituency that I may
advertise myself on eBay as a willing petitioner for anything
that somebody wanted to submit as a national petition so that
the Prime Minister has to deal with them. I say it half frivolously
but half seriously because any system you put up there people
will work out the best way to game it in order to achieve the
objective they want. Or you submit 2,000 petitions to Andrew Miller
one week because he refused one so you get a whole lot of people
to submit lots and lots and he is then expected to do the filtering.
Just a note of caution to say that volume will be an issue and
gaming will be an issue for the system that you put up there.
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