Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
MR DOUGLAS
CARSWELL MP, ANDREW
MILLER MP AND
MR RICHARD
ALLAN
28 NOVEMBER 2007
Q20 Chairman: Douglas, do you want
to add?
Mr Carswell: No.
Q21 Chairman: If the House insists
in any system it introduces that it wants to retain this link
with the constituency Member and wants to insist there should
be a facilitator, despite the evidence from Douglas, do you think
where an issue is local, as in regional rather than in one constituency,
there should be provision for more than one Member to act as a
facilitator? Would you see an advantage in this in helping perhaps
to prevent multiple petitions because in one area one constituency
is represented by the Labour, one by the Lib Dems and one by the
Conservatives so they all organise petitions and two are seen
to be outshone by the one that did it first?
Mr Allan: There is a practical
solution to that which is to allow and indeed to encourage Members
to sign the petitions themselves so the Member's name is appearing
at the top and effectively you have a lead group of signatories
to that petition, which is a very practical way of allowing Members
to associate themselves with a petition and then the public to
see that they are associated with it and that would make sense.
Q22 Chairman: You anticipated where
I was going in my next question.
Mr Allan: It would make perfect
sense for regional petitions.
Mrs Riordan: You have all already touched
on this subject but I wonder if you could go into a little bit
more depth on how multiple e-petitions should be dealt with, for
example against factory closures, Post Office closures, and should
duplicate petitions be allowed?
Q23 Chairman: Or should there be
a requirement that while a petition is open for additional signatures
we should not allow duplicates?
Mr Carswell: It may not relate
immediately but I know that in New Zealand where they have a process
for applications to initiate petitions for legislative changes,
the Clerk of the Table Office has a role in ruling out fantastical
propositions; there is a bar on multiple applications; and a small
fee is also charged to prevent constant attempts at overloading
the system, but I do not know how significant that is to e-petitioners.
Q24 Chairman: Are you advocating
the charging of a fee in the UK if we go down this route?
Mr Carswell: If it would actually
lead to substantive change in Parliament yes, I think it would
be worth it. If you were simply just being charged to add your
name to an electronic graffiti board like the Number 10 Downing
Street website, then no. I would willingly pay for politicians
to discuss some of the things I would like to see discussed in
Parliament and am unable to even as a Member.
Andrew Miller: I would argue strongly
against the presumption that anyone signing a petition or even
initiating a petition should be charged. I think it is a basic
civil right to be able to petition your Member of Parliament or
this Parliament. However, I can certainly see in practical terms,
because Richard's slightly tongue-in-cheek observation is absolutely
right, that there might be people out there who are looking at
the system and saying, "How can I break it?" or, secondly,
"How can I make the life of Member X a complete misery?"
and that is a serious proposition. I think I probably still hold
the record, having dealt with a case some colleagues will remember,
the Louise Woodward case, where I dealt with in excess of a quarter
of a million emails and, believe you me, that overloads a Member's
office, and I had to get a team of volunteers from all over the
country who acted electronically as my filter for that. We simply
have not got the resources to manage that kind of volume so we
do need some process of filter. The New Zealand idea of having
the Clerk of the Parliaments who does this as an officer who determines,
just as when we go down to the Table Office, there is an official
that says, "No, Mr Knight, the wording of that is not appropriate,"
or, "You are targeting the wrong department," I think
there is an argument for saying there ought to be an officer independent
of the political parties who could guide and steer people towards
a sensible and acceptable wording given the objectives that they
are seeking to come up with and if you did that that would act
as a slight deterrent, not a complete deterrent, regarding the
dangers that Richard Allan has flagged up.
Mr Allan: I think it is a very
good point. The Number 10 website has not been fully evaluated
but some of the anecdotal feedback is that the users themselves
do not like the fact that there are multiple overlapping petitions.
Obviously some do because they write them but the other ones that
come along later find it very confusing. I think Andrew is exactly
right that Number 10 was a "suck it and see" approach,
put it out there and we will see what happens, and Number 10 is
relatively poorly resourced to do this kind of work. However,
if you have an existing Table Office and existing structure of
precisely doing this kind of work and if you are prepared to resource
it properly—and as I say I anticipate maybe 100 a day coming
in—so if you have resource and somebody to evaluate 100
petitions a day, sort through, say, "That is a duplicate,
I direct you there," then I think that would be well worth
doing and better for the users. It has to be absolutely clear
in the terms of usage that this is not an open petitioning site,
the parliamentary site is a moderated petition site, if you want
an open one go off to site X, Y or Z or go to a party political
site where they will have very different kinds of wording on their
petitions, but this is a moderated one and these are the rules,
and we have a resource here that is going to do that and work
with you in a customer service way to try and arrive at the right
petition. Some people will go away unhappy. Some people will go
away and say, "Freedom of speech, how can you muzzle me?"
There will be others however who will be much happier because
when they get there they will see an orderly list of 200 or 300
not overlapping petitions rather than 2,000 or 3,000 overlapping
ones.
Q25 Mrs Riordan: Should different
petitions on similar subjects be somehow linked?
Mr Allan: You could do that only
with this level of sensitivity where the person doing that linking
is not perceived to be biased for or against the Government. What
people are going to say is, "Oh, you are trying to muzzle
the petition. I want to say that `ID cards are an evil encroachment
on individual liberty' and you have just said `we request you
do not bring in an ID card scheme.'" So they are going to
be upset because they have not been able to put their wording
in but as long as it is handled sensitively and they are told
those are the rules of this game, you can go off and play another
game somewhere else if you like, then I think it could make sense
and be workable.
Mr Carswell: In New Zealand I
think it is the Clerk of the Table Office who, in consultation
with the Speaker, can use their judgment to decide if something
is fantastical or what the wording should be and has a key role
in deciding whether or not something duplicates something else.
Q26 Mr Chope: If you have got several
Members of Parliament representing one city area like you used
to Richard, will there not be a game being played if you do not
allow duplicates, where if there is an issue in Sheffield somebody
will say, "I must get in first sponsoring this petition and
then I am going to make party political capital out of the fact
that the other Members representing Sheffield constituencies (perhaps
from other political parties) are not able to associate themselves
with that petition except by signing up to my petition?"
Would there not be political games being played if we did restrict
the ability to have duplicate or similar petitions?
Mr Allan: There is a risk of that
and that is the downside of it. You would as a group of elected
Members working with a neutral authority who are actually working
on the wording have to accept, in a sense, that you are not going
to claim superior ownership. If all six MPs for Sheffield signed
up to something you would have mutual ownership even though one
of them technically was the one who started it. If you can behave
in that way then it would make more sense from a public point
of view. That would be their expectation. If your feeling is that
you are not going to be able to restrain yourselves from wanting
to use petitions in a divisive way then come back to the point
that you then have to have multiple petitions and potentially
six MPs with six petitions from the same city.
Andrew Miller: I guess, Mr Chope,
having represented a city area where you cross all three parties
you know that those political games do go on anyway in the paper
world, do they not, and people wanting to get on the bandwagon
first and taking ownership of a particular subject. That inevitably
will happen with an electronic system but as long as there is
the facility, I think somebody suggested that the Members that
have signed up to it appear in emboldened at the top of it or
something like that, you may not be the first but you can come
alongside Richard Allan—
Mr Allan: In alphabetical order
I think!
Q27 Mrs James: Coming back to the
bag and bagged petitions, should there be an electronic equivalent
to the bagged petitions when the link to the MP is not made clear
or is not publicised?
Mr Allan: That is a good question.
For clarity, under current procedure an MP comes and drops the
petition in the bag—
Q28 Chairman: I think what the question
is, is whether the Member should have a right to remain anonymous?
In other words, he facilitates the e-presentation but because
of the subject matter, let us say it was to do with abortion or
something, he does not agree with the petitioners and therefore
wants to be behind the curtain, do you think that should be allowed?
Mr Allan: From what you are saying
then, the electronic equivalent of the bag is an unsponsored petition;
it is as simple as that.
Chairman: Maybe "facilitator not
named" appears on the petition.
Q29 Mrs James: No public record.
Mr Allan: If the procedure is
that the MP will do it anyway, so if the MP is not acting in any
way as a censor of that petition, if there is currently a vehicle
for me to write a petition and have an MP physically drop it in
the bag but no way to interfere with the transmission of the petition,
I do not see how that is functionally different from me being
able to go to an electronic site and put up an unsponsored petition.
It is absolutely functionally equivalent to have one without an
MP sponsor.
Q30 Chairman: But I think we are
working on the assumption that the House may insist that the link
with the constituency Member be maintained and therefore the question
you are being asked is should a Member of his or her own volition
be able to seek anonymity?
Mr Allan: I think you have to
have that, yes. I would be going further and say why not just
be explicit and let them do it. My answer to that has to be yes.
If you want to technically associate a Member with it but never
have their name appear then yes, it seems unnecessary, I guess.
Q31 Chairman: All of you have touched
on the likely volume, if this system goes ahead, of e-petitions
that are likely to be tabled. You have all had experience as well
of running a Member of Parliament's office. Do you think a situation
could arise where there is a demand on the Member's staff to such
an extent that the current resources would not be adequate? Do
you feel the request to facilitate an e-petition is going to add
much of a burden to a Member's work?
Andrew Miller: No, because a lot
of colleagues could make some significant productivity gains in
their own offices by using technology more efficiently than many
of them do. I say that having given advice to a number of colleagues
both in terms of their offices here and the equipment they have
exploited in their own constituencies, so I think there is a lot
of learning we can all engage in to improve the efficiency of
our offices. Where the pinch point might come is in terms of resources
of the House where if the initial process is not managed with
some care, we could overburden officers of the House both in terms
of the people doing the IT support, which I know works on a shoestring
in comparison with most corporate entities of this scale, and,
secondly, in terms of clerks of the House.
Q32 Chairman: Okay. Douglas?
Mr Carswell: Without wishing to
be terribly contrary I think we are just looking at this whole
issue in terms of what would it mean for us as politicians. What
would it mean in terms of local political advantage for one MP
over another? What would it mean for resources and the pressures
on our offices? It should not be about this. It should be about
the fact that, for various reasons to do with the distribution
of Executive power and the whipping system, the Executive is no
longer held effectively to account so how can we have a system
that allows the people to hold the Executive more effectively
to account and to assist us to do that. Yes, there is a tremendous
appetite in the country for the local but that is because there
is an appetite for the distinctive and the particular and the
authentic, back to that idea of the Internet and the tail. That
does not necessarily mean an exclusively locally defined interest.
People interested in special needs education or vivisection or
all sorts of issues like that have a very minority sectional interest
but it cannot be defined in geographic terms, so I take issue
with this idea that an MP should be steering it through the Commons
and we should be looking at it in terms of how it will affect
us. We should be looking at it in terms of how, given that the
medium of communication is very different today to what it was
ten or 150 years ago or whatever, can we devise a system that
allows the governed to hold the Government to account, and if
that makes life difficult for us then so be it.
Mr Allan: I think there will be
two points at which MPs will have to do extra work. One is obviously
when the petitions come in, and there is clearly potential for
quite a lot of time to be spent negotiating with constituents
if you maintain that constituency link over a petition. We know
the volumes of that. As I said, there are 29,000 a year on the
Number 10 website and if you get that kind of volume MPs typically
every week or so will get one or two petitions for them to deal
with. It is not going to drown most of them but there may be hot-spots,
as I said earlier, depending how people behave. Perhaps the more
significant one—and I do not know if you are going to come
on to this—is the mechanism for responding to petitions.
What we do know again is that there have been over 5.8 million
signatures to the Downing Street site from 3.9 million email addresses.
By my calculation that is just under 10% of the voting population
so that would work out at roughly 6,000 additional potential contacts
between a constituent and their MP during the year. You might
build in a mechanism that says you then engage in correspondence
with the constituent or the constituent themselves may wish to
do that so someone could run a campaign where they bring the two
together and tell people to sign the e-petition and it would enable
them to write to their MP at the same time to tell him that they
have signed the petition. If those kinds of things happen where
people take the petition and build it into a broader set of communicators
with their MPs, then anticipating an additional workload of, as
I say, 6,000 contacts per MP per year, you have to think about
how that fits in with your current contact rate.
Q33 Mrs Riordan: Can I apply your
minds to the issue of presenting these petitions before the House.
If we are talking about 30,000 petitions, even though some might
go into the bag, we are talking about every Member perhaps having
one petition each week to present. Have you thought about the
implications of that? What happens after they have been presented?
Do they just go into the ether or do you think there should be
some provision for a special sort of debate and, if so, how would
you choose the debates because you obviously would not be able
to have 30,000 debates on petitions.
Mr Allan: Just as a point of clarification,
half of those 30,000 were rejected but you are still left with
15,000 which is a big number.
Andrew Miller: I would start by
saying this is where Richard was right in his opening remarks
by saying that we must not put a square peg in a round hole. We
cannot assume the rules are going to be precisely the same and
one of the reasons is because the volume will change. You will
empower more people and therefore the volume will automatically
start to change. Stemming from that, you have to say well, in
practical terms how can we deal with it on the floor of the House?
Should it be the sponsoring Member who takes the responsibility
of notifying the House formally. They do not have to do it by
standing and taking a minute and presenting it in the old-fashioned
way. They could do it by sending an email into the system either
to the Speaker or wherever. Let us think about modernising the
business process there.
Q34 Chairman: You mean rather like
written statements that it is e-presented and appears printed
in a House form?
Andrew Miller: That would be an
extremely good parallel to look at. I think if we try to duplicate
the current process there would be a serious risk of clogging
up time on the floor of the House in a way that most Members would
resile against because there is not enough debating time on many
days.
Q35 Mrs Riordan: What about these
debates on these petitions; do you think we should make provision
for that?
Andrew Miller: I think there ought
to be, but in the same way as there are mechanisms theoretically
for generating a debate around an EDM, the theory is fine but
the practice is a bit limited. Again there are certain petitions
of particular scale that surely would warrant the usual channels
agreeing to a debate taking place, so certainly if a petition
either genuinely represented everyone in a village or a huge number
of people in a particular community, there ought to be some potential
for having the matter debated. Where it is debated will depend
again on the scale and whether it should be a Westminster Hall
issue or whether it should be a matter for the floor would again
depend on scale.
Mr Carswell: I think your question
goes to the heart of the matter. If one is going to generate 30,000
petitions, so what if nothing definite actually happens as a result.
We all know how the state likes to talk about public consultation
and in what sense would this be any more meaningful or any more
democratic or relevant. It is precisely for this reason I suggested
in a paper I produced that the petition be through this five stage
process based on what they have in New Zealand and Austria which
will lead to legislative proposals and debates. Those six petitions
with the highest number of signatures which have gone through
this rigorous five stage process that works in other countries
would then be incorporated into part of the Queen's Speech and
every couple of months we could set aside time and have a debate
about the half a dozen issues that matter most to the voters.
I think one day it will come to seem like commonsense. To have
all this and then simply have the equivalent of a public EDM,
I cannot see it would increase turnout in elections or make people
more interested in the goings-on of this institution.
Andrew Miller: It might be an
interesting way of defining what a topical debate is.
Q36 Chairman: Yes, that thought crossed
my mind.
Mr Allan: You have got two great
advantages in responding. One is that by definition all the people
who have done this have come via the Internet, so you have the
ability to produce a written response on the Internet which you
know is going to be useful to them because they are going to be
looking. The other is that in 98% of cases you will already be
doing things on the subject that they are interested in, both
you and the Executive. Thinking of it from the user's perspective,
if I have come along and petitioned on fox hunting, say, and I
have said I have a view on fox hunting, for or against, whatever,
if I get a written response which is published on the site linked
to where I created my petition, and perhaps emailed back to me,
that says, "This is the Government's official response on
it. Here is the House of Commons Library note on it. Here are
all the recent debates on that", and if that is live updated,
because there will be debates and PQs on that subject every week
coming through the system in the normal way, some of them which
may mention the petition and some may not, then I have got something
of value from that. I have gone in, I have said I am interested
in fox hunting, and I now have a picture of all the activity that
is taking place on that subject. I think there is an enormous
value in that for a large number of those petitioners from the
point of view of engaging in the system. If I am not happy and
I read all these debates and library notes and stuff and say,
"You still have not got it right", at least I know where
to come back and have a second bite of the cherry.
Q37 Mr Chope: Can we go on to the
issue of access to the information that is going to be generated.
Under the Data Protection Act access to the names of the petitioners,
their addresses, their postcodes and email addresses would be
limited by law but I think facilitating Members would be clamouring
to get access to it and be able to use it. Do you have any thoughts
about that?
Andrew Miller: There is a lot
of activity that occurs in this building that works right up to
the limits of the scope of the Data Protection Act. A lot of colleagues
in all parties need to think rather carefully about the way they
manage their offices, to separate the parliamentary from the political,
otherwise there is a serious risk of them being in breach of data
protection provisions. There is an argument, although perhaps
not immediately relevant to this inquiry, Chairman, that there
ought to be some serious education of Members and their duties
under the Data Protection Act because they are handling huge amounts
of data about a lot of people. The Member should, of course, be
able to pass information back to those constituents and, therefore,
ought to have access to those email addresses for that purpose.
However, of course, just because they had the email address, if
the Member decided that they were going to spam the person with
every thought that they ever had, they would soon find themselves
in some difficulty. There needs to be a permissive system developed
so that the Member facilitating, sponsoring the petition, is actually
posing the question to the person, "Do you want me to email
you back when I have got some results from this petition, yes
or no?" The second argument is whether there ought to be
another tick-box that says, "Can I use this email address
for other purposes that are related?" We need to think that
one through rather carefully.
Q38 Chairman: Would not another way
of dealing with it be to say that the House authorities keep the
information and the Member is entitled to make responses by email
but he does not see the email addresses? Would that not be one
way of policing it against abuse?
Andrew Miller: It would work,
yes.
Mr Allan: That is how the Number
10 website has done it, I think under pressure from mySociety
and their partners who were keen that they did it that way. We
do need to recognise that petitioning is an email collection tool
in modern politics, that is why people do petitions online, and
all political parties do it, we want to collect email addresses
so that at election time we can write to them saying, "Vote
for us, please". That is the basic reality of how email addresses
are collected and used. It would be problematic if any system
that was official and public started to be used in that way and
I think people would rightly say that is not right. The safest
thing is if the House authorities manage all communication back,
so the individual comes on and they sign the petition and they
need to be given an option to say either, "I have signed
the petition but do not talk to me ever again", or "I
want to hear back from you", but the "you" should
be the House authorities. The House authorities can include communications
from Members in those emails. They can also include the links
to the other systems which are there precisely for one-to-one
contact. There is a system, I think it is called hearfromyourMP,
where you can sign up for a mailing list from your MP, and there
is writetothem, which is direct contact. There is no reason
not to put those links into the correspondence back to say, "Here
is the information about the issue you have raised, the neutral
information. If you want to follow it up further with your individual
MP, here's how to speak to your individual MP, and your MP is
X" and the onus is back on the constituent to decide whether
to have that one-to-one relationship, which is much cleaner and
safer than the House getting into potentially a very tricky situation
of trying to work out whether or not particular email addresses
that have been passed over have been used inappropriately, which
I can see is an accident waiting to happen.
Q39 Mrs James: Is e-petitioning likely
to deliver greater engagement between Parliament and the public?
If so, how?
Andrew Miller: Anything we do
to improve access to this place does help. We were talking outside
before we came in about the mySociety site and no longer can Andrew
Miller or Douglas Carswell act as the filter between us and the
local media and what the constituents discover about what we actually
say because there is only copy of Hansard that is taken
in one central public library, now Hansard is available
in literally every classroom, every library, every workplace and
an increasing number of homes, certainly the majority of homes
in my constituency. The mySociety link has enhanced the democratic
process tremendously because it has given people real access to
what we are actually doing here. We should promote that principle
and using e-petitions helps to promote that. It is only a small
part of it but I think it is an important part.
Mr Carswell: The Internet is certainly
useful in allowing voters to hear what politicians are saying
rather than what they say they say in their press releases, but
I think the uses of the Internet are a little greater than merely
that. Using these ideas, if we were bold about it and we were
really willing to allow the Internet to change our political system
for the better, we could allow it to help Parliament to hold the
Executive to account. If we allow the system that we devise to
help Parliament to hold the Executive to account then I think
that a lot of people who are otherwise disaffected and disillusioned
with the political process—40% do not vote, people under
the age of 30 not only do not vote but have never formed the habit
of doing so—would take a greater interest in politics through
Parliament. If we do not, if we just use this as a broad feeling
we ought to do something vaguely modern because it makes us look
good, but we basically carry on with the same outdated 19th century
notions of how this institution should be run, then voter turnout
will go down. Is it when 50% of people do not bother voting in
General Elections or 60% do not bother voting in General Elections
that we recognise there is something fundamentally wrong with
our system? It will take a lot more than this sort of initiative
to revive our democratic system but if we had a bold trust—the
people system of e-initiatives—I think we would go some
way towards restoring the trust of the people.
Mr Allan: I am following a dangerous
radical! I am going to express something a little more conservative.
I strongly believe in representative democracy, from experience
I think it works extremely well, and I see the e-tools as being
a way of enhancing the ability of a representative to do their
representative work. A connected representative, a representative
using all this stuff, is able to do more and engage better with
citizens if done correctly. E-petitions could be one of those
tools. Could it enhance democracy? Definitely, yes. How it would
do that is precisely in thinking through the classic transaction,
which is the individual sitting at home, these days feeling comfortable
with the Internet as their primary communication tool, not picking
up pen and paper because that is the way they like to do things.
They go to the parliamentary website, the official source. They
find something attractive which draws them in and says, "Hey,
come and express your view". They express their view through
the petition engine and as a result they get back some really
interesting information, and in the vast majority of cases telling
them that far more is happening on this in Parliament than they
ever knew because the parliamentary website has improved a lot
but it is still impenetrable; they do not understand the language
or the way it works, but if they get back something which says,
"You're interested in fox hunting, here's all the stuff that
has happened on fox hunting in Parliament", "Wow, I
didn't know that", and then "Here's a way to talk to
your elected representative about that", again an accessible
way to take it further. Through that sort of mechanism you then
end up with a citizen who is better informed and better engaged
than you had at the beginning. The petition engine is one small
piece of a process of better engaging people but it is one that
I think is essential because it is how people are working, that
is how they think, and the Downing Street system, for all its
faults, has clearly demonstrated that there is a large number
of the public, nearly four million people, who do think it is
worth doing and do want to engage in that.
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