Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-43)
MR DOUGLAS
CARSWELL MP, ANDREW
MILLER MP AND
MR RICHARD
ALLAN
28 NOVEMBER 2007
Q40 Mrs James: Given that if we do
instigate some sort of system, do you see a role for a Petitioning
Committee in that process, ie deciding what petitions go forward,
etc, giving additional information?
Mr Allan: From a citizen's point
of view, the ultimate response to your petition is, "Hey,
we've taken your petition and now done something in Parliament
and we've changed the law. We have responded in a very real sense
to it". That is the ultimate response. From that mass of
petitions that will only apply to a small number of them because
in the way citizens write them in a lot of cases there will be
howls of rage and frustration, they will not be asking for something
specific necessarily, but taking the ones where they are asking
for something specific out and where Parliament has the power
to do something, doing something and demonstrating you have done
it is important. Again, Scotland, for all its faults, has some
very good examples of where that has been effective. Doing what
you can do there would be great. The expectation that somehow
every petition is actionable will not be borne out by the reality.
Q41 Chairman: But you could have
an e-petitioning system without a Petitions Committee, could you
not?
Mr Allan: Yes, that is perfectly
possible. It is not essential. From the citizen's point of view,
a Petitions Committee for most people will mean nothing and it
is more obscure parliamentary language. If they get a response
back that says, "Because two million of you signed this petition
we had this debate on 23 September which we otherwise would not
have had", whether or not that was decided by committee or
plucked out of the air or the Government decided, they do not
care, they just want to know that there was an action that followed.
Mr Gale: Most Members of Parliament receive
pro forma letters sent by lazy PR companies, lazy organisations,
"Fill in your name and address at the top, sign it and send
it off to your MP". Most Members of Parliament treat those
with a fair degree of disdain because the person filling that
in has made absolutely no effort whatsoever. Equally, most Members
of Parliament receive large numbers of letters handwritten from
constituents, typed or by email that are highly personalised.
My experience is that on both sides of the House those get a proper
and courteous degree of attention from Members of the House because
it is somebody stating something in their own terms. I think I
agree with Mr Carswell that if all this is more graffiti, and
we have used the word several times, all this is is outside Tesco's
on a wet Saturday morning, "Sign here, please, it's to save
the animals", that is absolutely meaningless. It will do
nothing and nothing will happen. To come back to Mr Carswell's
point, if it is going to be done and it is going to mean anything
at all then somehow there has to be a way of sifting Mr Allan's
26,000 petitions per year through a House system that is already
creaking at the seams. Any Member of Parliament, however diligent,
through ballot and persistence, might get two adjournment debates
a year if you are very persistent. The law of averages says not
much of this stuff is going to get airtime on the floor of the
House. I would like to hear from you, not necessarily now but
perhaps after further thought, how you think the mechanics of
this is going to work to mean something because if it does not
mean anything I cannot see any point in it at all.
Q42 Chairman: Before you comment
on that, can I just add to that point. Would you support an automatic
trigger being attached? As I understand at the moment on the Number
10 website, if they get a petition with more than 200 signatures
that generates a response from the Prime Minister or a departmental
minister. Do you think in any parliamentary system there ought
to be a trigger based on numbers for a debate to take place or
should that decision be made on other grounds?
Mr Carswell: I have set out details
of a five stage process from the moment the citizen sits there
feeling aggrieved about X right up to how they could not only
trigger a Westminster Hall debate but actually initiate a change
in the law. It is a fairly straightforward five stage process
that adjusts existing arrangements we have, and it may be by adjusting
the role of the Table Office. I have submitted this in evidence
to the Chairman. Rather than trying to pluck out of the air arbitrary
thresholds which would trigger a certain response, what I have
suggested is you take the highest number of petitions so that
the petitions, if you like, are in competition with one another
and you would judge them not in absolute terms but in relative
terms, their popularity in relation to one another. If you did
that, that would auto-filter some of the white noise you might
otherwise hear.
Andrew Miller: I would be very
reluctant to have absolute figures built into the rules because
if the 200 electors in the village that I live in all signed a
petition, let us say they did it 12 years ago when the Post Office
closed, all of them wanted the Post Office to stay, it would be
wrong for that concentration of people not to have access to the
parliamentary system to express their view. Certainly there have
been endless debates over the years through both governments,
more recently in Westminster Hall, about the closure of Post Office
X, a specific very local thing that affects just a few hundred
people. I would be very reluctant for those people to lose their
route into the system by some artificial numbers cut-off. Going
back to Mr Gale's observation about the role of PR companies in
all of this, whatever you set the threshold at the PR companies
would crack that threshold by fair means or foul and it would
mean their favoured topics would get parliamentary time whereas
the things that matter to real communities might not. You have
got to be a little bit cautious about just taking numbers as a
guide.
Mr Allan: Firstly, on the Downing
Street numbers, that evolved through practice rather than being
a design feature. They said, "We have so many petitions we
cannot respond to less than 200". The other thing I would
say is can you conceive of a situation where you would have a
very large petition, say a one million signature petition, that
is not by some mechanism already being debated in Parliament.
If you had an engine over the last two weeks the big petition
would have been HMRC, and what are we debating today but HMRC.
The mechanisms exist. You have a finite parliamentary time resource
and you, as Members, are allocating that time resource generally
according to what the public have got on their minds. Whatever
is top of their list I bet you will already be debating that.
To me, the most appropriate response to these petitions is not
to try and seek extra parliamentary time because you probably
will not need it and certainly would not find it, as Mr Gale said,
but to make sure that they get really good written responses that
tell them what Parliament is doing on the issue that they have
raised and why the petition has helped to give a higher profile
to that issue. It is that written exchange that is most critical.
The threshold for the written exchange I think you will have to
set by custom and practice according to the amount of demand you
have and the kind of petitions you get. Downing Street says 200
signatures unless it is of particular concern to a local community,
so 150 signatures around a Post Office might still get a response.
You will have to set that according to what you find on the ground.
The game plan you should be setting out for the citizens is to
say, "You will get some kind of written response. You put
an email address in, something will come back into your inbox
telling you what Parliament has done on the issue that you have
said you are interested in".
Q43 Chairman: You were indicating
some dissent there, Mr Carswell.
Mr Carswell: I was, just on the
notion that politicians spend their time in Westminster talking
about things that matter to voters. After two and a half years
here, I profoundly disagree, I do not think that politicians really
discuss the things that matter to voters. Somehow we find the
time to talk about laws to conceal disclosure of expenses but
we do not have time to talk about things that matter to an awful
lot of people out there and I think if we had a system of e-petitioning
we could perhaps change that and some of the things that I know
my constituents and others would like their politicians to address
could actually be addressed. I do not think we really discuss
the things that matter to people, hence 40% of people do not even
bother voting any more.
Chairman: Except perhaps in this room
today where I think we are debating an issue which is of wide
interest. Can I thank you all for your time and assisting us with
our deliberations. This is quite a thorny issue but we are determined
to look at it thoroughly and bring forward recommendations in
due course, and you have helped us in that process. Thank you.
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