Examination of Witnesses (Questions 44-59)
MR TOM
STEINBERG AND
MR TOM
LOOSEMORE
16 JANUARY 2008
Q44 Chairman: Gentlemen, welcome, and
thank you for coming and giving up your valuable time to assist
us with our inquiry. The House of Commons has indicated that,
in principle, it is in favour of us pursuing this inquiry, with
a view to making a recommendation in due course. We have also
information from two senior government ministers that they are
rather in favour of this process being pursued, so we are conducting
a thorough inquiry which may well lead to a change in the procedures
of the House of Commons in due course. Therefore, in the course
of our inquiry, we feel that it is right and proper that we take
evidence from people with expertise and knowledge and views of
the petitioning process. Could I ask you in turn the same question—and
perhaps Mr Loosemore you may wish to answer this first and then
Mr Steinberg; do you personally support the introduction of an
e-petition system for the House of Commons and, if so, perhaps
you could briefly give the reasons why you support such a process
being introduced?
Mr Loosemore: Yes I do support
the adoption of an e-petitioning system, with an important caveat,
and that is that it is a) the right petitioning system from the
point of view of your constituents and b) that said e-petitioning
system is brought in in parallel with changes to the procedure
of the House in terms of petitioning to ensure that the very different
nature of petitioning via the Internet is accommodated successfully,
both from the perspective of the constituent and from the House,
in terms of actually being perceived to have a meaningful impact.
I think that just launching an e-petitioning system in a vacuum
would not be a wise course of action.
Q45 Chairman: Okay, thank you.
Mr Steinberg: I concur. I do think
it is a good idea, but I also have three initial caveats. Before
those caveats, I also have an interest, namely as the people who
built the Number 10 site, we as an organisation, as a charity
that does contract work, would be interested in this, so I must
declare that interest up-front. The first of my three caveats
is that having read the transcripts of your discussions, the dilemma
appears to be primarily over how petitions can come in and be
looked after. A thing that I think Number 10 was quite astute
about is they realised that one of the things that is profoundly
different about petitions online is the ability to begin two-way
communication. Traditionally, a petition comes into an institution
and it just disappears. Number 10 has mailed back to 900 different
petitions, to many millions of people at this point, with responses
on the topics in hand. That is an as radical, arguably not more
radical, change to the nature of our democracy than actually just
being able to petition via a new medium is. It is the beginnings
of a two-way process based on petitions but moving on from a traditional
one-way petition into some more two-way dialogue. Thus the first
caveat is that I support it so long as it has an aspect where
petitions come in, responses come back, and on-going dialogues
are set up and in some way looked after. I would not support it
if it was an equivalent of that bag on the back of the Speaker's
Chair, things drop in and then disappear.
Q46 Chairman: Can I just ask you
to expand on that. One of the feedbacks that we have picked up
from the Scottish Parliament is that they say if they were starting
this process again, they would have gone for an incremental approach
rather than the "big bang", to allow elected Members
as well as officers to cope with the change and the volume of
responses. They very strongly are of the view that if change is
to be brought about this should be done incrementally. In the
light of your last comment, if the House decided that it wished
to at some point reach a two-way process with this new procedure
but did not feel able to do so at the outset, what would your
view be of that?
Mr Steinberg: I would consider
that caution and using iterative processes are the right approach
to have, but that that would perhaps be caution too far to not
even commit to any form of response at all to any petition at
first. When we launched the petitions website for Number 10, the
site iterated very rapidly over many weeks and months after it
was launched. There were 14 changes made to the site on request
from members of the public in the first 24 hours alone. That is
the right way of doing these things. I endorse the view that it
should be iterative. The technology should be iterative and actually
your processes should be iterative as well. However, I would not
say that you should set your ambitions too low in the very first
instance.
Q47 Chairman: Okay, thank you. And
do you think Parliament is the natural recipient of national petitions
rather than, say, the Number 10 website?
Mr Steinberg: I believe that all
parts of government are the natural recipients of petitions. I
think it will be a very good thing that they come in here as well,
but I defend the fact that Parliament has a petitions site and
would defend it if other departments did on the following rationale:
if you are a big lobbyist, you know where you need to go in government;
you know which minister, you know which special adviser, and I
do not know why the public should have to play to slightly more
theoretical rules of the game and be told you shall only ever
talk to your Member, never, ever go direct, as the more powerful,
rich people will, straight over your heads to the people who count.
So I believe putting citizens on the same level playing field
as the lobbyists and the big interests is okay. I do also believe
that Parliament should definitely be petitionable and that MPs
should definitely get involved.
Q48 Chairman: In its first year I
think the Number 10 website had 29,000 petitions. Would you expect
the House of Commons system to have pretty much the same hit rate,
or higher, or perhaps lower?
Mr Loosemore: It entirely depends
on the devil of the detail of how you develop the system.
Q49 Chairman: You mean how attractive
it is?
Mr Loosemore: Not just how attractive
it is but how cleverly and how well you manage the barriers you
place in front of people before they submit a petition. I have
nothing but admiration for the user experience of the Number 10
petition system. It is exemplary in web media terms. If the Houses
of Parliament system is even only 30% less easy to use, less easy
to go through the process, you would lose well over half of your
potential applicants, so the devil really is in the detail. In
theory I would expect a similar number.
Q50 Chairman: Do you agree with that?
Mr Steinberg: My expectation would
be slightly lower but higher than you have at the moment. The
slightly lower would be for two reasons. Firstly, I think that
people who are politically marginally engaged have a better understanding
that there is a person who is in charge of the Government and
their name is Gordon Brown than they have an understanding that
there is a thing called Parliament with Members and committees,
so it will have greater name recognition amongst the more marginally
politically engaged. A point that I have not raised yet but is
very serious now—and I was going to—is that unless
there are substantial changes within the way that PICT delivers
projects, I do not believe that it will be anywhere near as successful
because I do not believe it will be delivered as well.
Mr Loosemore: I would agree with
that.
Q51 Rosemary McKenna: You have raised
an issue that I have had some concerns over for some time. Could
you expand on how you think PICT could deliver services better?
Mr Steinberg: I suppose the short
version would be some fresh blood and a new broom. We are as a
group a community of people, some of whom are paid and some of
whom are volunteers, and many of these people have given up their
time or accepted extremely inferior wages to build sites such
as theyworkforyou or writetothem because they believe
that the way technology is being used to access Parliament and
to access councillors and so on is nowhere near as good as it
should be, and so it is a common belief throughout our community
that things are not that good. Other than holding a competency
review, as happened in central government departments recently,
ensuring that there are relatively direct managers with quite
a lot of responsibility and quite a lot of leeway to make projects
and then change those plans and revise them, all without coming
and getting sign-off from higher levels, would be a huge improvement.
One of the reasons the Number 10 site is good is because it is
a pretty simple management structure. I would much rather seek
accountability where one quite responsible person came and sat
in front of you and you said, "Show us what has happened
in the last six months; tell us what the users have thought?"
and then you ask them hard questions and hold them accountable.
That would be a big, big step forward for this project.
Q52 Sir Robert Smith: To get into
the detail there, is it necessarily PICT that is the problem or
the fact that it is an institution and therefore where decisions
lie and where systems are decided? Is it PICT as a technology
delivery unit rather than necessarily a system?
Mr Loosemore: I have had some
direct experience of procuring Internet services and advising
clerks to the House and their staff on how to procure Internet
systems recently, and I am afraid to say that PICT is a major
part of the problem in the way that it manages itself. I would
also agree that the level of accountability, the clarity of ownership
and the responsibility given to the individual within Number 10,
who was able to commission Tom and mySociety, were huge factors
in its success and the ease with which that was able to iterate
and become successful with the Number 10 e-petition.
Q53 Sir Robert Smith: In a sense,
if you are running Number 10, as you said, there is one man in
charge of the Government and in charge of his office, but Parliament
is answerable to the whole of Parliament. Does that not by definition
create a more complex system to try and deliver the thing?
Mr Loosemore: I will draw on my
experience from the BBC where I was part of a central Internet
team trying to cater for a federation, which is a polite way of
describing the BBC. The successful way you deliver projects in
the BBC is you spend a certain amount of time up-front discussing
with a range of stakeholders what success looks like and then
you get absolute cast iron guarantees from that group of people
that they are going to leave the delivery person alone to deliver
and come back and be accountable. It is the constant coming up
and down the chain that causes the friction.
Q54 Sir Robert Smith: One of the
aspirations is that Parliament connects more with the public.
I think you have half-touched on this in a way with the earlier
answer, but is a system of e-petitioning likely to deliver a greater
engagement between Parliament and the public?
Mr Loosemore: Yes. I think if
you look at it in terms of what are the barriers people perceive
in front of them when engaging with the democratic process and
with Parliament, it is a big step to write a letter to your MP,
it is terrifying if you do not know how to spell (which a lot
of people do not) it is terrifying if you do not know how to phrase
the letter, so anything that allows people a low but meaningful
barrier (maybe not as meaningful as a letter or a visit to your
MP) I think is a good thing. It gives the opportunity to start
an engagement. I would agree with Tom about the Internet as a
two-way medium. It is a conversation medium; it is not a broadcast
medium or a post office. The opportunity to start a meaningful
dialogue with people is very powerful. To be honest, I have been
disappointed with how government ministers with the Number 10
system have failed to take that as a genuine opportunity to improve
government. The nature of their responses to petitions has been
rather too party political, to be honest, and rather less about
good governance and engagement.
Q55 Sir Robert Smith: It is getting
back to that responding part, if it is an engagement, if it is
two-way.
Mr Steinberg: I certainly think
so. Even if you do not respond, you will probably find, at least
in sheer numbers of people coming in, that it will go up, which
has a certain value in its own right. The analogy I would like
to use here is about Kennedy and Nixon in the famous television
debate; the one who got the TV era of politics and the one who
did not. Once you have built these two-way channels and once you
have built a bit of capacity to modify them and change them and
improve them at will, rather than waiting years until they are
right, when you have that capacity, then the question about how
much interaction there is depends on how good the politicians
are. What Tom may be alluding to is that if you look at the biggest
50 petitions on the Number 10 site, they have more than 5,000
people upwards on each one. This is historically a totally unprecedented
number of people that ministers, if they so wished to, could respond
to, could write to and engage in some way. They could ask, "If
you disagree with this policy, tell us more," and they can
challenge those people and they could say, "You have signed
this but do you know these facts? What do you think after we have
shown you these facts?" I think we need a new generation
who look at this opportunity and just think this is incredible,
it is such a huge chance to talk to so many people so cheaply
and we had better get good at doing that if we are going to get
better policy.
Q56 Sir Robert Smith: The Number
10 site has two replies and that is it.
Mr Steinberg: To make this clear,
Number 10 is limited to writing back to any petition twice. That
was the deal they struck with us. We did not want them to have
the ability where you sign one petition once and you get mail
for ever. That did not seem like a very good idea. However, even
with those two mailings, you can write back to people and say,
"Now would you like to engage in this other thing? Would
you like to sign up?" MySociety does this systemically. People
use one of our sites for one reason and we offer them something
else that is deeper. A classic example, they come to us to write
a mail to send to their councillor or their MP and we say at the
end, "Would you like to sign up to get mail from your MP
in the future when that MP thinks that you might like to hear
from them?" Many tens of thousands of people do that. It
is exactly that analogy. You come for a very low engagement and
either the Government or Parliament or individual Members take
that as an opportunity to engage in something slightly more.
Q57 Rosemary McKenna: Can we move
on to the outcomes of petitions. Many people are quite cynical
about petitions and believe that they achieve absolutely nothing
and there is no point in signing them. On the other side of the
coin, they will sign anything because it is outside Tesco or Asda,
they are just nice people that are asking you to do it. I think
e-petitioning would perhaps change that, but what outcomes could
people reasonably expect from e-petitioning?
Mr Steinberg: I have one very
specific request here which is I think what they could reasonably
expect is that a handful of the very largest petitions (as long
as they are not specious) have some debate time. That debate time
is not because one Member has said, "I am going to take this
forward and use my adjournment debate," but because there
would be some form of policy—and I am afraid I do not know
your internal mechanisms of working—which said something
like the largest four petitions that are not clearly specious
will get half an hour or one hour of debate time over the course
of the whole year. It is not a lot of time but it would be a real
measurable thing, that you could point all those many people who
had signed up and say, "Look, we may not have changed the
law exactly as you wanted but we took it seriously and you can
go to Parliament, or you can go to theyworkforyou, and
watch us talking about the things that you wanted us to."
I think that would be something that is in your power to offer
and would have a real meaning to the public.
Q58 Rosemary McKenna: We have already
mentioned this, you would expect it to be an interactive service,
like the Number 10 website where they did get a response with
the Government's view? That may be a wee bit more difficult to
do to give a response on Parliament's view because we do not know
what Parliament's view would be on the issue.
Mr Loosemore: I think you have
got some opportunities there to be more creative in how you respond.
In some ways it is more fertile as an area. If you get a petition
to Parliament, the pressure for Number 10 is to work out what
the line is and stick to it, come what may. That is the nature
of the institution there. Here it is much more questioning. You
could have responses that say, "Okay, Parliament has debated
these issues before. Here are reference to these debates. We have
forthcoming debates on these issues here. Here are some other
procedures of government that give opportunities to show Parliament
working". It is taking the opportunity for it to be a window
for people to open a crack into the democratic process. It is
a beginning; it is not necessarily the end. I would just say one
thing about the benefits as well. Given the scale of disengagement
generally with the political process, giving people an opportunity
to not only have their say but to be seen to have their say is
a valuable valve in and of itself. I will give you an example
that I felt very passionately about. There was a very contentious
petition about a mosque near the Olympics site, people resenting
that development. Whatever your personal politics, I felt that
was very popular, it was hundreds of thousands of people and it
was a big deal. It is valuable that that kind of valve is there
for people to have their say about things and to be seen to have
their say about things, even if it goes no further.
Q59 Chairman: That reply would tend
to indicate that you would support a response being made from
someone other than a government minister, who will always be giving
the Government line. One of the considerations that we are looking
at is that although one would expect there to be a Government
response, if the petitioner had his petition drawn to the attention
of his own Member of Parliament and his own Member of Parliament
is then also in addition to the Government response invited to
give his response, would that meet the point you are making?
Mr Loosemore: I think in part
it would, yes. It at least highlights the fact that you have an
elected representative and it gives your representative an opportunity
to represent you. I would just caution, one of the things I have
learnt in the last ten years or so of helping people engage with
MPs in particular is just how busy MPs are and, relative to other
countries, just how ill-resourced MPs are in dealing with that
kind of interaction.
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