Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
MR TOM
STEINBERG AND
MR TOM
LOOSEMORE
16 JANUARY 2008
Q60 Rosemary McKenna: In the Scottish
Parliament e-petitioning system they use forums. Do people find
that valuable and would they feel they were being more engaged?
Mr Loosemore: I have some fairly
extreme, in some senses, views in that I would go nowhere near
forums. I would go nowhere near forums on the Parliament website.
That is based on running the BBC's Forum (which has four million
messages a month) for a couple of years. At the end of that where
you have institutions, and the BBC is one and Parliament is even
more so, which people, for whatever reason, feel is "other
from them", is the establishment, you are unlikely to attract
a reasoned debate in that forum. You are more likely to attract
the extremes battling it out rather than the middle ground. As
a means of expression you do not insist that people come to every
single debate on every single issue wherever in the country it
happens. The debate on the Internet happens all over the Internet.
You do not need another place to have the debate.
Q61 Chairman: Mr Steinberg, do you
concur or disagree?
Mr Steinberg: I concur that a
straight off-the-shelf piece of forum software that you can plug
in will not deliver much in this case and could deliver real problems.
If you had written to the 1.8 million people who signed the road
tax petition and given them all the link to go to the same forum,
there would have been a terrible, terrible mess. I do believe
that there is hope for good-quality, structured deliberation of
a grown-up, interesting, educational kind using the Internet that
involves a mixture of citizens, experts and representatives. I
do not believe that anyone has ever paid for it to be built. I
spend quite a lot of time around the non-Parliament parts of Whitehall
saying to the departments you could have a go at this and that
in terms of projects. One of the most common themes I have been
saying is to please spend some money on having a go at this, because
if you can have a substantial debate with good evidence and a
lot of people then you can have a public debate of the sort that
we always ask for but which has never been held before and has
never, ever been paid for.
Q62 Rosemary McKenna: One of the
issues of course for the Scottish Parliament is that the population
of Scotland is infinitesimally smaller than the rest of the UK,
so it may be easier for them to be able to manage than it would
be for us.
Mr Steinberg: I believe that if
the Scottish petition system was higher quality they probably
also would not be able to manage as well. The Number 10 petition
website got the same number of petitions in its first seven days
as the Scottish system had in its first seven years. Scotland
may be smaller than the rest of Britain but it is not 365 times
smaller, so if you are aiming that your site is really popular
then you ought to be aiming to a point where discussion using
standard off-the-shelf packages, of which there are many, will
not work.
Q63 Mr Gale: Can I take you back
almost to your opening remark Mr Loosemore. You said that we need
to recognise the difference between the e-petition and the existing
system. There is a fundamental difference between Downing Street,
which is not elected in our sense, and the individual Member of
Parliament who is. Petitions at the moment are presented by Members
of Parliament and I think the expectation is that that would continue
to be the case and that therefore Members of Parliament might
well be, as we are now, engaged in the management of the process
in the sense that we would need to make sure that the words were
in order and guide the lead petitioner, for want of a better phrase,
through the process. If we were to go down that road, which is
a hybrid, half electronic and half one-to-one, how do you think
the public would respond to that contact with a Member of Parliament?
Mr Loosemore: If I am honest,
I am in two minds about it. There are strong arguments both ways.
There is a strong argument that says Parliament is about elected
representatives and your representative is your voice in Parliament
and ergo them acting as a guide is a valid way forward to strengthen
that sense of connection with your representative. On the other
side, it is an extra barrier, both in terms of the process and,
more importantly I think, in people's understanding of how you
do e-petitioning. If you are doing a major nationwide petition,
to have that go through a local MP just because it is the first
person who you sought to present the petition may not fit with
people's model of how they think they should interact with Parliament.
My gut reaction would be the name of the game here is to make
the barriers as low as possible to broaden the engagement as wide
as possible. If you can find a way to avoid the extra twist on
the road of going via an elected MP, my marginal preference would
be to do so. However I not think it is a clear-cut decision. I
would say one thing, I was very sceptical about doing Downing
Street before doing Parliament and I am very glad to see that
you have responded. To my mind, the most important place to have
petitions is Parliament, not Number 10.
Mr Steinberg: I was thinking about
the history of why it might be that MPs were tied to petitions
anyway, and it occurred to me that it must have been simply because
a way of physically getting the petition from the constituency
would have been to give it to the only person paid to make that
journey all the time. Given that context, the question is why
do we have endorsements—especially since so many petitions
that are going to be made to you are not going to be local—and
there seem to me to be one of two real reasons. One is a constitutional
view that the citizen has no view in government or Parliament
unless it is represented by Members, and the second is to save
money on the vetting. Number 10 has to have a civil servant who
spends part of their time making sure things are decent and legal.
If you have to put your names on these things first, then you
can do that instead and the taxpayer will benefit to the tune
of £50 a day. I would argue, though, that when you think
about how the website would ultimately work, you can have an endorsement
from the politician whose constituent is making the original petition
without holding up the process. What I mean by that is that a
petition could go into the system, it could be vetted properly
by a civil servant to make sure it is decent and legal, and then
it could go online, and whilst it is online any MP, including
the constituent's own MP, could put their name to it or not. That
to me would seem to have a very similar role to the current one
given that, as I have noticed in your previous transcripts, none
of you appeared to think that the role of the MP should be to
vet things and say, "I do not agree with this, I am not going
to drop it off." Most of you seemed to think that it was
your role to go and drop it off. In that case, if it is your role,
why should it not just be the Internet's role and why should you
not just endorse it if you think it is a good thing and not endorse
it if you do not?
Q64 Mr Gale: So you see this being
presented electronically and not actually being presented in any
proper form on the floor of the House?
Mr Steinberg: When it is finished
being signed?
Q65 Mr Gale: Yes.
Mr Steinberg: I would like to
see debates on the floor of the House and I would like to see
an excellent quality public record of what was signed made available
on the Internet and other media to anyone interested, but the
actual process of standing up, reading it out, putting it in a
bag, I do not think that is a massively good use of parliamentary
time.
Q66 Mr Gale: The point being that
at the moment we act as facilitators. It is not a Member of Parliament's
job to say, "I do not like that so you cannot do that."
It is a Member of Parliament's job to say, "If you are going
to do that, you need to get it into a form of words that is acceptable
to Parliament, otherwise it will not be acceptable." The
Member of Parliament then has a right to say, "I do not agree
with this so I am not going to formally present it but I am going
to stick it in the bag", which has exactly the same effect,
it is printed on the Order Paper and it has a response. What you
seem to be suggesting is that actually exactly the same thing
is going to have to be done by somebody other than the Member
of Parliament.
Mr Steinberg: I know that you
have been discussing this in relation to the New Zealand Parliament.
If you choose that there should be no clerk or civil service tie-in
then, yes, almost certainly someone is going to have to vet these
things because, apart from anything else, you will have legal
liability if you publish slanderous, libellous things on the parliamentary
website—I imagine that might in some ways get you in trouble,
if not legally then just reputationally, so someone is going to
have to check these things in the way that Number 10 does. Given
that someone has to do that, the question really can be is it
you, with your other very busy jobs, or is it an official with
a checklist, which is what happens at Number 10. If it is an official
with a checklist you can still actually have a revision process,
which does happen in Number 10. Often they will reject a thing
and say "Look, your petition is basically fine, but the way
you have worded this thing under `more details' it could be construed
as libellous; if you change it from `is' to `maybe' then that
becomes a piece of political commentary rather than a piece of
libel." They will send it back and the person will resubmit
it, they will say fine and it goes up. That can actually be done
by non-elected people in a reasonably good way and therefore save
you all time.
Q67 Chairman: I totally accept that
point but what we feel—and I ask you to comment on it—is
that the vast majority of MPs are not looking for less work to
do, are not trying to get out of doing work, and indeed they are
actually looking to be more involved in the communities they represent,
so I suspect that most MPs would want to have the opportunity
of being associated as a facilitator with a petition that originates
from someone who is in their constituency. I think that is the
point; we need to decide what role we give the constituency MP
because any system which froze out the constituency Member is
unlikely to find favour with the House.
Mr Loosemore: That is heartening
to hear, that MPs are looking for more engagement with their constituents,
but I would just offer some thoughts on what the most appropriate
means of adding value as a constituency MP are. I would argue
that with the Internet it is not in the management of a relatively
mechanical process at the start of the petitions process in terms
of is your petition fit for engaging with Parliament, is it liable
to libellous or damage reputations? In many ways, having to train
640-odd MPs to do that is not necessarily the most efficient way
to do that; the most value for me is at the end of a petition
where people are seeking to understand what happens now, what
is the next stage, is the answer no from the Government, is that
the end of the story or is it just the start. I would totally
endorse involvement of MPs; I just question where it is most appropriate.
Q68 Chairman: Do you want to add
anything?
Mr Steinberg: Yes. If we go back
to the Kennedy/Nixon analogy for a moment, if I was a Member and
I was saying how can I get the most out of this system so that
it can help me communicate with my constituents most effectively,
I would be pretty unconcerned about the way by which petitions
got into the system and I would be extremely exercised by what
could happen once they had signed up, how I could talk to them,
how we would discuss things, how things would go next, how I could
tell them about how I was lobbying the Government. That is the
part that I think deserves the effort. Anyone can build any version
of a system that can cope with MPs facilitating or endorsing or
not; that is a relatively small design decision and whoever builds
it will go with your decision, that will not be a massive issue,
the massive issue is what happens at the other end.
Q69 Mr Gale: Two further comments,
one in the light of what you have just said and the other on something
you said earlier. You said a moment ago one might lend his name
to it; of course, Members of Parliament do not sign petitions,
they receive them, we do not sign them. Secondly, you referred
earlier to the possibility of this being national rather than
local and that may well be the case. Members of Parliament are,
for very good reason, concerned when other Members start meddling
in their own constituency business and there needs to be, I think,
if we are going to go down this road, some sense of proper ownership
of it. It is all very well saying I want to know which Members
of Parliament are lobbying on this and which Members of Parliament
are lobbying on that, but this is not an Early Day Motion exercise
as I understand it, this is a Parliamentary petition and if it
is a Parliamentary petition then a Member of Parliament or, in
a city, maybe a group of Members of Parliament, do need to have
ownership of it. The other thing that springs out of what you
say is something that everybody is fighting very shy of touching
on: it is easy to say, and I am sure Downing Street does, all
we need to do is set up this unit to do this, but these things
do cost money. This Parliament is very good at saying yes, we
will refurbish the press gallery at a cost of a mere £7.5
million of taxpayers' money, but the system that we have at the
moment—and I appreciate it is designed for personal contact
rather than electronic contact—is actually very cost efficient,
it costs virtually zilch. If you are going to set up a bureaucracy,
which is effectively what you are talking about, as the alternative,
if we were to go down the German response route we could be talking
about megabucks.
Mr Loosemore: "You don't
get owt for nowt" is certainly true; if you want engagement
with people who are disengaged then I suggest the efficacy of
the current position is not good value for money, given that there
is very little value as perceived by most people in the general
population from it compared to the potential. The second point
is that the Internet is cheap; if you can automate processes it
is orders of magnitude cheaper than doing things by hand or on
paper. Tom will tell you of the vast expense which Number 10 spends
on engaging with millions and millions of people, but I can tell
you now if you design it carefully and, crucially, if you accept
the need to iterate your processes to blend in and gain those
efficiency savings, it is not necessarily very expensive compared
to how things are done by hand, and from my personal experience
with procurement of things in Parliament—I helped procure
the Internet streaming of live coverage of the Commons—the
process of procurement, I estimate, cost more than the value of
the contract. Whose problem is that? That is not the Internet's
problem; that is how you seek to manage the process.
Mr Steinberg: I would say that
Number 10's expenditure on the petitions system that it has is
probably the cheapest form of communication between citizens and
government that has ever happened in this country, in that we
worked out some time last year, before many more people had signed,
that it was down to less than a penny per person who had signed
at that point, and that includes the response going back out.
Even the response to just one petition was estimated by the BBC
at £500,000 if it had been done by post, when in fact the
entire project so far is well under £100,000. From your perspective
I suggest there would be three cost hubs: one is building and
running the technology, the second is administering it and the
third is the cost in parliamentary time that it generates if it
generates debates. The technology ought not to be expensive and
if the Germans have spent a lot they have made a mistake. The
aspect of vetting, how much it costs to vet, as I said, that actually
depends on whether or not you choose to take it on your shoulders.
It will have virtually no cost difference from the development
of technology for you to do the vetting or for a civil servant
to do the vetting, but if it is a civil servant it is probably
less than one fulltime post. The cost in parliamentary time of
course is a question mark, what is the cost of four hours worth
of debates in a parliamentary year, but I do not think that this
should be an expensive process and even if it was I would encourage
you to spend money on it.
Q70 John Hemming: Just on those questions,
with your expertise in the area, what do you think the capital
cost, the build cost, would be and what do you think the running
cost including band width would be, ignoring parliamentary time?
Mr Loosemore: The only variable
in both of those is how willing you are to alter your processes.
If you were willing to alter your processes so you meshed with
the reality of an internet-centric population I would suggest
spending of the order of £200,000 on the build and I would
suggest a similar amount for running costs. The cost of band width
is virtually nothing, it is all about the bureaucracy, the people
managing the process inside. That is cheap, but that is the order
that I would go for.
Q71 John Hemming: You were saying
it is not going to be that expensive and I just thought it would
be interesting to know what your estimates are.
Mr Loosemore: It is not millions.
Q72 Mr Gale: I want to set the record
straight, as this is a matter of record, when I mentioned the
Germans that was not in terms of the cost, that was in terms of
the volume of petitions they are dealing with and therefore because
volume often equals people we have a value cost. I would not suggest
for one moment that the Bundestag were either right or wrong,
I genuinely do not know. The figures that you mention are a lot
lower than the ones that we have been quoted by other people.
Mr Loosemore: I have not thought
that through carefully, but given how much Number 10 has spent
on engaging with millions of people I think you should be careful
about spending orders of magnitude more. The costs will really
be not the technology but how much you are willing to invest in
changing your processes and procedures and whether you seek to
distribute the effort of filtering or whether you would seek to
put it into one central place.
Q73 Chairman: Do you think we could
ever get a system where virtual help and guidance alone would
be sufficient?
Mr Steinberg: Sorry, virtual help
and guidance for what?
Q74 Chairman: For helping someone
to launch an e-petition?
Mr Steinberg: That is the situation
that Number 10 is essentially already in in that people are still
able to go to the gate of Number 10 and leave a paper petition,
that still exists, but the online system does not have a support
line, it does not have a phone line, it just runs and people come
to it and they use it in enormous numbers.
Chairman: Do you want to ask about lobbying,
Roger?
Mr Gale: Not at this stage.
Q75 Chairman: Let us say, for whatever
reason, someone seeks to launch an e-petition and whether it is
their use of florid language or whether they are being libellous
would you support a system where, after two attempts or three
attempts, for the same e-petition there is a blocking mechanism?
Mr Steinberg: That is what we
have delivered and it is a good idea. There is one caveat there:
because we were trying to encourage Number 10 to show really exemplary
best practice in terms of privacy and transparency of the process,
when you have your petition rejected on the Number 10 site, if
it is completely rejected because you have failed to submit it
again or you submitted it and it still mentions an ongoing criminal
case or something they are not allowed to publish, it appears
on the site itself, censored only in so far as it does not show
the bit that causes the problem, so if most of the petition is
okay but the title is libellous, then it will show everything
except the title; it bends over backwards to show why things were
rejected and what was rejected, and that is an attempt to build
a trust mechanism so that people do not claim that things are
being snuffed out because they are politically inconvenient.
Mr Loosemore: In addition there
was an audit process with Number 10—I audited it so I know—whereby
I went through a representative sample of the rejected petitions—and
many petitions are rejected by the way, mostly for reasons of
repetition. I audited 1000 petitions that had been rejected to
see were they rejected with validity against the rules that are
set out on the site, and I was encouraged that there were very
few that were being rejected wrongly. It is those processes I
think you need to encourage transparency.
Q76 Chairman: Last year, Mr Steinberg,
you submitted a paper on this subject and you were quite robust
in your defence of a rejections page being a must.[1]
Is that still your view?
Mr Steinberg: That is what I just
described, yes. I think that is a really good piece of practice.
Q77 Chairman: Even if there is editing
for legal reasons.
Mr Steinberg: Yes, you can just
show the bits that are legitimate and not show the ones that are
not.
Q78 Mr Chope: I want to ask about
what happens in Australia, which is that they have effectively
the means of petitioning, e-petitions can be presented by Members
of the Australian Parliament, but there is not an e-petitioning
system as such, but it means that people can get their point of
view across to their Member of Parliament which can then be incorporated
in the representations to the Government in the form of a petition.
That is a much simpler and cheaper way of people being able to
communicate in terms of petitions; do you see that as a satisfactory
alternative to the much more elaborate system which we are talking
about?
Mr Loosemore: To be honest, no.
It is the point I made a little while ago; if you see this as
a window at the start of a potential relationship then that may
have some value, but for me it is as much about people expressing
their concerns and frustrations and being seen publicly by the
whole country, via the Internet, as having expressed their concerns.
It is a public statement in a way that you can do with the Internet
but you cannot if you stick it in the bag at the back of the Speaker's
Chair even via an MP. So there is something around the Internet
to do with natural transparency; if you search for someone's name
on the Internet, sometimes it will come up and list them as having
had a petition. That is important to them.
Q79 Mr Chope: But we are trying to
get the public to engage more with Parliament, not with the Government,
and certainly some of Mr Steinberg's answers have indicated that
he is equating almost Parliament and the Government together.
At the moment you have said that the responses from the Number
10 site have been far too political—somebody said the nature
of the responses is far too political for the Number 10 site.
Mr Loosemore: That was me; for
my liking.
1 First Report of Session 2006-07, Public Petitions
and Early Day Motions, HC 513, Ev p 20 Back
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