Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
MR TOM
STEINBERG AND
MR TOM
LOOSEMORE
16 JANUARY 2008
Q80 Mr Chope: Why are they political?
Basically because it is the Government, one view from the Government
and the Opposition and other points of view do not get a look
in. What we are talking about is a much more refined system where
you have got 650-odd Members of Parliament, each with their own
particular take on a matter, and each of them eager to be able
to engage with their constituents on that particular issue, so
you might end up that although you have one petition on one subject,
you might have 650 different responses. That is why this system,
a full-blown e-petitioning system which involves giving Members
of Parliament the opportunity to engage personally with people
who have petitioned, as well as perhaps ensuring that the Government
whose representations have been asked for by a Member of Parliament
in the form of a petition, that they can all have their input
into the responses. That gets into all sorts of data protection
issues and things that we are coming on to discuss in a minute,
but in the Australian Parliament they have got a system where
at least you can use email as a means of petitioning your Member
of Parliament and thereby the Australian Parliament without all
the other complications that are involved.
Mr Loosemore: Email is a valid
mechanism for communicating with your representative, but it is
fundamentally a private communication, it is not a public statement
of your view as a constituent on an issue. I would agree that
the mechanics of the way Parliament works and represents people
is predicated on a geographically constrained world with its geographic
constituencies and big national issues that are not constrained
by your constituents' borders present a challenge to the way Parliament
is constructed. My view is that you are better off finding a locus
for people's frustrations and opinions, a single locus, rather
than dissipating them through 650-odd MPs, purely from the mechanics
of numbers but also people feeling that they have had their voice
heard in public in a matter of scale. If they are one of those
four or five most voluminous e-petitions every year and they get
represented in Parliament; that is a big deal for them. It is
quite hard to get that mechanic working if you also use email
to contact an MP.
Q81 Mr Chope: If you have got the
person who signed the petition and that is passed on by the Member
of Parliament to the Government and the Government responds in
a way that an MP does not like, he thinks the Government has got
the wrong end of the stick, the Member of Parliament then wants
to communicate directly to the petitioner and say the Government's
response is this but, frankly, it is wrong in the following material
respects. How are we going to be able to ensure that that happens
under this system?
Mr Steinberg: This is a really
good question and this is exactly why I would say that if I was
in this kind of new generation of MP trying to work out how the
system could work for me I would want to know about the writing
back part. There are several different ways you can do this: one,
when somebody signs up you could actually just say "Would
you like to opt-in to getting a reply, not just from the Government
but also from your own constituency MP on this issue, yes/no?"
You could design a system where they had no opt-in, where you
simply said "If you are going to sign this petition you consent
to getting a reply from your constituency MP as well as from the
Government." However, because there are so many possible
people who might want to write back I would encourage the following
way of handling this problem. Mail people who signed a petition
with a mail that says "There are three new responses that
have come in from this petition, one is from the Government, one
is from your constituent and one is from one of the political
parties, go to this page and read the different ones." Apart
from anything else that would help educate the public that there
are different views on issues, that issues have different sides,
will help engage people on an issue, and it will help all of you
see the benefit in terms of being able to communicate with constituents
on a lot of different issues. You can design the system so that
it will not irritate citizens, so that they will really see the
value and you will get to talk to far, far larger numbers of them
than you ever could using a system like the one in Australia.
Q82 Chairman: I suppose one way of
handling that would be to require a postcode in each case.
Mr Steinberg: Yes.
Q83 Chairman: And then at some point
to notify a Member of Parliament that a constituent or constituents
of his had signed the petition and did he want to respond by email.
Mr Steinberg: That is exactly
right.
Mr Loosemore: You could even go
further and say only send an email to an MP if five people in
their constituency had signed the petition to manage the volume.
Chairman: Although if you are an MP with
a majority of five you may decide you want to answer each one.
Christopher, anything else?
Q84 Mr Chope: You were saying earlier
that you thought the number of signatures could be significant
in terms of triggering a debate and so you see the number of signatures
on a petition as being worth emphasising, notwithstanding the
scope that there is for people to fiddle the numbers and get large
block transfers of signatures.
Mr Loosemore: It is far easier
to fake a physical signature than it is to fake a system like
for Number 10; you would need an awful lot of personal email addresses
to fake the Number 10 system. I would worry less about block voting
and fakery issues. There is a sense of scale and momentum that
is important to people when they choose whether or not to invest
their time in expressing their opinion, so I would be very, very
much in favour of illustrating which petitions have got scale
and which have not. The duplication issue is an important one
to manage such that if you do get a widespread number of petitions
on similar identifications you pick on one and point people at
that, which is the way Number 10 does it.
Q85 Mr Gale: I can understand if
you think I am terribly negative about this, but we are trying
to get to grips with where the pitfalls might be. Members of Parliament
are knee-deep in parliamentary graffiti as it is and one of the
things that is a waste of time really is what has become known
as the postcard lobby—I happen to be opposed to fox hunting
but the anti-hunt lobby did it in a big way, SPUC (Society for
the Protection of the Unborn Child) do it incessantly—and
we get fistfuls of postcards. SPUC have a membership, which in
their case is largely a church-based membership, and it is very
easy for them to punt out an instruction, for want of a better
word, to their membership. Every Member of Parliament in this
place, of whatever political party, gets reams of stuff where
an address is filled in, the name is filled in, and sometimes
you can even tell that the person who is signing it has not actually
even read the thing, it is just, oh yes, that is one of those,
sign it and send it in. Somehow we have to try, if we are going
to make this work in the way Mr Steinberg would like to see it
work, which would enable us to genuinely interact and respond,
to find a way of filtering in shorthand the union block vote.
Mr Loosemore: Those kinds of responses
you value—quite rightly you could argue—far less than
you would an individually typed letter or a written letter, but
try and encourage people to use petitions instead. It is not to
say that they are not valuable as part of the democratic process,
they just signify a lesser investment that someone has made in
engaging with the democratic process. I might be sent something
I completely disagree with just because it has landed on my doormat
or come in an email, it is just a question of the value you place
on it. I would agree that the value of someone signing a petition
is less important than someone who has invested the time to craft
a letter to you, but it is not valueless and in aggregate if you
get thousands, tens of thousands, millions, there is a meaningful
thing being said to you in aggregate.
Mr Steinberg: I was talking with
friends in Congress last summer who have email problems that make
those of MPs look tiny, all getting huge volumes of mail, huge
amounts of it generated by campaign groups where the same email
is sent to 50,000 different people at the click of a button. We
came to realise that a phase two thing that you can do if you
have a good working petition system, if you built it right in
the first place, is that you can update your email system. Leaving
aside the debates about PICT—the Parliamentary email system
is separately in need of an overhaul—if you have children
they have probably got 20 or 30 times the space to store the emails
that you do, and that is something that needs doing because they
are not even paying for it. If you get a good email system, that
can integrate really nicely. That is jargon; what I really mean
is this user case: someone sends 10,000 mails that are exactly
the same from 10,000 real constituents, and they can get into
your inbox, they can be caught on the way into your inbox and
all the people who have written them can get a reply that says
we think this is just the same as 9,000 other people, click this
button and we will turn this into a petition. Then you will get
the same engagement, you will not get the mail and you will get
the mail you can cope with, and the constituents may be more content
because they will be more aware that they are part of a big thing
whereas when you send a postcard you are not. That is very much
phase two, I do not want to confuse anyone saying that is in the
core specification, but a good petition system can, in the long
run, dramatically decrease and deflect a lot of this kind of cut
and paste mail you get.
John Hemming: I do not entirely agree
with Roger about the fact that parliamentary graffiti is a complete
waste of time; there are various levels of it and it does at least
give you some indication. The challenge is one of to what extent
is somebody standing at the door, forcing people to sign things
as they go out, collecting all the things centrally and sending
them off as opposed to what would happen with the authentication
of the email address where you get a return email and you authenticate
that, which is the strength actually of an e-petition system because
you know that somebody in the privacy of their home, on their
mobile or whatever it may be has had to go through a process to
sign the petition, which is very good. On this issue of email
and the PICT space, I am lucky to be one of the few MPs who have
a broadband account on Parliament so I do not use PICT so I do
not have the stupid limitations of how much email I can store,
which is quite useful, so there is a way round that. It is slightly
expensive but not very expensive. Some people support the World
Wildlife Fund or whatever it may be but I do think that this mechanism
where people have to do something themselves, they cannot just
have it all done centrally, is better. You get the emails through
your organisation that they write for you—everyone has had
the police ones I am sure, have they not—will you sign these
EDMs about the two per cent increase—there are all these
different things, but I think there is a role for that, I do not
think that is a complete waste of time, it does give you some
indication of support but I do think the e-petition process is
better because you are requiring somebody to do something for
themselves and you cannot just have a situation where everyone
leaving a building is required to sign something or, as the unions
often do, just write their union members' names on something and
send it in without the union members being involved.
Mr Gale: My understanding is that Mr
Steinberg is saying is that that is exactly what has happened
in America where an organisation does block vote but collects—
Q86 John Hemming: They collect the
emails and send from them. You can actually track that in the
RFC822 headers anyway—you can if you know what you are doing
and you look at that sort of side of it, but that actually is
sending the email out, purporting to be that person, when actually
it is the central organisation doing it. We have not had that.
Mr Loosemore: The mechanism which
is in place for Number 10 which is in place for all the mySociety
projects and is easily best practice provides you with more than
adequate defence against even the existing behaviours in print
of people gathering support where actually people have not thought
about it and actively opted in to signing that petition, but validating
via email is a very effective means of doing it for now—it
may change in the future because people are clever. I would say
I am disappointed to hear that you get copy and paste messages
via mySociety services because mySociety and myself in previous
guises put a lot of effort into catching it before it is sent
to you, saying to people please do not copy and paste identical
messages; we have caught you doing it, write your own message.
For me the actual thought-through correspondence with an MP is
sacrosanct and we need to find other mechanisms via the Internet
and e-petitions are important.
Q87 Rosemary McKenna: One of the
issues that people are concerned about is the data protection
of the information that people would have to put on. What would
you think are the basic requirements for any petitioning system
and what are the pitfalls that would attract your criticism?
Mr Steinberg: The basic requirements
are that people's personal information about their address, their
email address and so on, is protected very firmly, cannot be got
at, cannot be looked at, cannot be lost in the post on CDs and
that it is destroyed when it is no longer necessary. Petitions
are a little bit unusual in data protection terms because they
are explicitly public, they are like the opposite of medical records,
you are doing it so everybody knows, but there are parts of your
petition such as your street address or your postcode that do
not have to be included and, not only should they be protected
extremely carefully, but they should be destroyed. When it comes
to mailing people back I consider it very important that whoever
is given the right to mail back, whether that is the Government,
whether that is a party, whether that is a Member, they should
not be given the email addresses or the personal addresses of
the users, instead they should be given an ability to type a message
and press go and know that that will go to all the people. That
is what Number 10 have, they not only are not the legal owners
of the information, mySociety is, but they do not have actual
access to millions of email addresses.
Q88 Chairman: You think we should
resist pressure if we get pressure from individual Members to
have this information, a constituency MP should be able to respond
but he is responding without having the data basically.
Mr Steinberg: You should bow to
or listen to their pressures to have the right to respond and
the ability to discuss things too; as I said before, that is really
important. If they just want the email addresses or the postal
addresses, then no. There is another user I failed to mention.
Chairman: I am sorry, there is a division
on the floor of the House of Commons; I will therefore suspend
the Committee until four o'clock.
The Committee suspended from 3.47 pm to 3.58 pm
for a division in the House.
Q89 Chairman: I interrupted you in mid-flow,
do you wish to continue?
Mr Steinberg: Yes, if I could
make one change to the Number 10 site it would be to allow the
people who have made petitions to write back to the people who
then sign them. The reason I think this has value is there may
be at any one time in Britain 20,000 people who care about a certain
issue. The chance that they know each other, the chance that they
are even part of an organisation that labels them is very, very
small, but when they come together on a petition they are together
in a unique one-off way and it seems a real shame that that cannot
currently be used to crystallise essentially new social movements—the
group of people who are effectively the campaign group for a new
issue that did not exist yesterday. The last couple of hundred
years of British political life has shown that we are better off
when these groups are strong and vibrant and lively and part of
the political discourse, and I would like to think that Parliament,
as well as facilitating alliances and groups and politics within
this building might also enable the same formation and campaigning
of groups out there, and that can be done at the very minimal
level of adding the petition creator to the list of people who
may have access to write to the people who sign it.
Q90 Rosemary McKenna: Not with their
details but by the click of a button.
Mr Steinberg: Yes, again not being
handed all their private information, merely the one-off chance.
Q91 Rosemary McKenna: I presume to
see if you wish to be involved in forming a group, come back.
Mr Loosemore: Click this link.
Q92 Chairman: Does that not have huge
political implications? Would it not encourage every selected
candidate for a party other than the party that holds a seat to
take an electronic petition in the knowledge that they could then,
particularly if it were a local issue, have a free mailshot back
to people living within that constituency on an issue where they
could then attack the sitting MP?
Mr Steinberg: You can of course
change your terms and conditions of use to affect who is allowed
to use your petition site and what for, but sometimes we are concerned.
We allow, for example, MPs to use our tools to effectively communicate
with the public in a way that we do not allow people who are not
elected, and that sometimes seems a little unfair on those people
who are not. I imagine you would have to tweak your terms and
conditions so that the use was grown up and so that most of these
things really were, just like many of the people who set up petitions
on the Number 10 site and get loads of signatures, they are just
people who strike a chord with the country, they are not part
of campaign groups, they are not political experts, they are just
someone who happens to have realised and expressed something that
many other people think. I would very much like that as a feature
and I put it down I suppose as a challenge.
Mr Loosemore: I would just state
that with something as revolutionary as the Internet in terms
of what it does to support, you will always be able to find edge
cases that seem appalling to the point of seeking to maybe not
do something. The way to deal with them is as they come along
and make sure your processes are iterative, and I would stress
again that possibly the right way to approach that kind of edge
case is not to come back up to the Committee to work out how it
should happen or if it happened in one instance, but it is to
give someone responsibility to do their best to manage that process
and every six months have them come back and say we have hit this
issue, someone is in an edge case doing something that does not
feel right, here is our proposed response, yes or no.
Q93 Chairman: Before our break you
both said that you prefer a system where the constituency MP is
given an opportunity to respond and he does so blind, i.e. without
the data, and the House authorities would send the email for him
and he would not see to whom it was going. Are you saying you
would not even want an opt-in box on that issue and if so why?
For example, what would be wrong with having a tick-box on the
web page when you signed the e-petition to say "Would you
like your MP to have your email details so that he/she can contact
you on other issues"?
Mr Steinberg: I actually do not
see anything very wrong with that as long as it is very definitely
an opt-in. However, if like me you spend half your life making
sure you have not ticked those boxes—
Q94 Rosemary McKenna: No junk mail.
Mr Steinberg: Yes. In the discussions
on the technical design of the Number 10 site there was that opt-in/opt-out
question and we thought that the right response was you cannot
opt out, you will never get more than two mails, so there is quite
a lot of conversation but it ends, and in most cases Number 10
only sends one mail, but it is possible, these things are all
possible and as Tom says they should be approached in an iterative
way, and if it does not work after three weeks it should change.
Mr Loosemore: I would just stress
one warning about people's email addresses in particular. Any
perception that constituents may have that this is a means of
anybody—be they an MP or otherwise—collecting a list
of email addresses is a risk. Even if you have the most honourable
intent, in perception terms that is a risk, they will think "Oh,
it is my MP collecting a list of emails so they can spam me";
it is a response you want to avoid.
Q95 Sir Robert Smith: On this suggestion
where the petitioner could use the system too to contact, it would
have to have quite a strong health warning that in no way did
Parliament endorse it, that the person was responding then to
that on their own terms and involvement.
Mr Steinberg: There needs to be
a health warning anyway because when the Government responds that
is not Parliament responding.
Q96 Sir Robert Smith: We are used
a lot to postcard campaigns as a data-mining exercise for lobby
groups. The postcards comes to ask you to sign an EDM and that
way the lobby group collects data from people interested in the
subject. Similarly, presumably, the site then might become quite
a data-mining site, not just for MPs and not just for candidates
but also for commercial organisations—if we put a petition
up on this site we are going to get a hit of people who we can
then contact. Maybe that is not a bad thing.
Mr Loosemore: Fundamentally, if
people care about an issue they care about an issue. If you do
not have an issue that resonates then you will not do it. My personal
view on the case of letting the petitioner email back is that
it is a loss if you do not facilitate that. From personal experience
in a couple of campaigns that I have cared about and signed a
petition I would have loved to have contact, but it is one I would
want to watch closely during the iterative development to see
what are the edge cases.
Q97 Mr Chope: I am concerned about
the idea that MPs will be responding to a petition without knowing
the address of the people to whom they are responding because,
for example, you might have rival petitions, one calling for the
closure of a school and another petition for the retention of
that school, and those petitions are going to be impossible for
an MP to deal with unless he knows whether the people who signed
the petition against the closure of the school are people who
are within its catchment area and are not directly affected, or
whether they are people from another school who have an ulterior
motive. Do you think there is any way in which you could distinguish
between the petitions that are about area specific issues and
national issues? For example, a petition about Iraq or the Iraq
War, it would not really be so significant for an MP to know exactly
the location of the people who signed the petition, but that would
be a national petition whereas the other example I gave was of
a local petition.
Mr Steinberg: I would say you
should capture the postcode of everybody who signs up precisely
because it can tell you who they are a constituent of and whether
they are all in one area or not. I believe that you can answer
that question about the catchment area and questions like it without
revealing their private data because if you provide a nice system
the system ought to be able to tell you 16% of these people were
inside the catchment area of the school and 70% were not, and
that could be provided to you without you actually having to know.
Remember, of course, that people's names on petitions are public
so you are not actually responding completely blind and if you
know any of the people there you will have an impression just
from their names.
Q98 Mr Chope: The system will have
to enable the Member of Parliament to be able to find out that
sort of detailed information.
Mr Steinberg: Yes, and I actually
think that is entirely reasonable. Another example is it would
not at all be difficult to add a feature to the system that would
say show me whether the people writing this petition came from
the richest fifth or the poorest fifth of areas in the UK; that
is not hard to do.
Q99 Mr Chope: Do you think you could
restrict the petitions themselves to particular postcodes, so
that unless you are within the postcode of the post office that
is being closed you cannot sign the petition, otherwise it is
pretty pointless?
Mr Steinberg: It is technically
possible; whether it would ever be worth that extra effort because
I do not know how many people who live in Scotland are actually
going to sign a petition about the post office in Devon, but these
things are all possible up front.
Mr Loosemore: I would just caution
that you should be doing everything you can in my view to minimise
the barriers and if there are consequences that you feel rogue,
deal with them afterwards. The hardest problem of all to solve
here is engagement with the democratic process and making the
most of the opportunity the Internet gives to lower barriers should
always be front of mind in my view. Restricting things to location
is a barrier.
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