Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-159)
PROFESSOR JONATHAN
DRORI CBE, MR
PETER RIDDELL,
DR LAURA
MILLER, MS
KATHY BUCKNER
AND MS
ELLA TAYLOR-SMITH
30 JANUARY 2008
Q140 Chairman: I think that is a
fair point and I think Peter Riddell put his finger on it. You
could have a Petitions Committee of elected Members. The membership
is known. They could publish the criteria and if necessary they
could sit in public when they are making the decision.
Mr Riddell: Absolutely, yes.
Q141 Mr Gale: I think this is an
incredibly dangerous area. The Napier University paper says in
terms, "We recommend that petitions are considered on their
merits rather than according to the number of signatures."
In the event of a British athlete winning a gold medal at Beijing
and 250,000 people, having watched this spectacular event, saying
on the petition, "We believe that the athlete should get
an OBE," who decides whether that warrants more attention
than 25,000 people saying, "The Government ought to be putting
more money into the eradication of MRSA"? Is it a committee,
the Petitions Committee, which is going to decide that?
Mr Riddell: Is there not a dead
easy answer to that, Mr Gale? After all, the power to award the
OBE does not lie with this House, it now lies with an impartial
committee, so it is a terribly easy task. The clerk of the committee
just emails it on to the Cabinet Office on his committee and says,
"Here you are," and you can get round that actually
quite easily!
Ms Taylor-Smith: That brings up
another issue, which is that the outcome of the petition is not
necessarily a parliamentary debate. That should certainly not
be the end result. So the idea that a number of signatures would
necessarily trigger a debate loses a lot of things. It may be
that the debate is something which is better with two sites, so
if you have two medium sized petitions, one for and one against,
that would employ a debate more than a petition which most people
agreed with, which would not really require one. Equally, you
may have a lot of petitions which together cover the same theme,
particularly if you tried to localise petitions. You might have
the same issues coming up. I think in the previous session they
used the example of post office closures. If you had a lot of
little petitions about local post office closures, maybe it would
make sense to cover it in a debate on a national issue, but your
automatic trigger on per petition signatures would not make that
happen.
Q142 Mr Gale: I am sorry, I want
to press this further, because we had exactly this with topical
debates on the Floor of the House of Commons, where some Members
of Parliament had put forward subjects for what they regarded
as topical debates only to discover that that has been hijacked
by the Government's business managers and something either highly
convenient for the Government of the day or highly un-topical
is suddenly appearing on the Order Paper for debate. What you
are suggesting—and I understand exactly where you are coming
from—is eminently desirable in theory, but in practice a
Procedure Committee would then become yet another item of party
political domination and choice, surely?
Dr Miller: No, surely not, because
of the Crossbench, and also because it is being evaluated. This
is the importance of evaluation. Because it is being evaluated
and because it is being piloted it means that all the criteria
by which decisions are made are under scrutiny and therefore up
for consideration, yet again. So it is not a static thing. It
is not suddenly an instrument which the Petitions Committee has
and it can just use it how it wishes to and it is subject to political
domination. Maybe that sounds optimistic.
Mr Riddell: Could I take up Mr
Gale's point? The point on topical debates is that I think perhaps
there is a flaw in the plan adopted—and this perhaps goes
into the wider issue, not particularly relevant here—whether
it should be a business committee on which backbenchers are represented,
and so on and so forth. Therefore, the control on topical debate
should not lie with the Leader of the House, it should lie with
the House itself on a type of committee such as this one, which
is entirely a backbench committee. That is a separate issue, but
on this specific issue I think very much it should not be a committee
either with a minister chairing, it should be seen, like this
Committee, as a backbench committee, which would reduce the risks—I
do not say eliminate—of what you are talking about, Mr Gale.
I think if you have a differently structured committee you avoid
some of those problems.
Chairman: In your question, Roger, you
actually said "Procedure Committee". For the record,
will you clarify you meant Petitions Committee?
Mr Gale: That depends upon whether there
is a separate committee.
Rosemary McKenna: That is right. Exactly.
Chairman: Okay, but you mean a committee
designated to look at it?
Mr Gale: A committee designated to do
the job specifically, yes.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q143 Rosemary McKenna: I would like
to explore that because I think that is not an unacceptable suggestion,
that the Procedure Committee could be the actual committee which
would be, after all the official work is done by officers of the
House—not necessarily the final arbiter. Would it be even
more helpful if it went from the Procedure Committee to the Liaison
Committee, for the Liaison Committee to do what it does with the
select committee reports, recommend the ones which would go for
debate?
Mr Riddell: My experience from
working on the Scrutiny Commission, which was chaired by Tony
Newton, a wise man, although no one would agree, who forever said,
"Don't overload. Don't overload. You lot are busy people.
Don't ask too much," is that by definition, by consisting
of chairmen of select committees, this is the right mechanism,
but I just think that whatever "the precise procedure"
means (to use "procedure" in a technical way), it means
that a cross-party filter on which the Front Benches are not involved
is the right mechanism on that, whether it is the Liaison Committee
or not. Generally its functions now I am sceptical about, given
the nature of it all, but some body like that would be the right
filter. On the debates point, I regard debates as far less important
than achieving a proper response. Debate is at the end of a process.
As you all well know, you have debates on select committee reports,
which I generally from observation regard as a pretty unsatisfactory
process. It is who speaks in debates, the Members of the select
committee, the minister, the opposition spokesman, and that is
it. I think much more important is the scrutiny by committee and
the nature of the response, and the response may well be to say,
"We're already looking at it." I think one of the points
raised is that quite often people will have a petition on something
and you will be able to point out that the select committee has
already been looking at it. So the answer may be an information
answer as opposed to anything else. I think the idea of debates
on the Floor of the House, which would be quite limited in number,
I regard as a secondary part of the process in relation to giving
a considered response.
Chairman: Thank you. Does anyone want
to respond to that?
Q144 Mr Chope: The Napier University
has suggested that an e-petitioning site should include information
about parliamentary activity on the subject matter of petitions.
How would that be provided and how would this dream of an interactive
e-petitioning system actually turn into a reality?
Ms Taylor-Smith: I think really
exactly what Peter has just said. For example, if you had agreed
which committees would deal with a petition and decide who to
pass it on to, and what happened in these committees would be
recorded, presumably on the parliamentary sites, or indeed webcasts,
and that would all be linked to the petitions site.
Q145 Mr Chope: Yes, and people would
be able to see the actual outcome and the end, whether anybody
listened or not?
Ms Taylor-Smith: They would be
able to trace it as it went along.
Dr Miller: I think it is important
to see that it could be done in exactly the way Ella has described
with these kind of links to the processes it had been through,
what happened, the reports that are published, and so on and so
forth, but also that the way it can be presented on the website
is so simple and so clear, so people understand. Without having
to click on a series of links in order to get through the process,
they understand just on the first view exactly what has happened
and why.
Q146 Mr Chope: So you would expect
the petitioners to keep going back to the website rather than
being prompted as to developments in relation to the petition
which they had signed?
Ms Taylor-Smith: Both.
Dr Miller: I think it can happen
both ways, because I would imagine if you are an interested petitioner
you might as a matter of course—I know that I have done
this on issues I have been concerned about—check to see
what is happening. But I think if you are a busy person then of
course there could be automated responses coming from the system
itself.
Mr Riddell: To give an example
on this, I think that given the improvements which are already
occurring on Parliament's website—which are very considerable,
to make it more accessible and friendly, and I think a lot is
happening there in the House, largely unappreciated—in quite
a lot of the cases the petitioners would find out that actually
Parliament is looking at something, in most cases. If you look
at the range of activities any week the select committees are
involved in, and actually what you have been doing—and this
is where the communications point comes in crucially—it
is not necessarily changing the role, but actually your constituents
in response to the petition would say, "Well, actually it
is being looked at," and that, I think, is crucial and that
would come in the initial response. I know there are issues on
how much an email should be subsequently used. I think there are
very important issues there, very important ones, as Rosemary
McKenna raised in an earlier session, but in relation to the initial
response it would say, "Well, X or Y committee is already
looking at that and there was a debate on that last week,"
and so on and so forth. That would go to all the petitioners on
a particular issue.
Ms Taylor-Smith: Equally, though,
there would be a resource for whoever was looking after the system
so that if in the second year somebody was trying to bring a petition
on the same subject they could point them in the direction of
the account of what had happened to the previous one. An MP might
use it as well and say, "Look, this is what we did for our
constituents last year."
Professor Drori: I cannot help
thinking that the benefit to the member of the public needs to
be in some proportion to the effort they put in, and if you make
it so easy that you email everyone in the country and just say,
"Click here and you have got a petition," you will get
that kind of graffiti problem. It occurs to me that in order to
start a petition you might ask people online what their subject
area is and then offer them what else Parliament has been doing
in that area before they then go on to set up the e-petition.
That could be automated in the way, for example, if you look at
the BBC News website down the right-hand side there are links
to other organisations and other things to do with this topic.
Those are automatically generated mostly. So you could automate
a lot of this. People would then see what else, as Peter Riddell
has said, Parliament has been doing and is doing and they may
be either dissuaded from putting in their e-petition because they
can see that Parliament is already debating it or they may sharpen
it so that it is just a bit more relevant, and actually this can
become a useful part of the democratic process, so that people
are really only putting in petitions about something where there
is a need and Parliament has missed it.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q147 Rosemary McKenna: First of all,
can I ask about the Scottish Parliament process. We visited them
and saw their manual process. Bearing in mind the difference in
size of the country, the population is a crucial issue here. On
their Youth Forum, previous witnesses have said not to go near
the forum because of experience in, for example, the BBC site.
How important a part of the process is that in the Scottish Parliament?
Ms Buckner: In terms of what is
done by the PCC, the committee?
Q148 Rosemary McKenna: No, in terms
of the forums that are used, the forums which the Scottish Parliament
uses and e-sites.
Ms Buckner: I think there are
several ways in which these are useful. They are useful for their
citizens to talk to each other about the issue, so there is citizen
to citizen engagement about an issue where the topic is discussed
and of course the representatives can look at the discussion as
well. In terms of what goes to the committee, a summary of the
forum goes to the Petitions Committee for the representatives
to look at, which gives a brief indication of the number of responses
for and against and the threads of the inquiry, and so on, and
what has been said in the debate. I have spoken to the clerk to
the Petitions Committee, and I hope I am right in saying this,
but I think his view is that in reality in the Petitions Committee
the representatives do not actually take that much account of
what is said in the forums, but it is there for them to look at
if it is an issue which their constituents are bringing up or
if it is an issue for their concern.
Q149 Rosemary McKenna: But in terms
of the size of the population of Scotland and the ability of the
number of people to actually do that, the suggestion was from
previous witnesses that we should not get involved in that in
a UK situation.
Ms Buckner: I would certainly
think at the beginning it is not something you would want to start
with. I think you would certainly want to see the size of the
response to the petitioning to start with, to see how many petitions
were going to be happening, because it does increase the workload
to do any analysis of those forums. Certainly some analysis can
be automated, but not all of it. You do have to have some human
intervention to do some analysis, so there is certainly an overhead.
Another way of looking at the forums, though, is that the forums
should actually be a way in which the petitioners develop the
wording of their petitions. So by having the forum it really becomes
a resource for the petitioner to look at what is being said. In
fact, I think there is one case where a petitioner did actually
withdraw a petition because of what was said in a forum, so it
can influence the petitioners themselves and maybe if petitions
are used it might be worth thinking about it in that way rather
than the forum and the analysis of the forum going anywhere else.
Dr Miller: I would just like to
comment on the question itself, which I think is a very important
one. I think our position at the Hansard Society would be that
there should be forums, not necessarily at the beginning, but
I would not necessarily defer from doing them at the beginning.
I think it is important in the sense that if e-petitions are not
just to be a gimmick or a kind of one-off, quick-fire form of
engagement, then apart from the kinds of outcomes we have been
describing earlier there needs to be some kind of deliberative
element. We have done quite a lot of research into this, obviously
outside of Parliament—in fact within Parliament as well,
but outside of Parliament we have done research into the use of
forums by government departments for any consultations. Within
Parliament we have done research into the use of forums to influence
select committee inquiries into particular issues, and in both
one of the most striking findings is that the volume of correspondence
is not that high. So this is something to bear in mind, that you
have a lot more people visiting, far fewer actually engaging in
discussion, and you can have a very effective moderation system
which enables the discussions to be structured and guided and
people being, if you like, directed towards the appropriate materials
which will help to inform their discussion. It does not necessarily
ensure that everybody is really happy and that you do not have
people who are expressing anger at the forums, but it certainly
provides you with an effective tool of ongoing engagement, which
I think should not be overlooked.
Q150 Rosemary McKenna: I agree with
that. One of the reasons why I hope we do provide it is that actually
it will be a more accurate reflection of people's views, because
the easiest thing in the world—every MP knows this—is
to stand outside the supermarket on a Saturday afternoon and get
people to sign a petition. They do not know what they are signing,
but they just do not want to say no, because either they are in
a hurry or they are going off shopping. But this would be a far
more effective way of finding out, and it is how people communicate
today. You all seem to be agreed that the public would want a
response from the petition. What form would that take? Apart from
what is done with the petition, how would that be communicated
back? Would it be done on the site?
Professor Drori: I think human
beings get very frustrated if we do not get responses to what
we do, in almost every walk of life, so the first thing one would
want is confirmation that your contribution has gone into the
system, that it has got it and that it has not just gone in to
the ether and been lost. That might be a web page coming up saying,
"Thank you for your contribution," or it might be an
email back to you, and both would be fine. Then you want to know
what is going to happen to your contribution after you have made
it and what the status is of that petition, where it is in the
system and also how to find out where it is going if you have
not heard for a bit. Is there a number that you can key in or
something, a place you can go to which says, "This is where
this is at right now"?
Q151 Chairman: Rather like tracking
an order on Amazon!
Professor Drori: Exactly like
that, yes, and I think that is what people have come to expect,
partly because of the retail industry actually. Over and above
all that, just good practice in terms that you have made a contribution,
now what is happening to it and what is the result? I think people
are likely to want to find other people of like mind. I think
there will be some people who will want to be able to find other
people who have signed the petition or agree with them. Whether
that is Parliament's job to do that or whether third parties will
do that—they might set up a forum for debate and then enable
people to submit petitions through their services, if you like.
They may allow people to get in touch with each other and that,
I think, would probably be quite a popular thing.
Q152 John Hemming: Obviously technology
allows something which is not generally possible with a paper
petition, which is to actually against the same structure and
form of words record opposition rather than support. Do you think
there is any merit to that?
Professor Drori: In principle
I do, yes. I think it is all part of giving the public more say.
Ms Taylor-Smith: I think that
is the role the forum plays.
Q153 John Hemming: The point about
a forum, though, is that you do not have numbers on the forum.
You have a debate about the merits of a case, and that can happen
anywhere. The difference is that you can actually record numbers
for and against on a petition.
Mr Riddell: You can, of course,
have a counter-petition too.
Q154 John Hemming: Yes, it is just
that the difference with a counter-petition is that it is not
clearly the antithesis of the thesis, it is something else recorded.
Mr Riddell: Could I just add one
additional point on response, where I entirely agree with what
was said? I think one should not overload the people petitioning.
I agree entirely you have an acknowledgement, then you can look
at the site to see (using the Amazon parallel) where it is coming,
and exactly taking forward the Amazon parallel you then get the
email when it has been sent. The parallel point is that what you
get is telling you what the response is, but I think you also
need to be reassured that your email address is not going to be
abused, I think that is very, very important indeed, neither specifically
nor generally, that you always have a box to tick "No, I
do not want to receive other mail on this." I think that
is very important indeed.
Ms Buckner: Can I just go back
to this point about for or against petitions which you were mentioning?
I think that is something that some petitioners would be quite
interested to know, how much feeling there is against what they
are saying. Technically, it would certainly be possible to allow
the petitioners to decide whether they wished for signatures against
their petition to be allowed, and that could be an optional switch
which could be easily built into the system.
Ms Taylor-Smith: I also think
people's reasoning for either supporting or not supporting a petition
is often very, very important, and it is very difficult if you
do not always want to be lumped in with a bunch of people who
agree on an issue, because you may have very different reasons
for ending up there and this "Yes/No" is quite a blunt
thing.
Q155 Mr Gale: We have to a considerable
extent dealt with the involvement of MPs in petitions and I get
the impression that apart from Professor Drori the feeling is
broadly speaking that Members should be involved. I want to come
back very briefly to the Napier University paper, chapter 2 of
that. In Scotland petitioners are encouraged to contact MSPs prior
to submitting a petition, and I think we agree with that, but
the other bit of that says: "Bristol City Council and the
Royal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames both use systems where petitions
are initiated by councillors prompted by their constituents' concerns."
I think this is a very crucial area because somewhere along the
line we have got to decide between us whether these petitions
are going to be reactive or proactive. At the moment Members of
Parliament tend to receive requests from constituents saying,
"I want to petition about the closure of my local post office.
Can you help me to do it?" The answer to that is, yes. We
either know the words, or if we do not know the words we go to
the Clerk's Office and they help us to draft the sentiment in
parliamentary language. We give that to the constituents and they
go off and raise their petition. It then comes back to us, it
is cleared by the clerks and presented. By and large, that is
reactive in parliamentary terms. If we are saying that we are
going to use this as a political tool, "I've got a problem
here. I'm going to see if I can get 100,000 signatures,"
suddenly it is a whole different ball game and I can see again
the process being taken over by Members of Parliament rather than
by the people whom I thought we were interested in, the public
that we were trying to engage. That came out of the Napier paper,
but it is not particularly a Napier issue. Does any of you have
a particular view on it?
Dr Miller: I would just like to
say that I kind of agree with the caution you have expressed about
proactive petitioning. There are examples of e-petitioning around
the world, so it is not just in Kingston or other examples that
you cited but where MPs have to be, the people who actually sign
the petition in the first place, whom you need to petition in
that way. Evidence highlights that it does tend to polarise, if
you like, so it tends to lead to a continued political polarisation,
and I think that is to be avoided, so MPs as facilitators, yes;
MPs as originators, no.
Mr Riddell: But is there not a
human point there too? In practice, if you break the mechanism
it is going to be replaced by definition. There is no way you
can get away from that, because once you create the opportunity
it is going to happen. But equally, to come back to your filtering
mechanism, if you know that 100,000 people have organised on a
particular subject the filtering committee will have a degree
of scepticism—your parliamentary graffiti point, Mr Gale.
Journalists also get the equivalent of the parliamentary graffiti,
and we know and therefore add a discount to that, so I think the
scepticism of the Petitions Committee will come in there too.
Mr Gale: Thank you.
Q156 Chairman: Do you have any view
one way or the other as to whether, if the House embraced an e-petitioning
system, Members of Parliament who wished to be associated with
the petition could have their names published online, perhaps
in bold type at the top, although they are not petitioner originators?
Dr Miller: Maybe not necessarily
in bold at the top of the petition, but certainly if there is
an MP who is supporting, facilitating the petition—usually
it will be the constituency MP—then I think that obviously
has to be clear. If there are other MPs—for example it could
be that there is an issue which is affecting a city and there
might be three or four MPs or more in that city, and it might
be that certain MPs are actively engaging with citizens about
this particular issue—then maybe that can be highlighted
and then MPs who want to be highlighted in that way can be added.
But I think it is probably dangerous to make the petition seen
to be linked to too many MPs. It should just be the person who
is actually facilitating.
Q157 Chairman: The reason I raised
it is because I can envisage a situation where there is a Labour
MP, a Conservative MP and a Lib Dem MP all representing the same
city and there is an issue over, let us say, the closure of a
hospital in that city. If one MP gets in first, if we did not
have this provision then you will have three petitions or an attempt
to table three petitions on the same subject.
Mr Riddell: Could I come back
on that? I am almost thinking of the kind of EDM, when you have
half a dozen and then the others. You could always have a box
for MPs, something which does not denigrate the fact that this
is the people, the voters doing it, but something which meets
your point absolutely, and I think you can do that. There are
practical ways in which you can do it. You can have a box or something
like that.
Professor Drori: I think that
is absolutely right and part of the open democratic process really
to see which MPs support which petitions. Could I just correct
what may have been a misunderstanding? If I said that MPs should
not be involved, that is not what I meant. I said that I thought
it is not the only way of doing it. I am certainly not suggesting
that MPs should not be involved in this.
Chairman: Thank you for that.
Q158 John Hemming: I think the only
thing I would go into is the question of what do you think is
necessary to make sure that the system is transparent, to ensure
that people have confidence that what they are trying to petition
for has been considered and, if rejected, properly considered?
Mr Riddell: The seriousness of
the response, that it is a considered response.
Q159 John Hemming: I am talking here
more so about if you put in something which is deemed to be out
of order.
Mr Riddell: There I think there
are lessons from the Number 10 site, where they have criteria
for rejection. Obviously, they will be totally different criteria
than the ones that apply in Parliament because of the nature of
the process, but, you know, personally offensive, gratuitous,
and also ones which are outside Parliament's remit—you can
imagine things which are totally irrelevant to Parliament, and
so on and so forth—and there would be published criteria
and there would be reference to those published criteria.
Dr Miller: Could I just add to
that that I think the transparency needs to be built in. In other
words, the system de facto, how it either automates or how the
Petitions Committee, the Procedure Committee, whoever is dealing
with it, responds to petitioners, and so on and so forth. All
these things can be built in at the very first level. So it means,
as Peter said, that things like terms and conditions are apparent.
If somebody has contravened the terms and conditions of the parliamentary
website or the e-petition site, it is very clear and they are
notified. I noticed in the evidence from Tom Steinberg last week
that there was also mention of ways in which you could deal with
this so that if, say, the substance of the petition was okay but
there was some libel contained within it, that could be taken
out. There are various things you can do. I think this is the
lesson from all the Hansard Society commissions and from other
evidence is that so long as you are communicating and so long
as there is evidence on the website that people can have access
to which highlights how decisions are being made and why, then
you go a long way towards transparency.
Professor Drori: I think this
is an area it is important to pilot and it may be that the Number
10 system would be a good starting point, what happens in the
process, who takes decisions, on what criteria, who appoints the
people who make the decisions and by what process, that all needs
to be transparent.
Ms Taylor-Smith: In order to write
these criteria and make them workable in the process you really
have to be honest about it. It is no good sort of having this
idealised list of processing criteria and then equally having
another one. For example, you may in practice have some sort of
volume limit. That would need to be listed at the start.
Chairman: Thank you.
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