Examination of Witnesses (Questions 105-119)
MR TOM
STEINBERG, MR
ROSS FERGUSON,
MR WILLIAM
HEATH AND
MS RUTH
KENNEDY
8 MARCH 2007
Q105 Chairman: I call the Committee to
order and welcome our witnesses this morning. It is very good
of you to come along to talk to us at relatively short notice.
The Committee has a long-standing interest in issues to do with
public consultation. If I could think of the collective noun to
describe e.People I would use it. All of you know about e.Government
in a variety of ways, and therefore we have brought you together
to help us with our thinking on this matter. I would normally
ask if any of you want to say something by way of introduction,
but because there are four of you if all of you did that it would
take a long time. If, however, any of you wanted to say something
quickly to enthuse us we would be willing to be enthused.
Mr Steinberg: Is this something
that you would rather happen or not happen?
Q106 Chairman: Could it happen briefly?
Mr Heath: Briefly, I am William
Heath and the company I founded, Kable, looks particularly at
public services and the computerisation of them. We are not technologists
and are non-partisan, but our interest lies in understanding the
change that occurs when public services go into the information
age. Through that work we have some concerns about the clarity
of intention.
Q107 Chairman: For the record, I
should have said who you are. Mr Heath is from Kable. Ms Kennedy
who also represents Kable has a history of working inside government.
Ms Kennedy, do you wish to add anything?
Ms Kennedy: I have worked for
Kable and have been looking at government from the outside for
just over a year. Prior to that I spent six years at the centre
of government, most recently at DfES where I was a senior civil
servant. Before that I was owned by the Cabinet Office but sent
off in various directions such as Defra, the Home Office and also
the Number 10 Policy Unit where, amongst other things, my portfolio
included e.Government. That goes back to 2000 and 20001 and an
earlier stage of the revolution.
Q108 Chairman: Mr Steinberg, you
are the founder and director of MySociety.org, are you not?
Mr Steinberg: Yes. My society
is a non-partisan and non-profit group based out of a registered
charity. It has two equal missions. The first is to give citizens
sites and tools on the Internet that provide them with simple
but very tangible benefits in the civic and community parts of
their lives. The second mission is to teach government and the
voluntary sector largely through demonstration and explanation
how new and good things can be made that do not just take old
things and put them online, that is, how new services can be provided
that enable people to take control of their lives and their government.
Q109 Chairman: Mr Ferguson is from
Hansard and does government work there.
Mr Ferguson: The Hansard Society
is very happy to be here and welcomes this inquiry, particularly
those strands that place emphasis on democratic engagement and
the role that parliamentarians can play in holding the government
to account and involving the public in developing services in
future.
Q110 Chairman: One of the stimuli
for this inquiry was the argument going on about Downing Street
e.petitioning and so on. Mr Steinberg, I gather that you are responsible
for this.
Mr Steinberg: MySociety was commissioned
by Downing Street to build this.
Q111 Chairman: Can you tell us how
it works? Whose idea was it? Who approached whom and how was it
all set up?
Mr Steinberg: I would be glad
to answer those questions, but e.consultation or consultation
generally is a rather different thing from petitions. I am happy
to answer your questions and talk about petitions. I am proud
of the work that we have done as an organisation, but I would
not want today to turn into a discussion of just that because
consultation is a hard and interesting topic and is not being
talked about enough. That is a personal statement.
Q112 Chairman: That is absolutely
right, and we shall do so. I just wondered how it started.
Mr Steinberg: We were approached
by the Civil Service web manager at Downing Street in the early
or middle part of last year. She said she believed that the time
had come to bring the petitioning system, which had been in place
for as long as anyone could remember, online and into the 21st
century. That was how the process started.
Q113 Chairman: What was your response
to that?
Mr Steinberg: We expressed interest
and said that it sounded like something that would be within our
remit. We said they should be aware that in Scotland such a system
had been running for years and they could take a look at it, but
that if it was the sort of thing they wanted to commission we
would have a very good team with perhaps an unmatched record in
doing this kind of thing and we could help them do it well and
right in terms of it being a transparent, trustworthy service
rather than just a tool.
Q114 Chairman: Do you believe it
has been successful?
Mr Steinberg: It has kept us busy.
I believe that it has been completely successful. It is a beta
test site. It existed to experiment and dabble in the waters to
see whether petitions could be done online. We had every reason
to think that they could be because it had been done very well
in Scotland for a long time. I believe that the take-up vindicates
the idea that it is a service in which the public is interested
in using and one that is good value for money. I do not know whether
you are familiar with the recent concept of "the engaged
1%". Demos, for example, has been writing papers asking whether
there will ever be only 1% of the citizenry that is really politically
involved. Should we try to fight that and go for a larger percentage
or say that we will never get more than 1% because, as Wilde said,
socialism is taking up too many evenings? The fact that we have
2 or 3% of the population signed up to and using the service within
just a few weeks must be a sign that it has succeeded in some
way. It must have broken outside that 1% orthodoxy of people who
are willing to be involved in political processes.
Q115 Chairman: But where does pressing
a button to say you do not like something rank on the scale of
involvement?
Mr Steinberg: Low.
Q116 Chairman: In that case why is
it a success?
Mr Steinberg: Because MySociety
believes that the barriers to engagement in the political system
can never be low enough. I know that as representatives you think
that we get sent too much stuff and we cannot cope with it anyway.
Sometimes people ask why we run Writetothem.com which is a service
that allows people find out who you are and write to you. One
or two MPs have said that they put all their details out there
and they are incredibly easy to write to. Why do we get in the
way and run this service which is a waste of time? The answer
is that that is great for the 40% of people who know who you are.
We exist to service that other percentage. When people do use
things like Write To Them they take a very basic step, maybe because
they have a problem in their lives or perhaps because they want
to express on a petition site that they disagree with something.
The ability to make that tiny engagement as easy as possible means
that perhaps they can take a second step or do something a bit
better, bigger and harder. The classic example using Write To
Them is that people write to their politicians; they confirm that
the mail gets to a real person. The mail is sent off and it asks
whether people would like to sign up to hear their MPs so they
can discuss issues with them and not just write. The local MP
then has a chance to say what he or she thinks is important, not
the other way round. The idea that people can seize the tiniest
piece of engagement and that seed can grow and be nurtured so
that people become more engaged is one of the foundation stones
of what we believe can and should happen.
Q117 Chairman: I am just trying to
link the ideology with the practice. I know that you do not want
to talk particularly about e.petitioning, but when you talked
to them about it did you say that it was liable to produce disaffection?
It is liable to produce responses from people who say in large
numbers that they dislike something and then nothing happens and
so they are more disgruntled than they were before you started.
To refer back to the Scottish example you gave, I understand that
the Scottish Parliament has a Petitions Committee so that if petitions
come in there is somewhere for them to go and be processed and
looked at. The issues can then be deliberated upon. That is a
million miles from simply registering on a website one's dislike
for something, is it not? Ms Kennedy is nodding so I think she
is on my side in this regard.
Ms Kennedy: It is not Mr Steinberg's
job to work out that end of the system, is it? My observation
from the time spent in government is that since the Cabinet Office
brought out guidance on consultation—for example, people
must be given 12 weeks and so on—that is embedded into the
system in a very healthy way, but it is easy to run those things
without thinking through the consequences, as you say. When one
invites people's views has one thought about what is to be done
with those views, be they what one wants to hear or does not want
to hear? I have not been involved in the Number 10 petitioning
site and cannot comment on it, but I think that that is often
a mistake made in government. In terms of my involvement in consultations,
government moves at great speed. There is huge pressure. Things
are announced and you have to make them happen very quickly. It
is often very awkward. We have to consult people for 12 weeks
and that cannot be done over the school holidays and so on. At
times I have certainly been involved in situations where one has
to write the submission to tell the minister what the answer is
before the consultation period is closed. One thing that needs
to be thought through more carefully is exactly what one says.
What is it that we do? When one invites people to give their views
one is giving them an expectation that those views will be listened
to.
Q118 Chairman: When I was listening
to the people who went into Number 10 last weekend on the deliberative
exercise they seemed to be very happy with it. They were coming
out saying, "Gosh! That was amazing. I was actually involved
in thinking through these issues. I have changed my view on things.
I have heard arguments", and so on. It seems to be a much
richer exercise than simply the electronic registering of opinions.
Mr Heath: We start with a democracy
which is complicated and we do not understand all that well. We
are trying to get our heads round it. Scientists at the instigation
of the defence community have invented the Internet which is a
fabulous communications media. It is insecure, convenient, interactive
and very powerful. We are trying to get our heads round that as
well. If one puts the two together one does not suddenly have
a brand new thing called e.Democracy; one has a democracy with
a set of communications tools added to it. I observed the work
on the Downing Street website. One exemplary feature of it was
that it was in beta test; that is, it was something that was admitted
not to be perfect. There was a note saying that if one used Hotmail
the site could not be used. I have observed huge amounts of very
expensive government IT projects and government websites which
pretend to be perfect and will not admit of anything else. In
reality they are very poorly designed and are not very friendly
to users. Here is an exemplary piece of online design because
of the quality of the team that Mr Steinberg has assembled which
is being quite honest about the fact that it is iterative, that
it will get better and problems will be sorted out as it goes
along; and it is also extremely inexpensive for what it does.
It also illustrates the limitations of addressing a complex issue
like road pricing with a simple proposition. When 1.8 million
people complained we did not know whether they were complaining
about an extra tax or about intrusive surveillance of every vehicle.
Was that the problem? Should we have an anonymous road-pricing
system? We do not know exactly what they were complaining about,
so it exposes the limitation of the simple proposition and also
starts to expose through the responses the apparently limited
extent to which anyone is interested in what people think. I believe
that these are useful starting points. The blog that I do is called
Ideal Government. It asks the question: what do we want from an
e.enabled government in an e.enabled world? It attracts loads
of complaints about how badly government is computerised, but
the rule on Ideal Government is that anyone who complains must
say what they want. They must say, "Wouldn't it be better
if?" We are all in this iterative process together. We need
to understand the nature of the new communications medium with
which we are working and what we are ultimately trying to do with
it. With a communications medium usage is a good sign, so if 1.8
million people sign a petition that is an awful lot more than
the 60 people who went to Downing Street and had a deeper, richer
experience. It does not invalidate that deeper, richer experience
but it does say that what MySociety did on the Downing Street
website appealed to an awful lot of people and that in itself
is interesting, powerful and worth taking further.
Q119 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Mr Steinberg,
how much did you charge Downing Street?
Mr Steinberg: About £27,000;
it was below £30,000 and above £25,000, or something
like that.
| 
