Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-159)
MR TOM
STEINBERG, MR
ROSS FERGUSON,
MR WILLIAM
HEATH AND
MS RUTH
KENNEDY
8 MARCH 2007
Q140 Chairman: Let us ask Mr Ferguson
what he is doing.
Mr Ferguson: My responsibility
at the Hansard Society is the e.Democracy programme. We are interested
in doing work with Parliament and the Government to explore how
it might use contemporary ICT to open up either the policy-making
or scrutiny process. We have been doing some work with Select
Committees, all-party groups and constituency MPs to explore how
they might use things like blogs, forums and webchats and standard
more information-based websites. Some research that might be of
interest to the Committee, which we submitted to the Clerk, is
that based on Digital Dialogues. We have been doing that across
central government with about 20 different agencies, departments
and ministerial offices. All of these case studies are very small
and involve hundreds rather than thousands of people. We are interested
in promoting awareness of e.Democracy practice and theory as it
exists at the moment, embedding skills of policy officials in
the main who run these things, or, if it is on the Select Committee
side, with members and their support staff, but also with the
public. The public is not used to being consulted in this way,
so there is a lot of work to be done to educate and help them
develop submissions and to develop benchmarks. What are the demographics
of the people who use these sites? What are their attitudes and
behaviours when they are on those sites?
Mr Liddell-Grainger: I am not sure that
I understand any of that, but I am sure it is terribly interesting.
Q141 Mr Prentice: I want to ask how
members of political parties can be consulted. We are talking
about the public engaging with government, but I am interested
in how party members can use e.Democracy to communicate with Parliament,
their MPs and so on.
Mr Ferguson: One can have lots
of potential routes for communication within party and between
them at parliamentary level with this technology. It has the potential
to bring large groups of people such as parties together and encourage
structured deliberation around policies.
Q142 Mr Prentice: Do you think that
that will happen, because the chair of the Labour Party, Hazel
Blears, says that it is not necessary to consult members about
the future of the UK's nuclear weapons. I wrote to the general
secretary on 4 December when the Prime Minister made his statement
to the Commons saying that the Labour Party ought to be formally
consulted on Trident. That did not happen. When will we reach
a stage when members of political parties will be able to influence
decisions taken in their name by the Government?
Mr Ferguson: Technically, it is
possible now. In terms of the culture within parties it is for
them to decide how to do it, but I think that more critical and
deliberate opportunities for Members and citizens to engage in
policy are desirable.
Q143 Mr Prentice: Is the Hansard
Society making any recommendations that this sort of thing ought
to happen; otherwise, people will just walk away from political
parties, because being a member of such a body does not influence
anything, and instead put their energies into single issue groups
and so on? Do you make recommendations along those lines?
Mr Ferguson: Through my programme
I do not make any specific recommendations about the way parties
conduct their business, but we recommend that people act in their
interests on issues but also act at constituency level in deliberating
with their Members or other elected representatives who then feed
that through the various available processes and groups into the
parliamentary system and from there up to government.
Q144 Paul Flynn: I admire the work
of the witnesses, especially that of Mr Steinberg who over the
years has been very much a guru in these matters. I want to ask
about TheyWorkForYou.com. How does it run? It has been extremely
useful to MPs and certainly their constituents. How is it financed?
There seems to be an enormous amount of work involved in providing
the information on that site and there is no sign of any commercial
interest, so how on earth does it function?
Mr Steinberg: TheyWorkForYou was
built almost entirely by volunteers. It got total funding of about
£3,000 from Rowntree at some point when the amount of volunteer
labour ran out and it needed to get over a little hurdle. It was
set up at the same time as my site and merged with us and came
under our wing early last year. It is worth explaining here how
the site works. We have a little paid corps comprising a maximum
of four or five people and then a bigger community of volunteers,
so there is a private and public developers list. The private
list comprises very trusted people who can help make decisions.
That has 18 people on it. That shows the ratio of unpaid to paid
people. I am one of the paid people. The developers who do the
bulk of the work are also paid but then people provide a lot of
help. TheyWorkForYou is an absolutely virtuoso example of sheer
volunteer labour.
Q145 Paul Flynn: How far has it achieved
its aim and what have you changed? It was said at one time that
it had an effect on the behaviour of Members in this House who
sought to speak just verbiage into the air as long as it got to
the top of the pile. Have you altered it?
Mr Steinberg: We are sensitive
to the fact that the world contains lots of media organisations
that do not care if they have a negative impact on the political
process. We exist purely because we want to have a positive impact.
That story concerned us. We looked at the data very carefully.
There had been a statistically significant rise in the number
of written questions, but it was impossible to tell whether it
was due to a larger environmental factor or there had been an
election and a lot of new MPs who had behavioural differences.
We just tweaked it a bit to make it seem a little less competitive
and put in bigger caveats. We said that it was just information
and did not necessarily mean what people might think; they must
take it with a pinch of salt and be grown up about it.
Q146 Paul Flynn: You make a judgment
as to how easy it is to understand what people are saying, and
presumably that can be done easily. Are there any other judgments
that you want to make about whether somebody is making the same
speech for the hundredth time or whether he is making a speech
of some significance?
Mr Steinberg: Computers are rather
bad at telling whether or not something is eloquent; they try
to keep to simple things they can determine, for example that
a person has voted so many times.
Q147 Paul Flynn: Mr Ferguson, I believe
you said that the politicians who were running rings round all
the others at the moment as far as the use of the web is concerned
are the BNP and non-Cameronian Tories. We are very conscious of
the work that they are doing. What are they doing that other politicians
are not doing?
Mr Ferguson: In this medium with
things like blogs in the case of more oppositional politics where
one can say what one wants and change it at a later date, and
one can be fairly flexible in one's position, I think the Conservative
Party has benefited in particular. But technically they are capturing
the spirit of the web and with a particular audience online they
are moving away from something that is more text-based; they are
using a lot more video and audio which is quite engaging. They
are also linking to other sites which have existing communities
so they have good visibility online.
Q148 Paul Flynn: What can we do as
a Select Committee? We are in the Dark Ages. We have webcasts
but we do not advertise very much. There are moments of high drama,
humour and confrontation on this Committee; it is a very exciting
place to be. When we publish our reports, wonderfully written
as they are, normally they do not set pulses racing. Should we
issue CDs with the reports giving the highlights and those points
that we want to get across? At the moment the matters that get
into the public domain are the rows in the Committee. It depends
on what happens on the particular day, particularly if there is
something exciting going on in the House. Do you believe that
it should be part of the role of committees both to attract information
when they start new investigations and, during them, to inform
people of the telling things that have been said, for example
the discovery last week that the person administering the minimum
wage did not know the level of the minimum wage? There are profound
things about the Strategy Unit. We had Lord Birt here. We produced
a fascinating report which was not thought fit for the people
to see because it was such a good report, which is the essence
of communication. It is a report very similar to the one to be
published in a few hours which suggests that joint policy does
not work. The nature of government work is that things are concealed
if they do not suit the agenda of government. As the Select Committee
will be the first to do these things what should we be doing to
enlarge our role?
Mr Ferguson: The Hansard Society
has conducted a lot of work in this area around Select Committee
and consultations. There have been busy and quiet periods when
Select Committees have stepped forward to take up the opportunity
to have their processes evaluated. The public is very interested
in engaging with the parliamentary process through Select Committees.
There will be times when it is appropriate to go out and try to
engage the general public or focus on some expert stakeholders
or practitioners. ICTs, definitely the web and potentially in
future more mobile-based devices, kiosks and digital television,
will open up the opportunities, alongside the offline routes available
to engage the public.
Q149 Paul Flynn: Should we have our
own website and be putting out the interesting things that happen?
At the moment we can put on our own website only those things
that individual Members have said; we cannot put on the brilliant
things that other Members say and the answers we get. There are
all kinds of silly rules. That does restrict the work of the website
and the way we try to get our work and its news value across to
whoever is running the show on that day?
Mr Ferguson: Some of the most
exciting and successful work that goes on in Parliament comes
through the Select Committee. People are interested in issues.
Q150 Paul Flynn: What should we do?
Mr Ferguson: I would stream some
of your meetings through the site and link up to one another when
talking about Select Committee business. Go out more to online
communities where one talks about things that are of interest
to them; tell them that this work is going on and be proactive
as they are, hopefully, proactive in coming to you.
Mr Steinberg: I should like to
make three points. First, you may have noticed that currently
TheyWorkForYou does not cover committees; it covers the Lords,
Commons and Westminster Hall. The reason it does not do that is
that all the committees publish their information in completely
different and incompatible formats which means that to take any
one and put it on TheyWorkForYou is a big piece of work. There
are lots of committees and so it must be done dozens of time over.
Come up with a consistent way of publishing all the committee
transcripts in particular—we can help you do that—and
make sure that that is done in a timely way. A great example of
what you are missing, if you are thinking of why that is worth
doing, is that any of the words we have spoken today may be key
words for which people have email alerts on TheyWorkForYou. For
example, I get mail if anyone mentions MySociety in the Commons
or Lords, but this Committee is not covered, which means that
all those people who might have signed up for key words that you
have discussed today would not get them because it is too hard
to cover it. We are trying to do it but it is a massive uphill
struggle because historically you have made it so difficult for
us. You would have a huge benefit because all the people who have
signed up to get mail when somebody mentions cheese, shoes or
Iraq—whatever they sign up for—will get those discussions
and hear more about the committees. At the moment 15,000 people
a day get these custom alerts and that number will go up in time.
The first point is that there should be consistent daily publication
of all the Select Committees in the same format. The second point
is that one should support the freedom of information file and
archive that we shall build and launch this summer. This is a
project to make it as easy to file freedom of information requests
as it is to write to Members of Parliament. Unlike writing to
MPs, it will take copies of the requests and responses and put
them online so people can find them and so will not have to refile
requests that have already been made 16 times. It is about saving
the Government money and giving better service to the public so
they can get the information they want faster. Use it and tell
people about it. The third point is that today we have talked
about petitions. We built the petitions site as a piece of free
software so that people can reuse it. I know that there are discussions
here and in other committees about the role of petitions in Parliament.
I am delighted that one side-effect of the Number 10 site is that
it has got Parliament talking about petitions, but there is a
free piece of software that has been tested against loads that
no other piece of software has ever had to deal with. It is there;
it was written by us; it is for you, so please take advantage
of it.
Mr Heath: I think the question
you are asking is: how does one best communicate in the light
of the availability of this new medium? At one level it is more
a question for a director of communications than an external expert
on technology in government. It is very important to start with
the underlying intention and purpose of the Committee and for
whom it is doing what it does. If one takes a technology-driven
approach and says that there appear to be CDs and new media and
asks whether one should be doing it one may get a technology-driven
answer which may be confusing. For lots of people in lots of jobs
the technology-driven answer is that their jobs are no longer
appropriate, which is rather uncomfortable. If one has too much
of an existing committee-driven stance, which is to ask how it
carries on doing what it does now, one may fail to take into account
the possibilities of the new medium. I believe that for the Committee
and other parts of government, including public services, the
question is: why are they doing what they do? What is possible
in the light of this new medium which is a fantastic research
tool? It is a brilliant communications mechanism and is low cost;
it is very widely available, though not universally. Questions
were asked earlier about the role of different parties and who
was making best use of this medium. It is quite clear that with
a new medium this will favour good communicators who learn and
understand the rules of it. All the other media are still there;
one still has face-to-face contact on television and radio. I
believe that with Mr Steinberg and MySociety you have in the room
the exemplary communicators in this new medium globally recognised.
History will be very kind to MySociety and what it has done and
how it has done it without a commercial agenda and brilliant design,
which is good for visually impaired people. It is exemplary in
all sorts of ways. You may not like what it does; you may choose
to criticise incorrectly addressed emails and stuff, but the fact
is that there is a huge amount to learn from its approach.
Q151 Paul Flynn: In the recent judicial
review of the Government's consultation on nuclear energy it was
suggested that when the Government knew its own mind there was
not much point in consulting. This was a change in government
policy where in 2003 nuclear energy was thought to be unattractive.
There was a PowerPoint presentation given by the Chief Scientist
to the Prime Minister. A light went on in his head and he changed
his mind and it suddenly became very attractive; and overnight
it also became very attractive to all members of the Government,
PPS and so on. Regardless of consultation, that policy had already
changed anyway. How do you feel about that? The problem with all
government consultation, and many governments—there are
plenty of past examples—is that it is largely a sham anyway
if they have a firm opinion. The only value that they see in it
is to reinforce their own views.
Mr Heath: What I have observed
is that a new communications medium cannot do much if people do
not want to listen. In the areas that I have been looking at the
issues are: the introduction of the children's index, Trident,
computerisation of health records and how one approaches ID management.
In all these areas the new communications medium seems to make
more apparent a reluctance to hear outside views, which is perplexing
and troubling. I do not think that it is a problem to do with
the medium.
Q152 Paul Flynn: Five years ago when
Mr Steinberg was writing about the future of these matters one
of the great hopes was that we as MPs would be able to do our
jobs better because people could communicate with us more easily.
I think that already as far as emails are concerned we find that
it has defeated itself; the volume of such messages has repeated
the experience in America. There is too much to answer. Very few
MPs now bother to answer emails from non-constituents except for
a few formal words. In the early days in America a wrestler did
win an election as a result of his website. He was certainly communicating
with potential electors. How do you think things are going here
compared with the States? They became awash with emails earlier
than we did. Is there anything that the Committee or MPs as communicators
can learn from the American experience?
Mr Ferguson: In the US the use
of the online medium tends to be concerned with campaigning work.
It is clear that through the work Parliament has been doing online,
and government is doing increasingly, there is a lot that Britain
can share with the US, whereas before we tended to take a lot
of our lessons straight from their campaign trails and tried to
apply them to our peacetime politics, if you like. I believe that
that is an incorrect approach. We have been doing some annual
audits of political engagement. Only 14% of people said that they
would be willing to engage in the political process through parliamentary
or government consultations and only 4% had done so. In the main,
there are two things that people would much rather do: the first
is to vote every five years and the other is to sign petitions.
There is a big gap—leaving aside voting—between the
more informal approach to political participation and the formal
approach. Some of the work that we have seen online carried out
by a range of different organisations shows that they can plug
that gap. The work that we did in Digital Dialogues was to run
case studies around particular policies on which consultation
was sought by departments. About 70% of the people who used those
sites engaged in a form of political process for the first time.
There is lots of data to show that the more people engage in politics
between elections the more likely they are to vote in elections
and sustain the participation. I think that one lesson that we
should be aspiring to send out is that the more we engage people
the more they will stay engaged, and I think that across OECD
countries that is an important matter. We should aspire to be
the leaders in that process.
Q153 Paul Flynn: Is there any future
in politicians being active on YouTube, MySpace and Google video?
Ms Kennedy: You talked about how
to get out Select Committee messages. Before Christmas I flipped
over by mistake to BBC Parliament and found myself mesmerised
by evidence being given to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs.
I did not intend to look at it, but it was fantastic. I do not
know whether it is possible, but those sorts of pieces when put
onto YouTube spread. That is one of the interesting aspects of
this new medium, and perhaps it is one of the underlying factors
in the Number 10 petitions site. One has the creation of online
communities. I received from more than one personal contact an
email asking me to sign the petition on road pricing on the Number
10 website. People become interested in the stuff and spread the
word through their own communities. That is a powerful development.
Therefore, if the Committee has some really interesting bits and
they are on YouTube people will rate them and email their friends
asking them whether they have seen them because they are very
interesting. One of the behaviour changes that the new medium
allows, perhaps requires, is that one does not have to push it
all from the centre any more. If things are interesting people
will pick them up and run with them. The difficulty for government
is that there is a lot of control there, but it is also very powerful.
Q154 Chairman: One would have expected
that the development of these new mechanisms for communication
and participation would produce a greater engagement in the political
process. Yet when one looks at the policy review documents prepared
for the Cabinet discussion today one of the charts indicates that
the headline of political efficacy or people's belief in their
capacity to influence the world is in decline. One might have
thought that all these new opportunities would have produced a
re-engagement and yet it seems not to have happened.
Ms Kennedy: I think that what
happened on the Number 10 site is an example of re-engagement.
The 1.8 million people might never have engaged at all. Whilst
we agree that it is at a low level and is the first point of contact,
that is a re-engagement. But people are very savvy at judging
what they see online and whether they believe it is real, and
so much of the engagement has not been regarded as genuine. Mr
Heath has already mentioned the quality of MySociety. One of its
powerful aspects is that it is really designed with the end-user
in mind, so it works for them. It is designed in a way that is
completely user-sensitised and is user-centric. A lot of stuff
that emanates from government does not feel like that. That is
the challenge for my old boss David Miliband. It is fantastic
that he is trying to do a blog, but there are things that curtail
his ability to speak on his blog. People see through that; they
know that one cannot have the discussion that one really wants
with him because of the rules as to what he is allowed to say,
collective responsibility and all the rest of it.
Q155 Chairman: Is there not a wider
point? Government is a rather complicated business that is all
to do with difficult trade-offs, and it is a million miles from
the simple approach that if only more people could be made to
express their views it would be all right. It will not be all
right; it will leave people feeling probably more disaffected
than before. Therefore, there is a mismatch between, as it were,
the nature of the enterprise and the nature of the technology.
Mr Steinberg: I think that representative
technology is great because it forces people to make successful
compromises in nice non-violent environments. One cannot just
push a button and expect to have exactly what one wants because
that is the politics of infantilism, not grown-up democracy. My
challenge to you is: go to the parliamentary website and find
where it says that, by the way, you should know that to be part
of the political process you have to make compromises. That is
the first thing you have to know. It should be in the middle of
the home page; it should say that government is not a normal consumer
business and it will not do exactly what you say but there are
ways of working with you and here they are.
Q156 Chairman: Did the Number 10
e.Petition site say that?
Mr Steinberg: It said that you
could petition the Prime Minister, as you already could. I believe
that Number 10 said that if you petitioned it did not mean you
would get automatically what you wanted. I am not completely sure,
but I guess they did.
Q157 Chairman: But you are saying
that that is what it should do, and it was something you set up.
Mr Steinberg: I think that it
did; I am just not completely sure. Maybe you are right and we
should go back and put something in the middle of the home page
saying that by signing the petition the individual is marking
his or her voice to be heard but should be aware that there is
a democratic process into which it fits. You are quite right;
and maybe we can persuade Number 10 that that is the sort of thing
it should do. Crucially, this is the house of representatives.
I would very much like you to be in the business of explaining
to the public through these new forms of communication that it
is messy and complicated and tell them how they can become involved,
rather than just imply that if they hang around Westminster long
enough they will understand. In the site that MySociety runs primarily
we take enormous guidance on what MPs do. You have probably seen
the huge documents showing what MPs cover. We try to distil it
into about 25 words because that is about the level that people
are willing to take in. It is great when one can express things
simply, honestly and not lose the nuance and the fact that it
is not just about getting exactly what you want. It is not like
going into a shop.
Q158 Paul Flynn: Are you going to
change the responses so you can sign in favour of it, against
it or express doubt?
Mr Steinberg: Personally, I am
against that because that makes it look like a poll and petitions
are not that. Polls and petitions are great but they are not the
same. Unrepresentative polls are genuinely harmful; they have
big negative externalities. I do not quite see that normal petitions
have such large negative externalities.
Mr Ferguson: I echo that. As much
as you should create opportunities for people to participate online
you should also provide information about how to participate when
those new routes are created. One of my favourite examples of
this working well is the online consultation by the Select Committee
on Defence last year in relation to the education of service children.
That was set up because the people that they wanted to talk to
lived outside the UK; they lived all round the world. There was
clear value in doing it online to involve them in this consultation.
They could have written in but the Defence Committee wanted to
be much more transparent and encourage people to deliberate among
themselves. The crucial difference between that consultation compared
with anything that had gone before was that Members also facilitated
the debate. Far from prejudging the findings of its inquiry the
Committee explained why things were the way they were, what options
there were, and when people made blatant complaints perhaps about
the committee system as a whole or the way the military worked
the Members fulfilling their role as representatives were able
to explain it to them. The satisfaction rate from post-consultation
surveys that we carried out was far higher than any we had previously
run. I think the reason why technology has not led to greater
political engagement is that Parliament and the Government have
been largely lacking in that area, particularly the formal opportunities
to engage.
Q159 David Heyes: I want to go back
to consultation other than in an electronic sense. I believe that
Ms Kennedy said she had been in a situation where she had had
to write submissions for the minister before the consultation
had closed. I should have been shocked by that admission but I
was not. It appears that very often that is what happens because
consultation is difficult and time-consuming, for good practical
reasons such as schools holidays which you mentioned, and it is
inconvenient to get the feedback that may come from it. The reality
is that it is a sham and the decision may be made by Number 10.
The department or minister is told what it is going to do and
then the sham consultation takes place: what was always going
to happen was what the directive from Number 10 said. It leads
on to the difficulty of electronic consultation being rooted in
the fact that consultation of itself is a sham. Perhaps you would
talk about that.
Ms Kennedy: I do not say that
government consultation is always a sham.
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