Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-179)
MR TOM
STEINBERG, MR
ROSS FERGUSON,
MR WILLIAM
HEATH AND
MS RUTH
KENNEDY
8 MARCH 2007
Q160 David Heyes: I am sorry to interrupt.
I am not talking simply about central government or Number 10;
it seems to me to apply equally in the context of local government,
local health services or local education—wherever government
exists and pretends to consult.
Ms Kennedy: The factor that is
often missing is the desire to listen. I believe that the key
question is: what is it that people are trying to find out. What
is problematic is that that is not always transparent to the general
public, if that is where consultation is being run. If the main
policy has already been decided it needs to be clear to the public
that you are no longer consulting on whether it is this or that
policy but on the implementation, that is, the hows and wherefores
of the policy itself. Often that involves not only individual
members of the public but NGOs and the third sector—those
who speak authoritatively on behalf of some of the groups that
it are difficult to reach in consultation. What are the opportunities
that the new technology provides to consult in a different way,
perhaps at greater speed and with a different range of people.
But it is "both and"; that can be done as well as the
old methods, but the Government can get much better at being clear
as to what it is they are genuinely undecided on and want views
on and they are trying to find out what people think about it
so they can handle the backlash when it happens. There are different
types of things that government wants to find out, and often it
is not very clear. One of the reasons for it is that I do not
believe there is a very professionalised approach to it. There
is not an involvement of people running and designing these things
who really understand how to engage with people in the outside
world. You might be heading up a policy area and there would be
consultation in your area. You and your colleagues work out the
questions. That is not the best way to do it, and that is why
quite often government consults on preconceived notions rather
than engages in deliberative conversations with people. Bodies
like the National Consumer Council are fantastic in this area
because they come to it from the other end. The results are very
surprising. The other day they said to me that there was an assumption
by government that if you asked some questions you would get nasty
answers so you should not ask them. For example, in the area of
housing do not ask people what they want because they will say
that they want something tremendous and they want it tomorrow.
The NCC's work shows the opposite. People are very realistic about
what it is possible to deliver. When you ask them what they want
they say they realise it takes a while for repairs to be made
but they want people to be honest about how long it will take.
If it will take three months tell them that, not that it can be
done tomorrow. I think that government would do well to engage
much more with those people who really understand how to do consultation
well. One fantastic example that the Committee may or may not
know about is the Trust Guide co-sponsored by the DTI. Rather
than ask people questions about things with which they were not
really familiar—this was about what it was that made people
trust online services—they took a deliberative approach.
They had about 29 focus groups comprising different types of people
but gave them hands-on lab experience which enabled them to understand
the technology about which they were being asked. Having had that
they were asked what they felt about using online services, identity,
biometrics and all the very complicated things that the average
citizen does not really know much about. The results of that are
incredibly powerful and quite challenging. They produce quite
different results from when one conducts a poll asking whether
people want ID cards. When one really wants to find out what people
feel or think about complicated things one needs to do it in a
very nuanced way.
Mr Heath: Following that particular
Trust Guide experience, it would be fabulous to take Committee
Members or senior policymakers through a process to show how chips,
pins, biometrics and the Internet worked in order to have informed
lay experience of the fact that the Internet is a dangerous place
that one should not trust at all. One might then come up with
the same conclusion, that you do not trust it but it is so convenient
that you will use it anyway as long as someone clears up the messes.
Your question about consultation takes us back to whether government
can govern better and local authorities and health authorities
can provide better public services with better evidence. Consultation
is one way of obtaining evidence. My personal experience—I
am quite na[doti][lcodot]ve and idealistic—has been very
disappointing. The petition is another small hint perhaps about
what people really think. The nature of the Internet is that it
provides copious amounts of feedback. People who search for anything
through Google leave a trace of what they have searched for. You
can go to Google and ask what is it in Finland, France or UK that
people search for. Anybody who has a website can download three
lines of code and suddenly have an automatic map of where their
visitors come from. Anything that happens on line produces its
own automatic feedback at very little cost and effort. In addition,
the Internet is a fabulous medium for providing personalised or
deliberate feedback for research or stories. An exemplary use
of this is something called Patient Opinion which was set up by
a GP in Sheffield. He is a doctor and he wants to improve people's
experience of the NHS and make it more responsive. He set up a
service called Patient Opinion which asked people what their experiences
of the NHS had been. What was it like? People said what had happened
to them. Very surprising results have come out of it. More than
half of the usage of the service was represented by people thanking
their care providers because they could not find a different and
convenient way of doing that. That is not nearly as frightening
as the practitioners thought it would be. Some of it reflects
serious malpractice issues which have to be taken offline and
dealt with by the hospital concerned. I think the answer is that
one can govern and provide public services better with the rich
feedback that the Internet makes possible in all sorts of ways
if one understands what the evidence really means—it means
different things—if one is prepared to listen to it and
able and willing to act upon it.
Q161 David Heyes: When I used the
word "sham" you nodded vigorously, so I took that as
assent to what I said. How does one move from what very often
appears to be sham and fake consultation to the idealistic world
that you have just described to us?
Mr Heath: I was so disappointed
by the consultations in which either I took part or persuaded
people to take part. For example, in relation to ID management
consultation I persuaded a Dutch professor working in Montreal
to make a detailed submission about the possibility of transacting
online in a complex way and maintaining privacy and anonymity
with a high level of security. It was not his problem that we
wanted to do ID management. He put in a lot of time to do that
but it was never acknowledged. The points that he made have never
been acknowledged in any of the policy statements since. That
was why I nodded vigorously. I was personally upset by that because
I found it shameful.
Q162 David Heyes: To continue my
thesis, if consultation is often a sham enhanced or enriched consultation
in the form of electronic consultation adds to people's feeling
that it is all a fake and increases a sense of disillusionment
with the political process.
Mr Steinberg: I am dying to get
specifically to online consultation. I do not consider that petitions
or writing to MPs are online consultation where government is
thinking of certain policy and it wants to ask people about them.
A lot of people have tried to do this over the past few years.
There is a range of providers out there and various parts of the
public sector have tried to use them. I do not believe that anyone
has got it even nearly right. This is a different point from whether
government will listen once it is done. I think that with things
like TheyWorkForYou they are getting it mostly right. Obviously,
one can always add and improve things, but it turns out that to
do any form of consultation well online is terrifically hard.
It is probably one of those problems that is genuinely expensive.
You write to them at a cost of £40,000 or so. People work
for you because there is so much volunteer labour and so it is
much less than that. I think that people have tried to build online
consultation for about that much money, although I am guessing.
Part of the reason it might not have been that impressive is that
it is probably the sort of project that needs low millions to
have a good shot at it, and even then it may turn out that it
is just one of those things, like making pasta, that you cannot
do very well on the Internet. Until we have tried with the appropriate
budget we will never know whether or not it is possible. My most
important lesson is that if you have ever been involved in online
consultation and felt disappointed in part it may be because government
is not listening but from a technical point of view a big part
of it is due to the fact that none of the systems out there is
that great. I would love to see Parliament invest directly in
trying itself to do it. That is not a plug for work because we
have much too much to do at the moment anyway. Can you use technology
to make people listen? Can you somehow use the Internet and get
people who did not show interest to start to listen? That is a
hard and interesting question. If the things are badly delivered,
small and underused it makes them very easy to ignore, but if
they are intelligently designed and reasonably well used it makes
them hard to ignore. I give a tiny example from Write To Them.
It is against the terms and conditions and its policy to let people
spam Members through that site. It stops and notices if people
try to send the same letter 20 times. That is partly because we
want you to like the service and trust it, but it is also because
we know that if you get 10 letters in exactly the same form you
know that 10 people have got together and organised something,
whereas if you get 10 letters on the same topic that are obviously
all different it may reflect a broader interest in the public.
That is one example of where a little technological change is
about trying to make people listen more. Sometimes it may work
and sometimes it does not. We do not read the mail that people
send because it is private and we do not know. I believe that
sometimes you can build technology systems that push the right
buttons and make people sit back, take interest and listen to
it, but it does not come automatically or easily. If you do not
design things well you will never get the result that people who
plan not to listen suddenly do so. They have to be good before
that even becomes a possibility. How to make people listen is
your business; it is to do with laws and stuff over which we have
no control, for example how you hold the executive to account.
We do not have any say in that, nor should we because we are a
little NGO, not elected representatives.
Q163 Mr Prentice: When people write
to me using WriteToThem.com I reply electronically. The reply
is triggered electronically, so everyone hears from me before
they get the substantive reply, but I have a very low score when
it comes to replies. How does that work?
Mr Steinberg: That is because
we ask people whether they got a reply from their MPs. Most people
know the difference between an automatic bounce and something
else.
Q164 Mr Prentice: When people use
WriteToThem.com my electronically-triggered reply says that I
do not discriminate between people who use different media to
get in touch with me, that is, the phone, fax and so on. I ask
people to give their postal address because I do not want to spend
a lot of time corresponding with someone in Alaska; I want to
speak to my constituents or people in the UK. When I got their
postal addresses I write to them using snail mail, but that does
not show up.
Mr Steinberg: Yes, it does show
up. We do everything to make this as fair and useful a system
for both you and them.
Q165 Mr Prentice: In that case why
do I get such a low score?
Mr Steinberg: I am afraid I do
not know.
Q166 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You are
probably sending them to the wrong address.
Mr Steinberg: There are dozens
of MPs who have had perfect response rates. There are some who
have very good and not so good responses. I am sorry I cannot
give the reason for that.
Q167 Mr Prentice: It is the person
who writes who decides whether or not he or she has received a
response. It is not an automated process. I have used Write To
Them. I then get an email asking whether I have had a response.
If I get one I say yes; if not, I say no. It is the constituents
who are the problem, not the system.
Mr Steinberg: I often thought
that.
Q168 Chairman: The emailers believe
that they have a greater claim on you than the non-emailers, whereas
the reverse should be true. Those people who write a letter, buy
a stamp at the post office and post it have a much higher claim
than those who press a button on a computer, do they not?
Mr Steinberg: That is why we do
not hold you to a higher standard on these statistics than the
rest of the public sector. We pick the public sector average for
response rates for departments. We look at what the departments
say is the date by which you have to respond and we give that
to you in the same way. We say that this is fair, unless you are
sending mail overland or by slow boat to Alaska. You have enough
time—two or three weeks—to get back before the people
get the mail and they are asked whether they have had a response.
Q169 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You said
that you did not read any of the emails. You published mine in
the paper.
Mr Steinberg: I will correct that.
We read mail only when we have reason to believe that there is
something suspicious.
Mr Liddell-Grainger: I understand—for
example, Number 10 and cash for honours!
Q170 Mr Walker: Mr Heath and Ms Kennedy,
do you believe that our parliamentary democracy is failing because
everything you have said suggests that it is?
Mr Heath: Perhaps I may answer
that in my own words without a yes or no. What I study is the
computerisation of public services and I do not believe that generally
it is being well designed for its users. I do not know whether
that is the fault of our parliamentary democracy. I suspect that
in Parliament for historic reasons there is not a high level of
expertise or ease or familiarity with new technologies. You have
an awful lot of things to be expert in and learn about IT takes
a good deal of effort, and there are not many MPs for whom that
is a professional background. I do not believe that Parliament
is yet effective in rectifying the fact that all our investment
in the transformation of government, e.Government or whatever
is not really designed for its users.
Q171 Mr Walker: That is an answer,
but what concerns me about the evidence you have given is that
you have not mentioned the role of a Member of Parliament. We
have a representative democracy in this country where every four
or five years people go to the polls to elect Members of Parliament
to represent their concerns to the executive. Everything that
you have talked about today is bypassing the Member of Parliament
and envisaging a democracy where we simply have an executive with
which the people communicate directly. I am not against that,
but I am just concerned that neither of you appears to believe
that there is any role for a Member of Parliament perhaps beyond
giving good people like yourselves a hard time.
Mr Heath: I do not want to give
that impression at all. Certainly, I have a very lively correspondence
with my own Member of Parliament, Mr Jeremy Hunt. Our business
studies where the money is spent on technology and that is entirely
about the bulk of public services: health, defence, local government,
central government and so on. That is not something which MPs
directly influence or control very closely. I was very surprised
by the experience of a former MP who now works on behalf of a
technology company doing lobbying and government affairs work
principally in Brussels and who has no doubt that there is a greater
effect on legislation coming out in the UK through working on
behalf of a company in Brussels than as a Member of Parliament,
but that is not something on which I have personal expertise or
experience.
Ms Kennedy: I do not suggest that
parliamentary democracy is failing. Certainly, when I have engaged
with my MP, Harriet Harman, I have found her very responsive.
From my various voluntary activities I have found that MPs are
generally very responsive to their constituents in taking forward
those things. One reflection is that as a former senior civil
servant when you write to your MP and he or she takes it up with
the relevant department it is pretty irritating to get a typical
civil service response from the department in question. As a civil
servant I always made it my business to read what people were
writing and to try to respond. For anybody it is disingenuous
to get a response that has not really engaged with whatever is
the issued that has been raised. That takes us back to the question:
does the big beast really want to listen? But I do not think that
that is a criticism of MPs themselves. There is a good deal of
public debate already about parliamentary democracy, and last
night's vote is all part of that. I think people recognise that
there are ways in which it needs to be made better. I am an enthusiast
for that, too. I do not think that it is failing.
Q172 Mr Walker: Mr Steinberg, I believe
that you have a great website. I look at two: yours and Conservative
Home. I think they are very good and enjoy reviewing them. I am
interested in petitions. We are running a petition in Broxbourne
regarding the health service. One brilliant feature of the petition
is that it re-engages local representatives—councillors,
county councillors, activists and myself—with the public.
They love that in a non-party-political way. I do not care who
takes it around. It is great fun because we get to meet people
and have nice chats. This just does not happen on the Internet.
MyPetition runs solely through the Internet. Ten thousand signatures
secured on the Internet would not have the same value as 10,000
signatures secured face to face because of that interaction. What
people say most of all is that they miss people knocking on their
doors and seeing their politicians and activists. One of the problems
with that is that fewer people become involved in that type of
work, but what worries me about the Internet is that it is all
very good and exciting; it is fun and it is entertaining. We have
framed this conversation in a way that suggests my entire electorate,
say, of 72,000 is just glued to the web; it is not. Only a tiny
minority of them do that. I think that we are in danger of overstating
the role of the Internet and e.communications in how we as politicians
interact with our constituents. I would appreciate your thoughts
on that.
Mr Steinberg: It is absolutely
true to say that it is one channel of many, and it just happens
to be the one in which I work. Therefore, it is not surprising
that a good deal of what I am talking about today is concerned
with it. There are loads of things in life in which paper is better
than the Internet and technology, and I would always say that.
What would be the number one way to use technology to get people
outside the school gate to engage in school boards? Put a sign
up outside the gate to explain how to get involved. There is appropriate
technology for that. One should pick the thing that suits best.
Petitions can still be done online and offline, and maybe in the
next few years we will see more combinations. For example, there
is no reason why you cannot go to someone's door with a laptop
and talk about a petition and then have the person sign it on
that. You would then have the benefits of both worlds. That may
seem a little cumbersome today but maybe by next week it may appear
to be old hat. You never know.
Q173 Mr Walker: I would never take
a laptop with me. It might be a BlackBerry or something. I just
think that that turns us into technology wonkies, for want of
a better word. It is nice to go out with a piece of paper and
pen and get people to sign up. You could do it with a laptop but
I do not see much advantage in that. You can now scan information
and people's signatures into a computer anyway, can you not?
Ms Kennedy: I should like to reiterate
what Mr Steinberg said. It is about using the appropriate technology
and the mix and maturity of the different things that are used
is part of the value of it. A lot of my social policy work has
been about engaging with those who are difficult to engage and
so on. Clearly, at the moment the Internet is not where many of
those people find the ability to communicate, but it is worth
noting that it varies across the population. The UK's Internet
penetration in households is pretty much the top in Europe; it
is about 75%. Of those who have access about 65% are on broadband.
There are big pockets of population where there is very low penetration,
for example in Peckham where I live. I think I am right in saying
that last year a survey was done of 16 to 24 year-olds. Of those,
75% used social networking sites like MySpace, Beebo and so on.
For that generation it is very different. This is how they communicate
with each other and so on. There is a need to be very clever about
the technology that is used and for whom.
Q174 Mr Walker: I am still troubled
by what I believe are your concerns about representative parliamentary
democracy and our role within it. What is it that you think the
role of MPs is? What do you think that we do within our constituencies?
I would be interested to know whether there is a gap between what
we feel we do and what you as experts in this new world of communications
think we do.
Mr Heath: I am cautious about
this because this is really not my specialist subject. We are
not lobbyists and do not deal with parliamentary lobbyists. I
like the HearFromYourMP service that Mr Steinberg set up because
it reflects the asymmetric relationship between the elected representative
who has to make decisions, balance things and take them forward
and the individual who may feel that his view is incredibly strong
but obviously cannot be reflected. If you look at the richness
of the evidence at one extreme, you take the views of everyone
in the country on every subject. The triumph of our representative
democracy is to reduce it to one vote for every person every five
years. That is an enormous simplification and digitisation process.
You then have the task of making sense of it and setting laws.
The fact is that there is now available a richer evidence base.
I do not know how best you act upon it and I shall watch with
interest, but I do not have a prescription for it.
Ms Kennedy: My answer is a purely
personal one and is not based on any particular expertise. When
once in five years I get to vote I choose my MP on the declared
range of policy options. In the intervening period I believe that
the MP represents me, so I communicate when I feel that things
are not working for me in the way they should or when I believe
that the MP should hold the executive to account. For example,
I last wrote to my MP about maternity services which is something
close to my heart. We have fantastic services in Peckham. I do
not believe that government is doing what it said it would do
in terms of excellence of service and choice. I wrote to my MP
on that issue and she took it up on my behalf with the Department
of Health. That is one of the ways that I get my voice heard within
the executive and across the Civil Service. That was very powerful
and I felt that it was responsive.
Mr Steinberg: I think that one
thing you do is send loads of emails with really bad tools. The
tools that Parliament gives you are rubbish. You need to get together
and beat up whoever is in the IT department in order to build
something specific for the job.
Mr Heath: Perhaps I may offer
you a more thoughtful answer. I think that what you bring to this
process should be common sense and empathy. The world that I look
at, which is the computerisation of public services, lacks those
two qualities and it is for MPs to introduce them. We can mechanise
our instruments of compassion. We can create a society in which
people are discriminated against on the basis of some automated
rules. Instead of going to the local post office where the postmistress
knows my name, my iris is scanned and suddenly I do not get a
service and I do not know the reason for it. We need MPs to bring
empathy and commonsense into the investment that we are making.
Q175 Chairman: But the point is that
the technology is driving the pattern of service provision, which
is a wider area, and that is one of the laments one hears in terms
of providers of services. We attended a Jobcentre in Clapham the
other day and heard how people were being deskilled. They used
to understand the job in the round and all the legislation and
could provide the totality of advice; now they are trained to
operate simply one section of a computer programme. On the other
side people do not see people face to face any more so they can
deal with problems in the round. They are expected to access services
electronically. That involves a loss of connection between the
citizen and the state.
Mr Heath: It should not be driven
by technology but by intention and the needs of customers. We
have to get on top of it so we are clear about our intention and
what people need in terms of jobs on both sides—the staff
who offer the service and the people who need the jobs—so
that the technology serves it. The voice of commonsense and empathy
would get that under control.
Q176 Chairman: But people have worked
out that if one brings IT in one door one can get people out the
other door. As many people experience it there is a loss of service
involved in the process.
Mr Heath: There is a fundamental
dispute, which goes back 40 years, about what the purpose of the
technology is. The original assumption is that it is all about
automation and that essentially people are ciphers who can be
done away with as machines get better at doing the job. That arises
out of militaristic thinking about it which is not what we see
in reality. This technology is about augmenting people and making
them more than they were before, bringing more information to
them so they can make better and firmer decisions. That is a matter
of personal computing and well designed services, and that is
the nature of the Internet. The control freaks are losing out.
They are still there and believe that it will work for them, but
they are wrong.
Q177 Chairman: Look at the evidence
of people's evaluation of their contact with providers, public
and private. The lamentations are all about the automated character
of the transaction as opposed to the people-focused transaction.
Mr Heath: That is because it is
so badly designed, and you need to say that.
Ms Kennedy: The problem is that
there are not enough examples of where the process has been changed
and there has been an improvement. For example, in relation to
the pensions service people were asked how they wanted the service
to deal with them. Funnily enough, people did not want to have
several hour-long interviews; they wanted a lot of the service
to be provided over the phone because it was quicker and easier.
But the service still sees a million people face to face every
year. What it now tries to do is that when someone comes to your
home to talk about your pension there is a person locally who
can also talk to you about other useful things that you may want
to know about and other services in which you may want to engage.
I think that what they are seeing is an improvement in the service,
and the bit that is face to face is much more useful and less
time-consuming. They have thought it through from the point of
view of the end-user at the beginning rather than bring in the
technology first.
Q178 Chairman: Last week or the week
before we had before us the head of the Inland Revenue who described
how the service had reintroduced case workers into the tax credit
system. Tax credits have been a disaster in administrative terms
because the system has been entirely IT-driven. They now have
to bring people back in to sort out the problems.
Ms Kennedy: I met some ladies
from Jobcentre Plus who said the same thing. They used to be able
to do the totals themselves and say, "We owe you a bit and
you owe us a bit and the answer is x." They are now
allowed to do that. For me, that is another example of a badly
designed system.
Q179 Kelvin Hopkins: I am not as
enthusiastic about computers as my colleagues and I try to minimise
my use of them. I must say that what Mr Heath and Ms Kennedy have
said sounds patronising, manipulative and even sinister. Setting
aside communicating at local level, in politics we have a prime
minister who finds Parliament and MPs extremely irritating; he
would much prefer to communicate directly with the people. Historically,
we have had good democratic enthusiasts who have written about
the importance of what they call intermediary organisations, a
variety of different institutions in representative democracy.
It is the dictators and authoritarians who love to communicate
directly with the people. Do you believe that if Hitler had had
the Internet he would have loved it? Not only would he have sent
out nasty questionnaires about what to do about the Jews; he would
have been able to trace back the people who were against him.
In the wrong hands these things can be very authoritarian and
anti-democratic.
Mr Heath: Hitler did not have
the Internet but it is well documented that he had Hollerith tabulating
machines which he used to mechanise the discrimination that he
practised. The thing about the Internet is that it is not a top
down communications medium. It is not trustworthy and it is chaotic.
One can communicate top down with it, but one can also communicate
peer to peer. China finds it quite troublesome. We visited China
last autumn. China is petrified about the idea of people communicating
on a peer-to-peer basis and sharing their views on what they think
is really going on and the loss of control. What they want to
learn from the UK, interestingly, is how non-conformists in this
country contribute to an active NGO sector. I do not think they
want to replicate the British establishment, but they would like
to replicate British NGOs in a controlled way. I am interested
that you find the world we look at patronising, manipulative and
sinister. We are in it and we just try to make the best of it.
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