Examination of Witness (Question Numbers
40-59)
RT HON
JACK STRAW
MP
28 FEBRUARY 2007
Q40 Rosemary McKenna: That was a
serious concern of the previous Committee when they made the recommendation
for e-tabling.
Mr Straw: Unless it is a discreet
electronic signature for these purposes alone, Members will, I
am afraid, not follow the undertaking, and what is the penalty?
Rosemary McKenna: Indeed.
Q41 Mr Wilson: I would like to turn
to the process of handling some of these questions by the Government.
From what you have said so far, it is clear that answering a large
number of parliamentary questions does impose quite a heavy burden
on the Civil Service in particular. You have got a lot of experience
of various departments, including the Home Office, which does
have a large number of parliamentary questions, as you know. Can
you describe for us the procedures within a government department
for answering PQs and, in particular, when and how ministers become
involved in that process?
Mr Straw: Firstly, I can describe
it from literally one perspective, being the senior minister in
two departments. I think you are about to open up for evidence,
are you not, but you will need to get experienced parliamentary
clerks in these big departments and to ask them as well, and bear
in mind that if you are the Secretary of State, you are answering
rather fewer questions than ministers for state and the parliamentary
secretaries. In my case, I would skim the blues every day, you
know, the questions that were put down the day before for answer,
or they would be drawn to my attention by the parliamentary branch
if there were some difficult ones. Let me say, an awful lot of
them are routine, important information, or they are something
local. Then, the next that I would note about a PQ, if it was
coming up for me to answer, was when the PQ folder was in my box,
and I would then go through it; and I would always check the background
note, which often has more information in it than the PQ answer.
Time without number I have put a balloon round the background
note, put it in the answer, and you think, "What?" Anyway
in the end they get the point, because it is kind of clear. As
I say, I happen to think, and so do most of my colleagues, you
are there to try and help provide the information, and if you
do not provide the information, you only get more PQs, so why
do you not just put down the information there? That is what happens
in nine out of ten cases. There are some cases which are tricky.
Sometimes I got questions where the advice was you could not answer
it because it was a disproportionate cost, and I would want to
be satisfied that that was the case or the information was not
otherwise available; and you had to check quite carefully. Obviously
there were some cases where it was a no-brainer, but a lot of
these were largely marginal cases. Alongside that, Rob, as I say,
this is what I was handling, and there was a list of the questioners
whose questions I answered, who were essentially privy councillors,
anybody in the Shadow Cabinet, whether they were a privy councillor
or not, plus other privy councillors, plus ones that were in both
departments on security or intelligence or terrorism, and that
sort of thing. There is then a need to supervise your junior ministers,
and the first line in that was the responsibility of the parliamentary
clerk and the Principal Private Secretary co-ordinating the work
of the private secretaries; and then sometimes ministers would
come to me and say, "What do we do about this PQ?",
and you would have to make sure that the Press Office kept an
eye on it as well, because they were also more alert to the sort
of things that could crop up. That is basically how it worked.
Then, sometimes you would get some questions which were very,
very tricky. The best example, I think, in the Foreign Office
was in respect of rendition, where I was being asked to prove
a negative. I knew what I had done and had not done, but the questions
were what had Government done and also what had the United States
done or not done in respect of the United Kingdom. There was a
series of questions, but they had to be delayed in order that
we got the information and that it was accurate, and it took about
three or four weeks to get it.
Q42 Mr Wilson: What you have given
us there is the view from your end of the chain?
Mr Straw: Yes.
Q43 Mr Wilson: What you are suggesting,
I think, is that we would need to go further back in the chain
and take more evidence?
Mr Straw: Yes. I am sure we can
do that.
Q44 Mr Wilson: Were there ever occasions
when the ability of civil servants to effectively carry out their
job was undermined by the quantity of parliamentary questions
that they had to deal with?
Mr Straw: Yes. Bear in mind that
parliamentary questions are not only the questions asked by parliamentarians.
For example, in the Foreign Office you had written questions from
select committees, you had a huge number, going up to thousands,
of questions from the Quad Committee on arms control, for which
I was the lead minister, and we also had questions from the Intelligence
and Security Committee, which works in secret but otherwise in
a very similar way to a select committee. I think it was on the
area of rendition and associated matters that the very good Director
General said to me that he had two people working full-time on
the answers for some weeks. We all just knuckled down to that,
because people were very concerned about rendition, and it was
very important that we pinned down the answers. As I say, it was
difficult, not because we had participated in anything unlawful,
illegal or immoral, but we were being asked to prove a negative,
and files had to be trawled through in SIS and the Security Service
and so on. Yes, sometimes people say in the Home Office, "We
are really pressed here", and one had to be accommodating.
At the same time I used to say, "You have got to keep on
top of it; I am sorry." Also, just bear in mind, it is a
question of making sure that your ministers kept on top of it.
I am afraid to say, I was notorious in the Home Office for going
round ministers' offices and pointing out to them I had piles
of PQs or piles of private office cases, that is ministers' cases
(letters), and that they had better clear them.
Q45 Mr Wilson: Can I move on again.
It has been claimed that a number of government departments have
set up a centralised unit for specifically answering PQs and that,
as a consequence of that, the answers are now drafted with an
eye to the political and media presentation rather than answering
the question specifically for the Member. Do you know of any departments
that have done this, and what is your view of such units being
set up?
Mr Straw: Can I say, there is
nothing sinister about this.
Q46 Mr Wilson: I did not suggest
there was.
Mr Straw: I know, but that is
the implication. All departments have got centralised units for
answering PQs because the questions go to the parliamentary branch
of the department and they are then dished out. There is a long,
long running debate in departments, as I dare say there is in
big corporations which have a consumer interface, about whether
the answers to questions, whether they come in question form or
in the mail, are dealt with by the line department or by the correspondent
part of the PQ unit centrally. The fashion swings backwards and
forwards. There will be a statistical section in most departments,
there is a big statistical department, say, in the Home Office,
which handles a lot of the data across the department. The Foreign
Office did not do that much by way of numbers, so it tended to
be handled by individual departments. It is just designed to get
through the volume. Obviously departments pay attention to PQs,
they want to deal with them properly. One of the things which
has also happened, which I was talking to the Secretary of State
and his Permanent Secretary about, is that you have had a downward
grade drift in terms of who signs the PQs off. It used to be the
case when I worked in the Department of Health and Social Security,
as it then was 30 years ago, that PQs had to be signed off by
a Deputy Secretary, number two in the hierarchy, to ensure that
they were accurate. What I found in both the Home Office and the
Foreign Office was that they were then being signed off by people
at Grade 7 level, principal level, and I insisted in both departments
that they had to be signed off either by Head of Department, Grade
5, Assistant Secretary or Grade 3, Director Under Secretary, the
same thing; and there was some squealing about this, but I said
to them, "I am having to deal with many more of these and
you have got to keep an eye on them, because if we fall behind
it will be worse", but it is a burden. I have been passed
a note here. We can give you this. The DfES, one of our stats
teams, which is seriously under pressure with PQs, have had 319
since the start of the session and one part of the stats team
has been unable to function normally for over a month due to the
large volume of PQs tabled recently. Treasury: a very large number
of questions about domestic management issues, many of them trivial
or frivolous, eg flushing lavatories, private office square footage,
wine cellars, flora and fauna, flag-flying, staff magazines. People
are making a decision about whether they think that is serious,
because they will get answered, but I think it is trivial, and
I do not believe, in most cases, that the Member concerned seriously
thought about whether to ask questions like that. It seems to
me that the researcher has been put up to that, probably by the
journalist of an equally trivial newspaper, just to try and get
something silly out. That is not the purpose of the system.
Q47 Mr Wilson: One very quick final
question. Do PQs get screened by press officers, communication
officers, before they go back to the Member?
Mr Straw: The practice varies
very much. There was a lot of suspicion about the DWP traffic-light
system, but the press officers are involved (a) because these
are people who are paid to be reasonably alert to what may cause
difficulty and (b) because, if it is an important issue, they
will get questions after they have been published, and that is
important.
Q48 Mr Wilson: Do they get called
in, or is it a routine screen?
Mr Straw: They may do, is the
answer. May I say this, Chairman, the Secretary of State in the
Department for Work and Pensions, John Hutton, is changing the
traffic-light system so that there is a new system, so that so-called
traffic-lights will not exist. That was not introduced in any
sense for sinister reasons, it was introduced to try and cope
with the volume of questions and to differentiate between those
which were routine and could be dealt with very easily without
having to go near the senior minister, those that were not routine
and those that had a political overtone. This is an ecumenical
gathering and it is the right of Members to ask questions, whoever
is in Government, whoever is in opposition, but, of course, there
is politics attached to this as well. That is what I was up to
28 years ago!
Q49 Chairman: But we have had a complaint
about this very department from Philip Hammond MP, who is concerned
that on two occasions answers have been press-released by the
DWP before he has actually received the answer. So he has seen
his name on the press wire before he has received the answer.
Do you not think, where a department sees value in press-releasing
their answer, that they should at least telephone or e-mail the
Member concerned to alert him?
Mr Straw: I think Mr Hutton regrets
that. It was not his idea at all, let me say. More than that,
I think the Member should have proper notice of the answer before
it is press-released so there will be reasonable certainty that
it is in the hands of the Member because the Member has asked
it. At best that is an error. I get plenty of PQs in my current
role, but they tend not to be as interesting for the press, though
the press secretary still sees them. In the Foreign Office, where
some were obviously of huge interest to the press, the press secretary
or his staff would be copied in electronically to the draft answer,
and sometimes they would say, "We need to be careful about
handling the answer once it has been issued. We need to be alert
on this." On some very big stuff, for example, there were
lots of questions on what happened at the time of the Tsunami.
There was no great politics in this, but people wanted to know,
it was very sensitive, sensitive about the people who were bereaved,
and so on, and the press officers were involved. On rendition,
to give another example, what I think was a PQ, it could have
been a ministerial statement, some years ago about a change in
policy on arms control called incorporation policy, the press
officer and my press secretary round the table, we discussed the
nature of the answer, because it was highly political and potentially
contentious.
Q50 Mr Chope: Would you deprecate
any department that held up the answers for news management reasons?
As soon as these answers have been approved by the Minister, should
they not be issued in a routine way?
Mr Straw: Occasionally, yes, is
the answer. I would sometimes say the most important thing is
to get the thing out. My long experience in politics is that,
on the whole, fancy tactics do not work. Do not sit there calculating,
"It is better if you do it on Tuesday rather than Monday"—just
clear it up. There are times, Christopher, when you need to delay.
If it is a big issue and you are not around, I had to think in
the Foreign Office, "Am I going to be here or am I going
to be halfway round the world and when this hits the press I will
be asleep or I will be the wrong side of the news cycle?"
Those are quite legitimate questions. Or in the Home Office, and
we are only talking about one in a hundred answers, "When
this comes out, should I be around the House rather than 100 miles
away visiting a prison on a Friday?" Do you see what I mean?
That seems to be legitimate, but, generally, my view is just get
them out.
Q51 Chairman: We are grateful for
your earlier statement that you believe a Member asking a question
should get proper notice of the answer.
Mr Straw: Of course.
Q52 Chairman: I hope you will use
your best endeavours to see that departments follow that?
Mr Straw: Can I tell you that
my colleagues know that I use my best endeavours.
Q53 John Hemming: Correct me if I
am wrong, but I think you accept Peter Luff's thesis that, in
part, the cause of the deterioration in the quality of answers
is an increase in the quantity of questions?
Mr Straw: Yes.
Q54 John Hemming: And that, in part,
having a lot of silly questions does not actually help the system?
Mr Straw: I do, and I am very
grateful to Peter for that. This is hard, because we do not want
this to be a partisan thing, it is about the rights of Members,
and that is why I say we have got to do this on an all-party basis,
but it is true that if you get people asking really silly questions,
like lavatories, flora and fauna and all this stuff, you debase
the currency, and then officials will start thinking, "What
is this about?" It is not schoolboy debating; it is about
the British Government.
Q55 John Hemming: Talking about improving
government, looking at an example, there were questions about
the consideration of prisoners for deportation. The problem was
that the database in the Home Office did not keep track of all
the information, so you had to look through all the files. What
had happened was that certain questions had not been answered,
giving the excuse of disproportionate cost, and what perhaps should
have happened there is a review of why the question has not been
answered and do we not have systematic problems in the system.
The question, therefore, is should we not have an appeals process
for unsatisfactory answers but potentially also reviews whether
the disproportionate costs limit is appropriate in the circumstances
or whether the answer of, "It is too expensive", is
an insufficient answer and needs more explanation, so that perhaps
you go back to the department and say, "You need to change
the systems, because your management systems are no good"?
Mr Straw: You do have a kind of
appeal system at the moment, which is called "points of order",
to the Speaker.
Q56 John Hemming: It does not work.
It may have worked under your leadership of the House, but it
was previously futile?
Mr Straw: Let me say with the
Speaker, when people raise points of order with the Speaker, when
the Speaker says he will follow it up, he does follow it up. It
is never a wise move to cross the Speaker because it will warm
up the margin and, when there is an urgent question put into your
department, he will not take your calls or he will not give you
the benefit of the doubt, he will admonish you from the Chair,
and none of these things are good if you are a minister. It is
difficult to work out how an appeal system would operate, and
I certainly would not recommend the equivalent of the FOI Tribunal.
One of the important aspects of PQs is they can range much wider
FOI requests, and so they should, because we are elected Members
of Parliament, and they have to be handled much more quickly.
It is 20 working days, as a minimum, with an FOI request, and
we do not want to get into that, and, of course, months can go
past before you get a tribunal decision. John, obviously if there
was a recommendation by the Committee for an appeal system, I
would look at it, I would not rule it out. Equally, you may want
to say something about whether there should be a tighter Standing
Order against trivial questions, like the flora and fauna or the
other nonsense that went to the Treasury, and lavatory rolls in
Downing Street! This is ridiculous. It debases the system. It
would have to be, I think, the clerks and the Speaker, or some
all-party select committee, because I do not think it should be
the Minister who says, "This is trivial."
Q57 Sir Robert Smith: You mentioned
how freedom of information has a longer time period than conventional
PQs and yet there is a perception, and the Hansard Society
in their evidence say, that Members are increasingly seeing freedom
of information as a better way of trying to get something from
a department than a PQ.
Mr Straw: It is not true, by the
way, but departments have got to be alert to the fact that they
should always provide in a PQ that which they would have provided
in an FOI request. It has to be an absolute minimum. We cannot
have a situation where members of the public or, more particularly,
journalists can get better information, even if they have to wait
for it, than Members of Parliament. That would be totally unacceptable,
and it undermines the special privilege that Members of Parliament
get along with being an elected representative, and departments
know that, but I would hope, if you look through Hansard,
you will see much more information provided by PQs. For example,
almost one of the first questions I was asked, Chairman, was is
it all right for departments just to say, "The information
is already available?" You can do that under one of the earlier
sections in the FOI Act. If it is available, just say, "It
is already available", that is it, that is how the system
works. But that is not acceptable in the majority of these cases
because one is trying to provide a service to Members of Parliament.
I think what is interesting, I do not know how many FOI requests
have been made by Members of Parliament, but certainly it only
came into force at the beginning of 2005, so I had no experience
of it in the Home Office, but in the Foreign Office I cannot think
of one FOI request which came in, not even one from Mr Norman
Baker.
Q58 Mr Wilson: The current consultation
on Freedom of Information requests also covers a proposal to "aggregate
all requests made by a person or persons who appear to be acting
in concert or pursuance of a campaign" within a certain timescale,
which is 60 days. Can you assure us that you will not be proposing
anything comparable in respect of written PQs?
Mr Straw: Yes.
Q59 Chairman: What assessment have
you made of the procedure that you introduced last year for recess
questions, and do you have any plans to make this permanent?
Mr Straw: First of all, it seemed
to be successful. People welcomed it. Yes, is the answer. I think
I have already said we are going to make it permanent. I have
been ventriloquised! We are bringing forward a motion shortly.
I think everybody else thought it was quite a good idea as well.
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