Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
80-99)
MR DAVID
DREW MP, MR
OLIVER HEALD
MP AND MR
DAVID LAWS
MP
28 MARCH 2007
Q80 Mr Chope: Many questions ask
for information which is available, although one does not always
know that at the time the person asks the question. Do you think
we could reduce the number of questions if we made it a pre-condition
of asking a question that it could not be a question on something
where the information was already publicly available? If so, do
you think that information should be checked out with the Library
beforehand by the Member concerned, or do you think it should
be for the Clerk's Department, no doubt with extra resources,
to try to organise that?
Mr Heald: I think it is important
to bear in mind that, if you ask a question, often the answer
does come back, "Oh, this is in the public domain" and
when you look at when it went into the public domain you discover
it was that morning. It is often the case that your question prompts
the item to be published by the Government and that is, of course,
a good thing. Certainly I use the Library a lot, but sometimes
you can ask a question just not realising the information is in
the public domain.
Mr Drew: The Library refer you
to written answers, perhaps. Often the stuff you get back is a
written answer that would crystallise what you would have asked
but in a slightly different form.
Mr Heald: There are all sorts
of faults in the system which I think are quite hard to remedy.
I think I prefer to leave it as a tool which is available and
not to restrict it, rather than trying to button it down too much.
All sorts of things happen. Often you are asking the same question
that some other Member is asking at the same time and when you
get your answer there are four or five different questions grouped.
But I do not think that is a bad thing. Quite often you can pick
up on other Members' questions. Quite often you do not realise
something is in the public domain but the written question prompts
the fact that it is and a lot of people become aware of this who
had not realised. I think the current system is quite good.
Q81 Chairman: Could I ask both Oliver
and David Laws, as you are spokesmen for your party: is it not
sometimes the case, though, even if the information is on a website,
that there is a value in having the minister validate that information
by giving a written answer where he supports a particular answer.
Even if the information is readily available, do you see a value
in still being able to ask the question to have the minister place
it on record that he accepts that information is the answer to
the question?
Mr Heald: Yes, that is absolutely
right. I remember recently that there was a pilot scheme in one
of the Exeter courts and I asked a question about it. The minister
put something on the record which was confirming other information
that was available, but it was actually a very useful answer because
it explained how the whole thing fitted together.
Mr Laws: It is an interesting
question because, at the moment, government departments are not
consistent in the way in which they apply the rule that they do
not have to produce lots of tables if they are in the public domain.
The Treasury are most assiduous in saying this is available somewhere
else, even if it is not. On one occasion, on a PQ here, they said
that what I was after was available. When I discovered how—you
basically had to take three or four separate tables from different
government sources, deflate various things by various GDP deflators
and multiply them by all sorts of other estimates—you would
have needed a doctorate in economics to come up with it. That
is not my definition of publicly available. And, of course, we
had this ludicrous thing on child benefit, where publicly available
meant that there was a Child Poverty Action Group website on which
the information could be found, and as far as the Treasury was
concerned they referred me to that. The Department for Work and
Pensions seems to be far more willing to produce information which,
if I had asked the Library or researchers to do quite a lot of
work, maybe would have existed somewhere. The problem with that
is that there are occasions when you want it on the record, because
it may be semi official and you want it official, but also you
do not know whether the series has been updated. I had a PQ back
yesterday from the Economics Secretary asking about the cost of
tax relief on pensions. The answer simply referred me back to
a figure that was available in the Budget Report. My question
asked for an estimate for a year beyond the year that was available
in the Budget document and I had no way of knowing whether there
was a Treasury estimate for the cost in that year. If there is—and
I think there might be—it has not been given to me because
the Treasury has simply referred me back to the publicly available
information. I do fear that if we use that as a route to try to
cut out some of the questions where we might be able to get the
information from elsewhere, then it would reinforce the powers
of some departments who want to close down information sources
for their own more political reasons. It would reinforce their
power and make our job much more difficult.
Q82 Chairman: David Drew, would you
like to add anything?
Mr Drew: I think it is the way
and it should be the way that ministers actually read their written
answers. It is a good way of focusing their attention on an issue
about which you might subsequently be able to talk to them informally.
Let us take the FCO, for example: you can pick out a particular
event, maybe some far distant event, and begin to focus with them
on why they should be paying some attention to that, and it then
gets picked up in adjournment debates and obviously in main debates
in the House. But they do read them, or they should do, and if
they do not read them then they are making a mistake.
Q83 Mr Chope: I would like to ask
you about the 30-year rule. I do not know if you have this in
your experience of asking questions: you can do so covering any
period up to 30 years ago but quite often departments do not have
information going back that far. Do you think there is any case
for reviewing that 30-year rule in relation to questions?
Mr Heald: I do not have any strong
thoughts on that. It obviously is the case that it is quite a
long period in terms of government records, but of course it also
ties in with some of the rules about Cabinet documents and so
it probably is quite sensible to have it at 30 years. In one sense
it is a figure totally plucked from the air, but it is the figure
we have plucked. It is the one that applies to Cabinet documents
and so on and I think it is probably as good as any other. I have
not really thought it through.
Mr Laws: I have not found it a
huge problem getting at things that I have wanted to get at. Sometimes
the information clearly is available earlier and you would have
liked to get it but you are not allowed to table for it. I suppose
there would be a possibility that you could be allowed to table
for something which, if it was available very easily, might be
supplied, but I guess that the Table Office and others would be
worried about trying to police that. All I can say is that it
has not been an enormous problem.
Mr Drew: I cannot find any reason
why it should be changed but I find some of the weakest answers
come when you are seeking historical information. When you want
to do comparisons, they very often argue that this can only be
supplied at inappropriate cost, so they either kill it stone dead
or they give you a much shorter period of time, over which the
comparisons that you were seeking are pretty meaningless.
Q84 Mr Chope: Do you think frontbench
people should have their questions dealt with on a separate basis,
with perhaps a different priority system, with more latitude in
relation to the use of researchers and signing them off or perhaps
even identifying/flagging the question as being asked in the capacity
as a shadow minister rather than as an ordinary Member? Asking
that last part of the question, I have in mind a colleague who
was the Shadow Minister for Wales. In the general election, he
was taken to task by his political opponents for having asked
more questions about Wales than about his constituency, which
was of course wholly unfair, but this was the way in which it
was exploited and it was impossible for him to demonstrate that
he was the shadow minister. Do you think there should be any differentiation
between shadow ministers or frontbench spokesmen and the rest
of us?
Mr Heald: I do not. I think we
have all seen examples of backbenchers who have taken issues and
really pursued them vigorously and put matters into the public
domain which would probably never have come to light. There are
notable examples. Just recently, Grant Shapps, the Member for
Welwyn Hatfield, did a great amount of work looking at temporary
workers and how they were being used in filling gaps in the Civil
Service. He has pursued it tenaciously and we discovered that
it is a rather important point he has uncovered. So I would not
want to see any restrictions on backbenchers. I personally do
not think it is a bad thing that we are seeing a big increase
in the number of written parliamentary questions. Last year Jack
Straw said it was a sign of healthy scrutiny. Obviously I would
like all colleagues to ask sensible questions but I would not
want to see this restricted too much. The other point is that
I do think the Government should have a duty to assist, as they
do with Freedom of Information, and stop a lot of these foolish
answers which are costing the country money. If they make us ask
10 questions instead of one, they are costing us all whatever
they say a parliamentary question costs.
Mr Laws: I am very worried by
the idea that departments should flag up particularly risky MPs
or spokesmen and deal with their answers in a different way. We
received e-mails from a Subject Access Request when we were putting
lots of tax credit parliamentary questions into the Treasury and
on 12 June 2006 there is a reference in an email: "As you
are aware, the Paymaster General has asked the Chairman of HMRC
to clear all the Laws' easement PQs and the Chairman now wants
to clear all the PQs to Laws for the time being personally before
they go to the Paymaster General." I do not like that amount
of interference. You will guess that I have asked questions about
why and how many that has been done to and they have all been
blocked. On the DWP, where we have this traffic light system,
it was being implied to us by the official who phoned us from
a call box, very worried about this system, that if there was
an embarrassing question asked by, say, Philip Hammond for the
Tories or myself then there would be a traffic light system that
would pick this up and ministers and advisers would look at the
question. The official line is that they would look at the question
so that, when the information was released, they were aware of
it and the Press Office would be able to rebut any story or distortion
or whatever line was put out about it. I think that is quite fair.
If I were the minister, I should most definitely want to know
what was going out in my name, when and what the underlying government
position was on it. But my concern is whether that traffic light
system, by flagging up embarrassing answers, means that they get
amended by special adviser interference or by pressure on civil
servants to deny information in a way that other parts of the
Subject Access Request suggested, and whether there is therefore
a pressure to distort the answer or limit the information. I do
not know whether you will have a chance as a Committee to find
out how these traffic light systems are working and to find out
whether any of the answers are being amended as a consequence
of the process, but that I would worry about that a lot, and that
is what we were initially told. If the traffic light system is
a way of flagging up dangerous MPs and changing answers, it would
be very dangerous; if it is just a way of making sure ministers
are aware of sensitive information when it is released, then that
is certainly what I would want if I were in their shoes.
Mr Drew: I think it is very dangerous.
We have those in the Government and they are a very clear group,
but once you start having segregation between opposition spokespeople
and a category of question they can ask, and then you have backbench
MPs to the Government and backbench MPs of the Opposition, then
you will have so many different systems. At the end of the day,
it is not up to civil servants to decide how they answer, who
they answer and the way in which they answer. Clearly you get
answers that are not good enough. If a minister has told a civil
servant to write a bland answer, that says something about the
Minister; but if the civil servant decides off their own bat that
this is a troublesome MP and they are going to give as little
information as possible then that civil servant should be dealt
with by the Minister. That is not the way this should be working.
Q85 Mr Chope: Traditionally some
departments have said to opposition spokesmen, "You go and
talk to the relevant official or the agency chief executive and
sort this out because that is going to be able to cut through
the need for a lot of questions." Do you find that sort of
meeting is still being volunteered or do you think that, because
of the restrictions on that sort of meeting, more questions are
being asked as a result?
Mr Heald: I have a good relationship
with departments. For example, recently I wanted to talk about
the Transformational Government White Paper and had a meeting
with Gus O'Donnell and we went through a range of issues for an
hour. I do not think I could really complain about that. But,
of course, there are areas where it is not that sort of issue,
where you do seem to find it quite hard to get the information
that you want.
Mr Laws: This has been offered
to us as well by the DWP. They, on the whole, are quite cooperative
as a department. They are quite open, as far as one can establish,
or were quite open, in their parliamentary questions. When we
tabled quite a lot of questions on things like the Child Support
Agency, both the ministers and officials said to us, "For
God's sake, if we can help, tell us and we will not have to answer
all your wretched PQs." The problem is that works if you
are asking for fairly bog standard information that they are quite
happy to give you. However, if you want to table a question on
how many bonus payments there were to CSA staff in a particular
year where they were making a real mess of the system, then not
only might you not get the information, it would not be published,
it would not have an official status, but also I would then be
nervous and uncomfortable with a relationship where I was expecting
them to give me information that I am using as an opposition spokesman
to embarrass the Government. Unless they did that in a formalised
way which also went to the minister, I think they would very quickly
end up in a real old mess as well and either would bring the shutters
down or, potentially, you would leave them in a very embarrassing
position with the minister due to their na-£vety. That underlies
my nervousness about engaging in that type of relationship, which
would be either sterile from my perspective or extremely embarrassing
and difficult from their perspective.
Mr Heald: Of course one of the
things which is important is to have the information in the public
domain so that you can hold the Government to account publicly.
Meetings to have a good discussion about background and the general
thrust of the Government's approach to something is a useful thing
to do, but it is not really a substitute for your written parliamentary
question which gets the answer on the record, where you can then
have some oral questions and in a debate you can really get the
minister answering the point.
Q86 Chairman: This Committee, in
2002, recommended that we had a quota on Named Day Questions which
was subsequently implemented at five a day. The reason for that
was to reduce the number of holding answers being given. Do you
think that has been a success? Has it largely achieved what it
was set out to do? Are you happy with that remaining in force
or would you wish to go back to the situation before the quota?
David Laws and Oliver, do you, as frontbench spokesmen, feel you
should have a higher quote on Named Day Questions?
Mr Laws: No. I would be very nervous
about treating these differently because there are some very active
non party spokesmen who are very effective in using PQs and I
do not think it would be very popular to do that. I confess that
when we had them at the open Named Day thing, I was in the habit
of automatically ticking that on the basis that I wanted my answer
as quickly as possible, but since the change has come about it
has not made any measurable difference to the speed at which the
questions are answered and so it seems to have been quite successful.
Mr Heald: I was never a great
one for using Named Days because I felt that we tended not to
get much out of it. If they wanted to answer it, they did; if
they did not, they just gave you a holding reply. I think five
is fine. I do not see it as a problem.
Mr Drew: I have no problem with
it as it is working. The only interesting thing would be how many
questions are answered on the Named Day. I do not know if you
have done any research to find out how many questions subsequently
have been further delayed. There may be good reasons why there
is no answer.
Q87 Chairman: The Table Office was
mentioned earlier, really in passing, that you felt it should
be there to be helpful to the Member and not as a gate which is
trying to filter things on behalf of ministers. Do you have any
other comment or criticism about how the Table Office operates?
Are you generally happy with their system?
Mr Heald: I would say that I have
had a lot of help over the years from the clerks there. Many a
time they have found a way through for me, when I was slightly
in doubt as to how to approach a particular topic, so I would
pay a great tribute to them. But from discussions one has when
one is in there, I do think they have become concerned at the
volume of questions and their ability to cope with it. I know
on occasions I have had the comment that it is very helpful to
put a smallish number down each day rather than a great lump of
questions and so on, and I do get the impression that they feel
under a bit of pressure of numbers and maybe that has slightly
affected their attitude. I do get the feeling that it is a bit
more restrictive than it used to be. That may just be totally
unfair but I do feel it is. I would like to see them geared up
so that they can allow this very healthy thing for our democracy,
this rise in questions, so that they can cope with it.
Mr Laws: They have always been,
it seems to me, pretty rigorous and sometimes a bit pedantic.
If I am in the habit of asking lots of PQs, I tend to get lots
of cards, which I allow to build up for a couple of weeks, and
then I go to see them for 10 minutes and usually get about 80
or 90% of them through. Occasionally they can be a little bit
difficult about questions which they could tweak if they wanted
to or they could allow through, and I worry a bit that MPs who
do not table as much or who have just arrived may end up giving
up, when, with a slight tweak of words, they could be in order.
However, a few years ago I saw some of the questions that go through
in the European Union Parliament, which are very loose, open-ended
and unclear. If I had to choose between having that and our system,
where what you are asking for has to be very clear, it has to
be something for which the Government is accountable, the information
has to be available, there has to be some basis for it—which
does serve to filter out some sort of silly questions or questions
that might be unclear—I would much rather have our system
than the EU system but I think they could be just a little bit
less pedantic occasionally.
Q88 Chairman: Thank you. David Drew,
would you like to add to that?
Mr Drew: They are generally very
helpful and try to get the questions through. The only area I
have some concern with is this notion of what the Government is
responsible for. The one I tend to fall down on is, if you have
an interesting report of which you think it is particularly relevant
for a department to have some knowledge, you are not allowed to
ask the question: "Has the Government seen this report and
does it have a view on what the report is saying?" because
if it is not a Government report, the Government does not have
a view. I think that is quite restrictive. Even to the extent
that you have a non answer saying "No, we have not seen this
report" that says something. That is the area I feel is quite
restrictive. Also, devolution has some interesting imperfections.
Q89 Mr Chope: At the moment, all
written questions are dealt with on the day of their receipt,
regardless of the number received or the time of day. One way
of coping with this very large number currently being tabled might
be to allow the Table Office to hold over all new written questions
which arrive late in the day until the next day. How would you
respond to such a proposal?
Mr Heald: Personally, I would
not be in favour of it. I think the Table Office should be geared
up to meet the needs of Members because this is such a vital tool.
It is one of these things where the House just needs to get focused.
Our job is to hold the Government to account. This is a key way
of doing it. If we need to have a few more clerks, let us have
them, but let us not give up on something as important as this.
Mr Laws: I am conscious that,
particularly as an opposition spokesman, you can occasionally
have periods where you do not have loads of PQs and then suddenly
you want to put in a lot on some issue. You set to work, or your
researcher goes on to produce a lot, and it is quite possible
that you might turn up at the Table Office rather late in the
day and lob in 50 or 100 questions. It is not totally unknown
for that to happen. Given that now the time sensitivity of dealing
with these is slightly less and there are less Named Day Questions,
it is not usually vital to me that they should be in that particular
day rather than the next morning. If there was a cut-off that
was decided upon at nine o'clock or eight o'clock, it would not
be the end of the world to me, but, like Oliver, I would not want
the system to be designed too much around administrative convenience
rather than accountability to the Government. If there were some
slightly earlier deadline, it would not undermine our ability
to hold the Government to account.
Q90 Mr Chope: An hour? A couple of
hours?
Mr Laws: Yes, an hour or two would
leave me very relaxed, particularly if it were 10 o'clock/10.30
finishes, and maybe slightly less if it were seven/7.30.
Mr Drew: I have no problem with
cut-offs because I think that makes a lot of sense. The most important
thing is that the Member has faith that if an answer is either
going through or not going through it is being dealt with properly
by the clerks. I do not want to think in terms of the clerks being
so overwhelmed that they would let daft questions get through,
because that reflects obviously on the Member as well as the system.
It is important they do their job properly. If there is something
wrong with it, I would rather they had the time to think carefully
about what they want to say to the Member rather than it being
just submitted because it comes in a hoard of other questions.
Chairman: We have been going an hour.
I am going to try to finish this session by five o'clock, if it
is all right for you to hang on a little bit longer.
Q91 Ms Barlow: We have talked about
the demands of the Civil Service by the big increase in the number
of written questions. Would you accept that the increase in the
number of written questions into the Civil Service would lead
to a reduction in the quality of the answers?
Mr Heald: No, I do not think it
should. The Government really has to understand that we are living
in a much more open democracy, where MPs are more vigorous than
perhaps they once were. If that is the case, just as they have
had to come to terms with the 24-hour media by having a lot more
press officers, they ought to come to terms with the fact that
they are being vigorously held to account by having the requisite
number of civil servants to do the job properly.
Q92 Ms Barlow: Would you support
an increase in the number of civil servants to deal with this?
Mr Heald: I was suggesting there
is a duty to assist. Obviously I have not seen their Precedent
Book on how parliamentary questions are to be answered, which
is a Cabinet Office document, and I do not know if the Committee
will get to see it, but that would be very interesting reading.
If they were very much on the basis of, "Look, we have to
give the information, as much as we can" and they did not
have these constant blocking mechanisms, it would free up the
system. They would have more time to find the answers if they
spent a bit less time prevaricating. Really it is what Jack Straw
said when he gave evidence to you: if you do not answer the question,
you get a lot more questions. That is true, so one answer might
be to answer the question in the first place.
Mr Laws: I agree with that. Issues
of quality in terms of the response are far more for me about
willingness to respond than they are about time pressures. Those
departments that may end up with a lot of questions may end up
also being the ones which are wilfully trying not to answer them.
In the cases I gave, in particular, on tax credits they have ended
up with hundreds and hundreds more questions because we have not
been willing to be put off by the original blocking answers. I
think that can make a big difference. I know this is not answering
your question—which is a danger, given the subject!—but
could I say something maybe at the end of this question, 30 seconds
about one issue which I do think is important, about the FOI process
for challenging non answers and whether that is a problem or not?
Q93 Ms Barlow: I do have a couple
of supplementaries and I would like to hear from Mr Drew. We only
have 10 minutes more.
Mr Drew: I think it is a very
important skill for the civil servants and also non civil servants,
because obviously some questions are answered by executive agencies
where they are technically not civil servants. You know that because
sometimes these people ring you up and say, "What are you
trying to get at in this question?" I think that is something
this Government, to be fair, has been very good at. There has
been much more open access to the people who hold that knowledge
and I congratulate them for that. It is just something that civil
servants have to do: they should be trained to do it; they should
do it as well as they possibly can; and they should not have the
view that they are there to block the information.
Chairman: Could we leave the FOI point
until John Hemming has asked a couple of questions, because he
wants to talk about what is contained in answers.
Q94 Ms Barlow: You have mentioned
some very specific instances of very serious questions which you
feel did not get serious answers. But another point made by Jack
Straw, which is a counterbalance to that and by no means detracts
from what you were saying, is that if you get people asking really
silly questions about lavatories or flora and fauna you debase
the currency, and officials start thinking, "What's this
about? It's not schoolboy debate; it's about the British Government."
In other words, do you accept that in some cases the quality of
the answer may be a reflection of the quality of the question?
Mr Heald: I do not think it is
for ministers to judge that. Let me give you an example. I asked
a lot of questions about John Prescott and one of them was about
the replacing of a sign which said "Office of the Deputy
Prime Minister": it was changed to "Deputy Prime Minister's
Office" and it cost £640. I am sure John Prescott thought
that was an absolutely disgraceful, insulting question that should
never have been asked, but, from my point of view, it illustrated
a waste of money on a department that does not really involve
a job. It is a matter of political debate. Certainly in terms
of the public and the media that highlighted an important issue.
It is quite hard and it is very much in the eye of the beholder
as to what is a ridiculous question and what is not.
Mr Laws: I think there are some
silly questions but it is terribly difficult to know how to stop
them without closing down access to information which might be
important for the public to have. We all know that the parliamentary
answers that are easiest for the press to grab and turn into a
simple headline tend to be to do with expenditure of sometimes
quite small amounts of public money but on things that sound terribly
wasteful and so there is quite an incentive for lots of MPs to
table those types of questions. The problem is that, whilst some
of them might be and might seem totally trivial, others might
be quite important questions about the waste of public funds.
I do not know how, without self-policing, we can really strike
the right balance without denying access to things for which the
Government wants to cover up the boundaries.
Mr Drew: I think silly questions
reflect as badly on the questioner as they do on whoever answers
the question. We have all seen press copy where someone is asking
for some ridiculously small sum of money to be exposed and then
the press find out what it cost to find out that answer. So I
do not think it is terribly clever and, again, Members may wish
to learn from that.
Q95 Ms Barlow: I would like to go
back to something you said earlier, which was that ministers have
a duty to look at written answers. This was also brought up by
Jack Straw. He wrote to us after giving his evidence to this Committee
that "It is of fundamental importance that . . . Ministers
consider draft answers and devote a great deal of attention to
them. . . . as the number of questions increase, the amount of
time Ministers devote to them must therefore also increase in
order to maintain an acceptable quality. Because Ministers must
ensure they consider each answer fully, there is also an increased
risk that answers may be delayed due to the sheer volume of questions
put to them." Would you agree with Jack Straw that ministerial
involvement in the answers is fundamental to the parliamentary
question system?
Mr Heald: Yes, I think it is very
important. I think ministers need to give enough time to do it.
I remember, when I was a junior minister, I was doing pensions
and benefit fraud and we used to get a lot of questions. It really
was quite busy and you just had to set aside the time to answer
those questions. I think ministers should be prepared to do that.
I know it is time consuming but it is important.
Q96 Ms Barlow: Would you agree, then,
that the increased number of questions would inevitably lead to
reduced ministerial involvement. There is only a certain number
of ministers and a certain amount of time.
Mr Heald: I do not think that
is the way it should happen. I have noticed quite a lot of ministers
now do not sign their own letters. Quite a lot of letters now
responding to Members of Parliament are not signed by a minister
at all—you know, it is not even the minister's letter. I
think all that is very bad and that the House should deplore that.
I think ministers should treat MPs' correspondence and questions
very seriously indeed, make the time for it and not expect to
be able to treat MPs in a disrespectful way.
Mr Drew: For any minister who
does not read those answers, there will come a time when they
will pay for that. In a debate, somebody will read back an answer
that a minister has given which they have completely contradicted
in a subsequent debate and it will look not terribly clever.
Chairman: Again, I think this is an example
of a change of culture.
Q97 John Hemming: Perhaps the key
question is how you make the ministers answer the questions properly.
I tried judicial review; I tried going to the Information Commissioner
saying, "Can you have a fast-track scheme for MPs?"
and they said no. One other option is to have an appeals process
in Parliament, perhaps to have a committee which goes through
them; the point being to make sure the initial question is answered
correctly, because they know it will be a real trouble if the
minister is called to give evidence on why they did not answer
the question. What are your views on that?
Mr Heald: Personally, I would
not be keen on that. If you look at what has happened with FOI,
a lot of those have gone on appeal and by the time it gets to
the point where the Information Commissioner is going to be dealing
with it the point has been lost. In fact a lot of the appeals
are abandoned. I think it would be another way in which ministers
could prevaricate by not answering the question properly, knowing
it is going to appeal, it takes ages and we end up not knowing.
Personally, if they do not reply, I ask another question and another
question and I do pursue it. That may be one of the reasons why
we have more questions. If you, as a Committee, were to take a
strong line that ministers should have a duty to assist Members
in answering these questions, I think that would be very helpful.
Mr Laws: I am quite worried about
the existing system. If you do not get an answer, you table a
couple of further parliamentary questions, and you are likely,
if it is the Treasury or a rogue department or perhaps most departments
and they do not want to answer, to be blocked. So you put in an
FOI request, and that is almost always blocked the first time,
and then you have to go through an appeal. All of this takes a
long time. It is designed to wear you down. FOI means that they
have to give information that is available, but they are not required
to do any work that might create a data series that is not already
there, so it is not quite policing exactly what a parliamentary
question is asking for. I have an example here where I have got
to the end of this appeal route on a matter where I am only asking
them to give me information on tax credit payments against Budget
profiles—so how much they are paying out in benefits, versus
the Budget figures. This is a series that is already published
internally to the department. Having finally got through to the
end of the process, they have given me some information but denied
the rest on the basis that "revealing some of their forecasts
could generate false assumptions about the economy and compromise
their ability to run the economy". That is utterly ludicrous.
I have had to resort to using the Public Administration Select
Committee to try occasionally to police ministers' unwillingness
to release information which is clearly there. Tony Wright, who
has taken this up with ministers, has then quite frequently embarrassed
them into providing very quickly, by return, the answers that
I was seeking. The existing system is not working for me. It takes
too long. It relies upon wearing you down. It can take four/five/six
months to get through. By that time, maybe the data you are seeking
has been published anyway, the issue has gone away. It is not
easy, for reasons that are obvious to you, to produce a magical
alternative, but I am pretty sure that the existing system is
failing and I would prefer an appeal route that did not take us
through a very long, prolonged FOI process.
Mr Drew: I do not think an appeal
route would work. I think it is up to the individual Member to
pursue it through the means that are available to them, which
is at least to get the Speaker involved.
Q98 John Hemming: And ask it again.
Mr Drew: And the question must
be necessarily answered. You have business questions where you
can at least get Jack Straw to have to respond to it and subsequently
go for an adjournment debate. That will put the minister under
pressure, because you can then use that period of time. It is
more difficult obviously with official spokespeople, but they
come in on the back of another Member's dissatisfaction, and that
is what we should be doing as MPs.
Mr Laws: I think you could shorten
the FOI process so that you do not need to make the second appeal,
because that is where you really get bogged down. If you gave
them a chance, with some appeal route or FOI, to produce the answer,
and then after that you could go to an independent policeman of
some type, I think it would be a much better system. But the double
FOI request I think is a real killer.
Mr Heald: One of the things I
find quite odd is that you can get an answer on 15 January this
year saying there are 369 magistrates' courts in the country,
but by 30 January you can get an answer saying there are 344—quite
a substantial fall. Often you have to ask quite regularly to get
at what is happening. We had some information that the number
of magistrates' courts had been cut back and we wanted to follow
it up. We were told there were 369, the same number as before,
and yet two weeks later it had fallen by over 20.
John Hemming: Everyone is saying the
system is broken, it is not working properly. The question therefore
is how you go about it. Everyone has responded on that specific
point. People have said that you get more information through
the Freedom of Information at times than by parliamentary questions.
In terms of the other questions, there has been a deterioration
in the answers to questions. That deals with all three questions.
Chairman: Thank you. The final question
is for Robert Smith.
Q99 Sir Robert Smith: We have touched
on people signing books of questions and so on, but there is circumstantial
evidence that some Members seem to have given their passwords
for their parliamentary accounts to their researchers and that
possibly e-tabling has made even easier for researchers to go
straight to the tabling without using the Member. Do you think
that is going on?
Mr Laws: I am not aware of it.
I do not know my password so I have not given it out to anybody.
I cannot speak for others.
Mr Drew: I have tried it and it
did not work for me, so I thought I had better have another go
and do it more successfully. Any Member who does that is mad.
They will be caught out sometime; it will go wrong. Some researcher
will put in a bizarre question that the press will pick up and
they will be slain alive.
Mr Heald: I think it is important
to write your own questions, to take responsibility for them.
Equally, I think ministers do need to take responsibility for
the answers they give.
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