Digital Democracy Commission

Kevin Foster Excerpts

Wednesday 10th February 2016 Westminster Hall

[Meg Hillier]

The hon. Lady must be a mind reader as well as an MP, because I was just about to move on to the issue of electronic voting using MPs’ smart identity cards. We had some serious discussion about that on the commission. I will touch on the history of the idea, which might inform the hon. Lady’s thinking.

The commission’s headline recommendations 29 and 30— we had many more—were as follows. Recommendation 29 said:

“During the next session of Parliament”—

this Session of Parliament—

“the House of Commons should move to record votes using MPs’ smart identity cards but retain the tradition of walking through division lobbies.”

Recommendation 30 said:

“The House of Commons should also pilot an electronic version of the practice of ‘nodding through’ MPs who are physically unable to go through the division lobbies, which would enable MPs who are unwell, or have childcare responsibilities, or a disability, to vote away from the chamber.”

This is not the first time that electronic voting has been discussed here; we may be slow, but we sometimes come back to things. In 1998, the Select Committee on the Modernisation of the House of Commons issued a consultation paper to Members of the House at the time on voting methods. Just over half of MPs—53%—preferred the current system, with 70% finding it acceptable, although there were suggestions that voting could be made quicker by the use of smart cards, fingerprint readers or even infrared handsets.

The reason that the commission did not push hard for remote voting in the end was a strong concern from Members about losing the opportunity to speak informally with Ministers in the Lobby and to have contact with other Members; the Lobby is dubbed the Lobby for a reason.

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

I am interested to hear the points that the hon. Lady is making. While it is important for people to be physically present in the Chamber or in Parliament to vote, does she agree that a key part of having an electronic method of recording votes is that people could quickly find out how their MP voted? We would then not have situations such as the one we had yesterday, when an hon. Member asked the Deputy Speaker in a point of order how three members of the Cabinet had voted. Of course, the Deputy Speaker could give no answer.

[Meg Hillier]

Absolutely. The problems with the current system will be evident for many people. I have talked closely with the Clerks of the House about how they record votes. For those who are not initiated, once Members have been through the Lobby, we are crossed off a list with a black marker pen. That piece of paper is then taken by parliamentary staff and reconciled. It not only takes us about 15 minutes in total to walk through the Lobby; it is a considerable length of time—some hours—before the vote is published digitally.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Deputy Leader of the House of Commons (Dr Thérèse Coffey)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Stringer, and to contribute to the debate secured by the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier). She is a member of the Speaker’s Commission and has spoken with passion about its work and her views. I thank her for the update on the progress made, including that reported at a meeting of the commission earlier this week.

The commission outlined five key targets, but as the hon. Lady has already stated those, I will not repeat them. There are further recommendations in the report, many of which are for the House to consider and debate. To some extent, a large part of that should be done, in my view, via the Procedure Committee. I will try to highlight key areas where, in particular, the Government can contribute to that debate.

Promoting public awareness of the role of Parliament and of Members of Parliament, and increasing public participation and engagement, are both worthy aims. Much has been achieved, particularly in recent years, as a result of the efforts of many hon. Members and our dedicated House staff—the service and the Clerks—and undoubtedly, that engagement will continue to increase.

The attempts to engage the public in different formats are very valid, as there are several recognised ways of learning and engagement, and people will have a natural tendency towards one or two. Traditionally, people have always had the written word, in the form of Hansard, legislation and business papers, accompanied by the occasional visit to Parliament to see how it works in practice, elements of which are open to everyone in this country. Aural transmission through radio and the screening of proceedings has been a step change. Further elements such as videos explaining Select Committee reports and the use of social media have continued to reach different audiences and interact with people in different ways. They are to be welcomed.

I will try to address the points raised by the hon. Lady and by other hon. Members during the debate. Turning to some of the commission’s recommendations, particularly focusing on the targets, the House service continues its work on engagement and outreach, guided by its strategy—I believe that was praised at the commission the other day—although I think it has found the feedback from the commission helpful, in that it was not necessarily achieving all that it thought it had and had a higher bar to reach. That said, I congratulate those involved in some of the improvements. Improvements to the digital service for both internal and external users are a key priority but there is still a considerable way to go.

The Commission made some useful recommendations about engaging the public. Some aim to improve understanding of Parliament and the work of MPs— for example, simplifying language, clarifying online publications and improving the website, including for people with disabilities or sensory impairments. Much has been achieved in these areas already, but I am sure that there is further to go. Making it easier for people to track specific areas of interest to them is one example of how we could improve interaction. I think some MPs are not aware of some innovations that would be useful to them. I am an evangelist for the apps for tablets and smartphones that have been created and help both MPs and the public in their daily work and to access documents that can be read alongside debates.

The public inquiries team has reviewed and rewritten every Commons glossary entry on the Parliament site and about 400,000 users access this. Content now focuses on explaining in clear, plain English the word, phrase or acronym, and includes links to further learning and business content to extend users’ knowledge. Previously, content had been overly long and often unclear.

A recommendation that cuts through to the legislative process is the commission’s suggestion for a new procedure for amending Bills so that amendments are written in plain English. In my view, this is where the role of explanatory notes comes in. We saw in the last Parliament, and see it more and more now, that Members are encouraged to add explanatory notes to the amendments they table.

The Government are committed to ensuring that the legislation they put before Parliament is of a high standard, but I know we can always do better. It is vital that Parliament has the necessary means by which to perform its scrutiny. Further recommendations to change that process further are for the House to decide, but I suggest to the hon. Lady that we are creating law, so to some extent, the clarity and the explanation come from the debate on Second Reading and the examination in Committee, where the Minister and the Opposition—any Member in fact—can to talk to amendments. We could do more and, in my role on the Parliamentary Business and Legislation Committee, I often push for further detail on the explanatory notes when I do not think they are clear or we need to be more explicit in stating the intention of amendments and clauses.

One recommendation is to improve the search engine. There are other search engines, but many hon. Members use Google to find information on the external parliamentary website. That is a shocker and apparently work is being done on it, but perhaps we should just leave it to the market. If Google and other search engines have already cracked the issue, we may want to use the House’s financial resources for other matters.

[Kevin Foster]

The Minister is rightly talking about how better to explain legislation, but sometimes we need to explain better to the viewer what is going on. For example, the most common question I am asked on school visits is why MPs are standing up and sitting down.

[Dr Coffey]

That is an interesting point, and new Members often ask that question when they arrive. To some extent, the induction process helps with that. There are matters not covered by the commission that many Members would like to see changed but—dare I say it?—some of the more traditional people, and I include the Speaker in certain elements of this, are resistant to that change. Examples include speaking lists and understanding how to participate in a debate. Perhaps we can do more on the video front and if we stop trying to improve our own search engine, it could free up a bit of cash to do that.

On crowd sourcing questions, the party leader of the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch is doing that for PMQs, which is an interesting experiment. I will leave it to hon. Members to draw their own conclusions on whether it is successful, but I am sure it is good for the Labour party’s communications database. It is an interesting approach and some Select Committees have considered it as part of their reviews. I seem to remember the use of #AskGove to generate questions for a Select Committee. It is for Members to decide how best to use that and to manage expectation without just using it as a gimmick.