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I-Parliament?

How might digital by default make a difference?

The government has made much of ‘digital by default’. Now Parliament is getting in on the act with its new e-system for written questions. How might it make a difference?

Today, a new e-system for handling the exchange of written questions and answers between Parliament, government departments and other bodies is being launched. The outputs of the new system will help Members keep track of the questions they’ve asked and whether answers have been given, increasing the efficiency with which they can hold government to account. It should also create some small savings for government departments (the total cost to government of answering the average 60,000 written questions a year from both Houses is around £1m) and help the public better hold the government to account. Planned developments in the system will extend it to the House of Lords (in October) and include Written Ministerial Statements (in November). The biggest difference will be in the timeliness of information. At present answers to written questions are physically walked over to the House in hard copy and left in Members’ Lobby, Hansard and the Press Gallery. The new system will largely abolish this hard copy system (the old guard can still opt out if they wish) and instead provide Members with an instant email notification when their question is answered. This will arrive between 45 and 90 minutes before the answer appears on the new public web pages – to enable the Member to make use of time critical information before it becomes more widely available. What we can’t tell yet is whether this knowledge may influence departments’ decisions about when exactly to answer questions. The new system will provide each Member with a personal page listing all the questions they have asked and their answer status, enabling them easily to monitor responses, including the dreaded holding responses where a substantive answer is put off to a later date. This is an official version of the service already provided by the non-parliamentary website TheyWorkForYou.com – an illustration of how voluntary sector innovation can help drive service development in the public sector. It will enable MPs to disseminate responses immediately through social media – enhancing their interactions with constituents and other followers. The system will also help citizens hold the government to account – providing an official and more timely version of the questions database developed by TheyWorkForYou.com. Anyone will be able to search the database to find and track questions. These will be displayed together with answers and any subsequent corrections or Written Ministerial Statements made in connection with them. The quality and accessibility of the data supplied by departments may be increased because the system will support a wider range of materials to supplement answers, including colour graphs and maps. As another part of this e-reform, the Commons Table Office has changed the cut off time for answers to parlimentary questions to be published on any given day from the highly unpredictable ‘rise of the House’ to a consistent 6pm. This seemingly minor increase in predictability should make it considerably easier for departments to manage their flows of answers and for ministers to prioritise the signing off of answers. Departments will no longer inadvertently fail to answer questions when business unexpectedly collapses and the House rises early or (in the interests of keeping up their statistics on the timely answering of questions) have to rota staff to hang around late into the evening on Mondays in case a minister finally signs off a question at 10.15pm. Government departments will also be able to use the information to track who their persistent questioners are; immediately see their areas of interest (important for anticipating supplementary questions to oral questions) – and readily see all the previous answers they have given. The House has estimated that the new e-system will save nearly £800,000 a year (and a considerable number of trees) from 2015-16, primarily in printing and publishing costs. The savings to government departments in processing and distributing hard copies have not been calculated but will no doubt be welcome to hard pressed accounting officers. More important than any incremental savings made is the potential of the new system to increase the utility of written parliamentary questions as a mechanism for holding the government to account. At present the Procedure Committee periodically publishes self-reported data from each department on the timeliness of their own answers. The new system will generate these statistics automatically and the Procedure Committee will be able to publish the data more frequently if it so wishes. This will put more pressure on laggard departments to up their performance – and help MPs to hold them to account.
Legislature
House of Commons
Publisher
Institute for Government

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