Petitions and e-petitions

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Andrew Lansley (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I apologise to the House and to my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) for missing the start of his remarks. You have been so admirably brisk this afternoon, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I was caught elsewhere in the Palace when the debate began—[Interruption.] It did not happen like that in my day, but the present Leader of the House is so efficient.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne. Some time ago when I was Leader of the House, the House resolved to ask the Procedure Committee to consider this matter. I take no issue with the way it has been brought forward as there has been an excellent examination of it. The Committee has made very good recommendations that will enable us to do something for the next Parliament and beyond that will be regarded as important: enable people to interact directly and collectively with their Parliament on issues that matter to them. There is a very rich history of petitioning Parliament. If the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) were here, he would be able to explain it to us in great detail. Petitioning is at the heart of Parliament, along with voting Supply. It is one of the central missions of a Parliament and in recent years it has fallen into disuse.

I give credit to my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Sir George Young). At the start of this Parliament, the e-petition system was developed so that people had a mechanism to petition what they thought of as their Parliament. In reality, they were petitioning the Government. It was only by virtue of the Government’s reference on to the Backbench Business Committee that there was an expectation—no more than that; nothing was written formally into Standing Orders—that petitions that attracted substantial support would get formal responses from Government, which is something I introduced or, that those with more than 100,000 signatures, would be eligible for debate in this House. The way in which the Backbench Business Committee has consistently and positively responded to that has enabled people to believe that they were petitioning their Parliament, but they were not. We have debated before in this Chamber the distinctions between Government and Parliament. Those distinctions are important. It was clearly the public’s belief that they were petitioning both Government and Parliament. They were not really distinguishing between the two. They wanted the people who had Executive power to listen to them and respond. They wanted their representatives to take their issue and to hold the Government to account, or to have the opportunity to express their view. The proposals will enable that to happen in the next Parliament. I think it will rapidly become a very meaningful part of our new reformed relationship between the public and Parliament.

The Deputy Leader of the House and I visited the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament. We saw, in the Public Petitions Committee of the Scottish Parliament in particular, a lot of good practice, which we were very keen to bring back here. I know that the Procedure Committee has looked at that experience too. Of course, the scale is immensely different. In the order of magnitude, there is a greater scale of petitioning to this Parliament than to the Scottish Parliament.

In truth, as my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne made clear, very large numbers of petitions do not attract substantial support and do not raise broader issues of public policy or accountability. It will be for a Petitions Committee to examine the flow of petitions and isolate those that are important enough to be debated. What I think will become a significant part of our practice here will be the opportunity to bring petitioners before the Select Committee on Petitions to present their case. People will literally have their day in the court of Parliament. They will be able not just to present but explain their petition. As my hon. Friend made clear, through the mechanism of enabling them to tell their Member of Parliament that they have signed a petition, they will be able to update their MP on the progress of that petition. There will an opportunity for MPs, if they wish, to join in that process of examining the merits of a petition and examining how Parliament and Government are responding. I think that that will be a dramatic improvement in accountability.

We have seen during this Parliament some positive indications that the public believe that this Parliament, in the past four-and-a-half years, is more likely to debate issues of relevance. Other measures have contributed—the use of urgent questions and so on—but the petition system has been a part of that. We are seen here to be responding on issues of importance and relevance in a timely way for members of the public. This will add to that. I think the public will recognise that and use it—whether they use it will be the deciding factor.

I pay tribute to the Government Digital Service and to my former colleagues in the Leader’s Office, who have managed this system. They have demonstrated how this can be done effectively, efficiently and economically. The new system will, to a large extent, rest on that and we should certainly give them credit for that. The Government and Parliament working together is a powerful illustration of how we can bring our activities together to benefit the public.

On cost, one of the recommendations of the Wright Committee, as yet unrealised, is a critical examination of the number of Select Committees. We are resolving here to have one more Select Committee. I make no bones about that: I think it is the right thing. However, Members in the next Parliament should be prepared to examine critically—it will not be me—the structure of Select Committees and whether there are more than we need to do the job they are required to do effectively. There should be no part of Government activity that is without a Select Committee scrutinising and holding them to account. To some extent, however, we have some overlap. It will be important for the House to take an active decision at the start of the next Parliament on how many Select Committees there should be and on their future structure.

Having made that more contentious point, I would like to return to the consensus and say a final thank you to the Procedure Committee and to my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne for the efficient and effective way in which they have taken the request from this Chamber and turned into it a practical way forward for the next Parliament.