Information Committee: Annual Report 2010-11

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2012 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to debate the report and to make a few points on it. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, for an excellent introduction, despite the rather rude interruption which tried to take us completely off the point that we were on. In future, if some Peers are going to make speeches in the middle of a debate, perhaps they will have the courtesy to stay until the end and not interrupt people at the start. This is a new tradition which has arisen with people who have come here and seem to think they have the right to do it and not to debate matters in a proper way. This reiterates the point of the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, that we are having trouble getting people to understand the conventions of a self-regulating House, where you are not told what to do by a Speaker and you do not have a headmaster any more.

Leaving that point aside for the moment—I shall take it up elsewhere—I found the Information Committee report interesting and hugely encouraging. Like everyone else, I shall start by talking about the tablet trials, which is a wonderful move in the right direction. There are lots of questions about it and we received a bit of flak in the press the other day, which was very unfair. I have found that it has enabled me to work more efficiently and has allowed me to find papers when I have not got them. I remember going to a meeting where we were discussing the Protection of Freedoms Bill and some aspects of RIPA and I had thought we were going to be discussing something slightly different. I turned up with my tablet and everyone else had about a foot of paper in front of them. When I realised what we were discussing, it did not take me long to get the information up on the iPad because I know my way around the parliamentary site—a point I shall take up later—and I was able to find things quicker than the other people were able to by desperately fumbling through their index tabs. In particular, when we went on to a point they did not expect, I was able to search the PDF for a different Bill, to which it referred back, find the information and produce some intelligent comments. With the annotation facilities that we have for the PDFs in GoodReader, I was able to find information more quickly because I had indexed it already when we were debating the Bill. That is hugely valuable and useful and it is there, sitting with me, all the time. So, called into a meeting, I can react immediately. In the case that I mentioned, I think that it rather astonished them. They thought that I would know nothing because, apparently, I had no supporting material, but actually I had an entire library at my fingertips. That is the point, and it is one that has been brought up by other speakers.

The other advantage is the flexibility afforded when speaking, which the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, brought up. He would have printed his speech out and probably have felt constrained to stick to what he had written. He would have discovered that it was no longer as relevant as it was, but instead he was able to adapt it in a sensible and flexible way and produce a very interesting speech—one that, I hate to suggest, was probably more useful than the original speech because that one had been pre-empted. That is a huge advantage. I certainly found myself always modifying my speeches because I was able to use my Writer application.

We have been criticised in the press for handing out laptops, but you have to have a core group of enthusiasts who will test anything that is new. There is an old adage that no plan survives its first encounter with the enemy. Whatever you do to start with is not how you will end up. We could have launched on day one with the idea either that we would loan out tablets for Peers to use or that we would get people to bring their tablets in. Some businesses are doing that, but a lot of large organisations are fighting it quite hard because of security issues; they are finding it much harder than we are to adapt, but they are being forced into it. We have moved proactively, although the point is that if we had gone in that way, the critics would have killed it on day one. You have to run a trial to find out what the disadvantages are. We can see already that access to the website is changing and modifying as a result of some of the reactions to the tablet trial in the Information Committee.

I think that this still has a long way to go. An example is that when I want to look at a Bill I am concerned with, I want all the stuff that is relevant to whatever stage we have reached to be together in one place. I am prepared to pick the Bill up off the desk, but I am only offered the latest version and all the documents. I then have to go in and stab around. What I want are the latest amendments. I also want the note from the Whips’ Office so that I know what order people will be speaking in, although I am quite happy to get that off the other thing because I normally have that sitting there as well. However, it means having to jump backwards and forwards from one bit to the other. It is as if the most important thing is the last stage of the Bill, but it is not. The most important thing is the amendments we are about to discuss. Also, it is a real nuisance having last-minute additions to the Marshalled List, but I do not know how we are going to handle that. It means that you have to have two lists of amendments. However, we may see an improvement in our working practices as a result of all this because in some cases it may make us think more logically.

To make maximum use of this technology, we need training in how to search for and find things. For instance, occasionally I want to find EU papers, which is a particularly thorny problem on whatever device you are using. This is where we need the expertise of our librarians. One of the great things about modern technology is the way librarians have changed from people who just give you books and tell you where to find something into people who are able to gear up their expertise in knowing where to find information, then summarise it and produce a distillation. Library notes and research papers into aspects of things we are looking at are found to be extremely useful by Peers. You can see that in the doubling of the take-up of those notes. It changes someone who used to sit behind a desk into someone who is summarising information usefully so that it then becomes knowledge. It is then up to us to have the wisdom to turn it into something that we will use properly. Things are useless when they are just out there in the form of information.

I have one other brief comment to make about the trial. We are facing what every large organisation has to face, which is the problem of how we are going to handle security in a deperimeretised environment, as it is called. How are we going to have collaboration orientated architectures, as the Jericho Forum calls them? I know that these are technical things, but I thought I would throw them in for fun. These are the things we are facing, and large companies are stumbling over them as well. That is why at the moment we have a separation between the intranet and the internet, which I find so awkward because there is stuff I cannot get on my tablet. It is sitting on the intranet and it is too cumbersome to try to log in on that if you do not have a good connection. So I end up taking what I can get on the internet. There is some stuff which is missing. It is not secret or anything like that, and there are ways around it. I think we need to look at this, and it is something that may usefully come out of the tablet trial. I hope that the internet will survive and the intranet will be something that is accessed, if it is needed, in a very different way. I think there will be secure areas.

I want to say two things very quickly on the report. I was a little concerned by the talk of bespoke systems for core activities. I can see certain aspects of how we handle amendments and things as Bills progress through another place and then here, going backwards and forwards, and that there is a specialised system especially written to handle that. However, for a lot of our systems, we should be careful about going too bespoke, because the world is changing very quickly in a very unpredictable way. Who would have envisaged, even four years ago, that we would be doing a tablet trial here and that I would be permitted to use it in the Chamber or for my notes here in Committee? Who would have envisaged that we would be beginning to work in these flexible ways, or that we would be talking about Members bringing their own stuff in that would hook up inside the parliamentary perimeter? The changes are so fast that we do not know where we will be, and we have got to be very careful of locking ourselves into expensive, upfront capital expenditure when the world may move in a different direction.

To take up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, again, is it an iPad or not? We are quite right to say tablet. It just happened that the iPad had the easiest interface, earliest on, off the starting block in this area. Actually, there are very serious rivals now and some that are outselling the iPad. There are some other more generic operating systems that could give us better access to some of the other facilities one would like to have on the internet. The iPad for various commercial reasons will not run Flash, but an Android-based system will. There are all sorts of bits and pieces like that, so we should very firmly say tablet, but of course it does not matter. If we go to a system which is device agnostic—as the chairman of our committee said—it removes that problem. People can have whatever they fancy and like and want to use. That is definitely the way to go, and it also offloads a huge amount of capital expenditure.

There are two other things I wanted to mention very quickly, because we have spent so long on computers. What we are doing on the outreach area and the Peers in Schools programme is very laudable. I think that move is hugely useful to public perception of what we get up to, what Parliament gets up to and what the two arms of Government—the legislature and the executive—do, with all the issues behind it that people do not understand. I am very encouraged to see that that is expanding. I have spoken in a couple of places, but not as part of the service. I think quite a few of us do, but it is right that we should formalise it and make it easier, and that is a very good move in the right direction.

The other thing that I am very grateful for is the Press Office. I have not had to use it, but I find it hugely reassuring that when there is something that hits the press that you are worried about, and you think, “Oh my goodness, what am I going to say?”, you have the Press Office there to act as back up. If it is a bit oversensitive, instead of putting your foot in it you can hand it over to the Press Office, which can put its foot in it instead. I am sorry, I mean that it can do exactly the right thing instead. These are very important aspects, which we should not lose sight of in our excitement about the new technology.

It is a very interesting and useful report, and I look forward to working with the committee as long as I am allowed to.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

My Lords, I am grateful to all the Members who have taken part. Apart from my noble friend Lord Avebury, we have kept this within the family. There is no harm in that, and I draw a conclusion from the fact that we have not had the Grand Committee packed with people complaining about various services that have gone wrong. That is a positive. The opportunity is there and it is important to provide that opportunity, and the fact that we have what is, in effect, another of our useful seminars among colleagues who were thinking freely and without being tied to an agenda has been valuable. Some important points have been made. The noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, made an important point about in-reach, not outreach. There is no substitute for visits into the Parliamentary Estate, particularly for young people. In-reach is important as well as outreach, and I also agree with him that information should be fun. The committee’s work is lots of things; it is sometimes fun, sometimes it is hard work, but it is important work, and we need to bear that in mind.

I just want to take up a point from the noble Lord, Lord Maxton. He is right to be impatient for change for wi-fi roll-out, but there are practical difficulties about the public contract, which has to go through European procurement rules. That is what is actually holding the thing back; there is a cost, but there are some procurement rules which we cannot avoid. We will know soon who the contractor will be, but then there is a lot of bureaucracy to go through; it is all European-compliant legislation of which we have to be very careful to take account. The earliest we can possibly do it is March 2013, but he will know—because he keeps up with these things—that there is an advantage to that, because the standards for wi-fi provision are being upgraded and we will be able to take advantage of that. If we had done it earlier, we would have been with wi-fi one; we will actually be going into a situation with wi-fi two, as it were, so there is an advantage in hastening slowly, at least to that extent. However, I am grateful to him and I hope he will continue to challenge robustly the speed of the provision.

We have been in danger of anticipating the outcome of the committee’s deliberation on the evaluation of the tablet trials. I do not want to do that, as it is still a very open question, and we have to go through this process very carefully. I am grateful to all my colleagues who commented, including the well informed overview that the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, gave of the trial. He has vast experience in this are, which is valuable to the committee, and I take his point about generic systems. But the generic systems will be in the customisation of the applications for each individual Member, so the customisation that would be required for him will be at a much higher grade than for ordinary users. It is more customisation of generic systems that we have in mind.

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, this is of course the advantage of having an iPad which is indexed immediately with my comments, which one can do in a PDF. The document is actually talking about a use of bespoke solutions for Parliament’s unique core systems, in paragraph 12 on page 7. That was the one that worried me. I entirely agree with the noble Lord about customisation for individuals at the front end; it is a very good idea.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

I thank the noble Earl. We are not far apart on this now. I am grateful to him for his other comments as well.

The noble Lord, Lord Haskel, was very kind to the House staff. We all feel that too; I think Member-led outreaches are invaluable and difficult to improve upon. I hope the debate has provided the House more generally, in Grand Committee context, with an overview of what we are doing and that we as a committee will decide to have another annual report, because they are good for the committee. They make you always look back at what you have done and give you a better idea of what you want to do in future. We are facing a challenging two or three-year period in the run-up to 2015. The committee is very vigorous and knowledgeable about this. I enjoy participating in it and am grateful to colleagues for the energy they put into the committee, which is in the service of the House and for the benefit of the House. There is a lot of work to do, and I hope it will continue to be fun. On that basis—because the Grand Committee has a lot of important work to do for the rest of the afternoon—I have pleasure in moving that the committee’s annual report for 2010-11 be noted by the Grand Committee.