Information Committee: Annual Report 2010-11

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

My Lords, before the Division was called I was remarking that the business managers have done us a favour in finding time for this important debate in Grand Committee to deal with the annual report of the Information Committee.

I am sure that I speak for all committee members in thanking both the clerks who have covered this report and our own clerk, who has succeeded Rob Whiteway, and his colleagues in the clerks’ department. We are very grateful for the support we get from the clerks’ department. That is true also of all the heads and members of the professional staff and the directorates of the work that is overseen by the committee. They are all absolutely dedicated, enthusiastic professionals. It is a privilege to serve with them and we acknowledge the contribution they have, in their individual ways, made to making what I think was a successful year’s work enshrined in the committee report.

The committee has a very important, if rather peculiar role. You could characterise what it does in the three themes that are adverted to in the early stages of the report. It is driving what benefit we can get from information technology services in the service of the House. That has many aspects and dimensions, not just in terms of servicing Members but the back-office administration functions too. It is trying to make sure that we get a much more effective message across to the wider public generally about what is going on here and how we do our business, as well as trying to inform those who are anxious to inform themselves about the work of the House. That is an important element in the work of the committee.

I will be spending the majority of my short introduction dealing with services for individual Members in the House. In that regard, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, who represents the administration authorities. We have had very good support from not just the clerks’ department but the House and administration committees in difficult financial circumstances, for which we are very grateful.

For a committee member trying to cover all the important aspects of the House’s work, it is right—good practice dictates it—to take every opportunity to report back to make sure that Members of the House and others know what is going on in the work of the committee. We do that by publishing our minutes. We are as open and transparent as possible, and that is useful. It is also right to solicit views. There is a user group dimension to the work that we do, and to be successful we need to encourage people to give their views. We must use every opportunity we can to get feedback. As another dimension, using complaints constructively and instructively is also important. We are getting better at that, particularly with the Parliamentary Information and Communication Technology side to the committee’s work. I have a sense—there is only anecdotal evidence—that PICT is rolling out services, such as the Windows 7 upgrade to operating systems on desktop and laptop machines across the whole Parliamentary Estate, with commendable efficiency and minimal disruption.

All these things involve change, and people get nervous of change. We need to keep in contact with the people we are seeking to serve, within the House, the Administration and the public. The 2010-11 report covers the first half of the Parliament—effectively, the first two years which are just coming to an end. The current period is not quite covered by that; I had hoped to mention one or two things to bring us up to date with things that have happened since July 2011. The report is a useful piece of work, and I hope we will have a useful discussion about it. For the members of the committee who are here, we need to learn what other people think about the contents of the report.

It is obviously true to anyone who has studied the work of the committee that we were bequeathed a very valuable legacy by our predecessor committee. The noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry and his colleagues produced, among other things, the seminal report, Are the Lords Listening? Creating Connections Between People and Parliament.

This report is still a work in progress before the existing committee. Indeed, my own name as chairman is on a list of ballotable debates dealing with Chapters 7 and 8. We are trying to get some feedback from the House as a whole on important questions such as the use of parliamentary language, which was identified as a barrier to people’s understanding, and to ceremonial aspects of some of the House’s work, which in modern times can produce a barrier to people’s understanding of the important work we do. There is a lot still being promoted, based on what was done before the committee took its place and started the work for this report.

The context is important too, because it has changed. The membership of the House has increased to such an extent that the pressure on all of its services, ICT and otherwise, cannot be ignored. That is something we are alive to. The political tensions and the quite hard-fought debates we have had attract attention, and we need to address and deal with that, in terms of dealing with people’s inquiries. We are also affected by deficit reduction, because everything we do in Parliament for the foreseeable future will be affected. All these things have to be considered in the mix.

We have a broad list of responsibilities. As well as parliamentary information and communication technology, we cover the Library, the important work of the Hansard reporters, public information, and bicameral services. Most bicameral services are hosted by the House of Commons, but we have our own parliamentary archive, which is a bicameral service that is brigaded in the House of Lords, and it is very valuable. Anyone who knows anything about what goes on here cannot help but be impressed by the enthusiasm of the staff and the dedication they bring to their work.

I should like to go through the five or six services to update the Grand Committee on where we are now as opposed to where the annual report ends. However, I shall spend a little longer on parliamentary information and communication technology because it is the biggest game changer that we are confronting as an institution and as a society. I do not want the House of Lords to get behind the curve to the extent that we do not relate to, and lose traction with, a public who are now involved in social networking and all that that means.

It is a struggle to stay on top of that degree of change but—I probably say this because I am chairman of the Information Committee and we are supposed to be doing this—we are ahead of this important area of public policy in many ways, particularly in the use and piloting of tablet technology. Since the report was completed in July 2011, two significant things have happened. First, the Information Committee agreed to undertake a tablet technology pilot. I stress the word “tablet” because this is not an iPad trial; it is a tablet trial. We must be careful that we do not end up as commercial agents for Apple Incorporated, however good the technology may be. That is easy to do, in the way that vacuum cleaners suddenly became Hoovers, and we need to be careful when talking about generic technology because it changes so fast. Machines are being trialled effectively at the moment by members of the committee and we will consider the first phase of the results at our important committee meeting tomorrow. The likelihood is that the evaluation of the work of tablet technology will need to continue before we can say with certainty that we want to deploy the servicing and the back-up of tablets for Members.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My noble friend invited comments, and as I have a Select Committee hearing to go to, I wonder whether perhaps he can help me with a question at the moment. I appreciate how PICT has helped individual members—it has been really helpful to me—but I get worried sometimes about the attitude within the Information Committee. It feels that issuing computers and laptops to Members is somehow a gift and that it is being very kind to us. In fact, those machines are there to help us with our work. We do not get any secretarial allowance now and those of us who come from outwith London have been seriously disadvantaged as a result.

When the committee considers this issue tomorrow, can more flexibility be written into the allocation of computers and laptops? For example, on page 8 of the report it says that we are entitled to a range of things, including one Blackberry handheld device. When I ask whether I can substitute something else for that Blackberry handheld device, such as another laptop or a tablet, I am told that I cannot do so. This kind of inflexibility creates problems for noble Lords who are only trying to carry out their job as Members of the House. Could the committee consider some greater flexibility in the allocation of equipment in the future?

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

Indeed. I am grateful for that intervention. We have to be open and honest and tell the unvarnished truth about the degree of change that will be coming if the ICT strategy that the committee has agreed in principle is rolled out by May 2015. I am keen on using that as a planning date. Previously we could not say with certainty when the Parliament will end, so being able to ask ourselves where we want to be by May 2015 is a useful device. It enables us to devise strategies and get plans in place.

In answer to my noble friend’s question, the ambition is to become device-neutral and provide internet-based services in the sky anywhere, any time and any place. The service will then change from a hardware-based system—as it tends to be at the moment, with broadband lines being provided and serviced—to inviting Members to use whatever device platform and in whatever combination they are comfortable with. We will guarantee bespoke services, including coaching in terms of individual Members’ ways of working. This plays into the important point that my noble friend makes. We all do things differently and struggle to look after ourselves without a heavy staff back-up. The best way we can do this within the financial envelope we face is to develop these services. I promise my noble friend that I have seen some of the early prototype services and they are stunningly useful on a tablet device.

We have to be absolutely upfront about this because people need time to plan. If this strategy works, we will not be in the business of handing hardware to people after 2015. We will not, indeed, be putting broadband connections into people’s homes. That is a huge change and people will be frightened by it, but the Committee’s important duty over the next two years is to try to win the argument about why we are making this change. It is not just about money, but it is about money; because you can do this an awful lot more cheaply. If my noble friend just thinks about the rate at which some of these devices change, then if, after 2015, you were locked into supplying people with up-to-date hardware, you would have to change the equipment you offered with such regularity to keep them ahead of the industry standard that it would cost an unimaginable sum of money.

I think people will get desktops in the main precincts of the Palace of Westminster because they are easily maintained by a central staff, but my ambition is to get everyone else mobile; and what a tablet device or platform gives you is the ability to work anywhere as long as you have a wi-fi connection. That is the first thing that the committee knows about and the strategy that we have agreed. We have a sterling job to do on that because people will understandably be slightly apprehensive—that is probably the best word—until they understand what is being offered to them.

Secondly, this is where the House Committee’s assistance comes in and again I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon. We now have the authority to wi-fi enable the whole estate over the next 12 months. That is a massive assistance. It puts us as an institution ahead of any other parliamentary service for tablet provision that I know of. The Italians are spending a lot of money and doing a lot of work on this and the Canadians have always had a reputation for it. The Brazilians are spending a lot of money as well. There is an international best practice sharing operation going on and by next year we could be seen as leading the service provision for individual parliamentary members because of the applications that we will be able to put on these devices. They will be crafted by our own people to assist Members of the House of Lords and I promise that when colleagues see the results of this work when it is rolled out—I hope within the next 12 months—people will see the reason and the justification for what we are doing in ICT.

In parenthesis, I want to be clear that we give an assurance to people who want their services delivered on a paper-based basis that they will always be catered for. That does not mean to say that the back-office machinery will not be done by clever enabled technology. People who are uncomfortable working in anything other than in a paper-based situation will always be catered for. That is an assurance the Committee would want to give so that that level of apprehension can be contained.

I have been slightly distracted. I wanted to talk about some of the other services. The Information Office, the Library, the Parliamentary Archive and the public information services have all done extremely well. The results of that are in the report. If I had had more time I would have given an update about the services that have been developed since July 2011 in each of those categories.

The Information Committee is at the forefront of ensuring that by 2015 we will be in the best possible place for incoming Members. However they come to this institution after May 2015, we will be confident that we will be able to provide them with an ICT back service which is fit for purpose.

I started with three themes: driving the ICT agenda forward with as much determination and as much robustness as we can, coupled with getting our message across to the general public about what is happening here so that they understand our work better, and getting the bespoke services fully operational and robust and fit for purpose. These are the things for the second half of the Parliament that the Committee will be committed to doing on behalf of the whole House. On that basis, I hope that colleagues will accept this report as a work in progress, and I beg to move.