House of Commons Business

Part of Business of the House – in the House of Commons at 1:13 pm on 8 May 2014.

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Photo of Graham Allen Graham Allen Chair, Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, Chair, Political and Constitutional Reform Committee 1:13, 8 May 2014

The hon. Gentleman has probably put the final nail in the coffin of a petitions committee by making it clear that Ministers should be brought before it to answer on matters that are in the Government’s, rather than Parliament’s, domain. Either that, or it may well be that the people who are members of the petitions committee will be so pliant that they will never bother to do anything like that and will just pass most of the responsibility over to the Backbench Business Committee, pretending that the job has been done, and that those petitioners have really been listened to. They do not get listened to easily. Every Member of the House knows that they have to fight for time. You have to fight for your airtime. You have to campaign. You have to really demand that something that incites you as an individual gets in front of Government. We should be extremely careful about compromising that.

My final point was pre-empted by the hon. Member for Broxbourne, the Chair of the Procedure Committee. It is about gateways. I do not pretend to be an expert on these things, but I do know that when people log on and have a look at how they can progress a petition, it is really important that they are given good advice from the first moment, just as we are in the House. If a Member goes into the Table Office with an idea for a question, they will get some good advice about who to send it to and how to word it. The same standards should apply in the House to petitions. That is why each petition should be in the ownership of an individual Member. Rather than the petition starting with the words, “We, the petitioners, call upon Parliament to declare world peace”—or free beer for everyone—there should be a check, and advice to the effect: “Hang on a minute. You are the Member in charge. We need to get the words right and ensure that your petition is in order. Then you may go crazy and get 100,000 signatures if you can.” But if we leave things as vague and open as they are at the moment, we again do the public a disservice, because they will not know, any more than they do now, the difference between Government and Parliament.

As the Chair of the Procedure Committee said, people need to know what other options exist. Petitioning may not be a very effective way to proceed. It may be better to write to the local Member of Parliament and get them to ask a question or appear before a Minister or write a letter to a Minister. Unless the gateways are really clear—the parliamentary gateway being very different from the Government gateway—I am afraid we are again perpetrating that deceit upon people. It would be no better than the origins of petitioning—prostrating oneself before a mediaeval monarch in the hope that they might grant a favour. I think we can do better than that.

My hope is that if the Leader of the House or the Deputy Leader of the House respond positively, the Procedure Committee will take what is before us now and do a really great job on it. I say to the Chair of that Committee, directly across the Chamber, that the responsibilities are onerous. People have been kidded about e-petitions. It has been confusing. It has not been clear even to many Members of the House, let alone to members of the public. It is easy to misrepresent. He needs to clean this up, and his Committee has a job to do that. One of the best ways he can do that is to ensure that a separation between Government petitioning and parliamentary petitioning is clear in the report that he produces for the House. I wish him well.