Connecting Parliament with the Public

I think the idea of making proceedings easier to follow is a bit of a red herring. Politics is a necessarily complex business, and we elect people to do the job of picking through the minutiae of policy and legislation on our behalf (or rather, to get civil servants to do it for them!), so we don't have to concern ourselves with every last detail. There are perhaps ways of simplifying language to make it more transparent - but what really matters is that the *outcomes* of parliamentary business be summarised in digestible form so that people can, say, follow the progress of a Bill through committee, easily access EDM texts etc. Perhaps on the "What's On" page of www.parliament.uk there could be a summary of the previous day's principal business ("Yesterday in the House"/"Yesterday in Committee"), rather than just agendas as there are on that page at present, to save people with an interest in the passage of a particular Bill or whatever wading through acres of Hansard text to get to the salient points.

I'd be interested to read what others think.

Nick

Modern IT requires effective sifting and directing information to where it is most needed and can be best handled. The select committees are the obvious medium for this. Again there could be an additional staffing need, but handling information for a small number of Members on clearly demarcated subjects should be a natural feature of select committee work. Without going into details, I suggest -

* All committees should have their own web-sites, with addresses listed.

* Whenever a new inquiry is agreed - and hopefully a future programme of inquiries would often be announced - the public should be invited to submit any ideas that they wish.

* A more structured consultation could be opened with potentially interested parties; this should be devised, if time allows, according to the excellent Cabinet Office guidelines for departmental consultations (your own consultation on behalf of the Science and Technology Committee looks to me to be a useful model)

* In cases where more detailed investigations are required, it should be possible for a committee to commission relevant research; this might involve undertaking a fairly lengthy inquiry.

* And of course at any time the public could lobby the committee to take on a new inquiry of the public's own choosing.

All of this should help committees to choose the best witnesses for their inquiries.(making sure that no serious body or person has been overlooked). It would also help the committees - and Parliament as a body - to assess the nature and volume of public concern in various issues and to report accordingly. Not all evidence or information needs to be the subject of formal inquiries, with formal reports and recommendations.

Select committees have been by far the most important development in our parliamentary processes in the past 100 years, and central to this has been the way they have provided forums and opportunities for the public to contact Parliament and to be heard. Not least, they have required different and conflicting opinions to be aired and argued out in public.

However public hearings and evidence should not be limited to the non-legislative policy and administration departmental committees. The process should be extended into the legislative field. l return to my old - and still running - argument for committing all bills of any significance to select committees with powers and processes for taking evidence (see Making the Law, paras.344 - 354, and Modernisation Committee reports on the same theme). Robin Cook made big advances and more bills are now published in draft so making it possible to sound out public concerns and thinking in good time, and select committee pre-legislative hearings should be valuable here, but there is still a lot to be done before we can claim to have opened the legislative process up properly to allow genuine public participation.

More effective use of the parliament web site would make things easier to follow.