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The Commons procedure committee has published its interim report on ePetitions.

The two main conclusions of the inquiry were largely as predicted in this blog's previous post on the committee's inquiry.

Most importantly, the procedure committee says debates should take place in a dedicated time slot on a Monday afternoon in Westminster Hall, rather than in the Commons chamber.

"We recommend that the Standing Orders should be changed to allow the Backbench Business Committee to schedule debates on Government e-petitions between 4.30 and 7.30 pm on a Monday in Westminster Hall. The sitting would only take place if the Backbench Business Committee had set down the subjects of e-petitions for debate. The debate would take place on the motion 'That this House has considered the e-petition from [petitioners] relating to [subject of petition]'. We recommend that this change should be introduced on an experimental basis for one year and that its effectiveness should be reviewed at the end of that period. "

It has been argued that moving the debate out of the Commons chamber would suggest to the petitioners that their concerns are given a lower priority, though the committee rejects that and notes that frontbench spokesmen would be required to set out their positions during the debate.

Arguably more significant is the change to the format of the motion being debated.

Whereas last October's Commons debate on the Hillsborough disaster was on a motion which "calls for the full disclosure of all Government-related documents", presumably the new equivalent would have been that the Commons "has considered the e-petition relating to the disclosure of Hillsborough documents" – a much weaker formulation, with a vote not on supporting or opposing the actual disclosure but on agreeing just that the issue had been discussed.

Unless I have misunderstood the proposal, that seems like a backwards step.

The somewhat less significant recommendations call for clearer text on the ePetitions website and improved communication with the sponsors of the petitions. The committee says:

"We recommend that the Government should remove the sentence 'e-petitions is an easy way for you to influence government policy in the UK' from its e-petitions

website and replace it with a statement that more accurately reflects reality. We

propose: 'e-petitions are an easy way for you to make sure your concerns are heard

by Government and Parliament'.

The aim is to essentially downplay what might be achieved by an ePetition. And the MPs also call for more information for the petitioners to help them understand the process better, particularly when it comes to ensuring they know to contact an MP to take their petition forward.

For example, the ePetition on pensions uprating has reached the 100,000 threshold but so far no MPs have told the backbench business committee that they are prepared to lead a debate on it.

The committee says its report is focused on dealing with some of the more obvious flaws in the ePetitions system and does not address deeper issues of public engagement with parliamentary processes.

"We have not, in this short inquiry, sought to address wider questions about public engagement with Parliament, reform of the House's own procedures for petitions, the treatment of e-petitions other than those submitted on the Government's website, and the role of the Backbench Business Committee. We believe that all of these subjects are worthy of more considered examination by us in the future."

So another review of these issues seems likely, and could further improve public engagement with Parliament at some point in the future. It might be after this that the whole ePetitions system is transferred from the government to Parliament.

The committee also said that there should have been more consultation with Parliament before ministers took the plans forward.

"We agree with the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee, Natascha Engel, that 'a lot of the problems that have arisen were perfectly foreseeable and had there been a debate, and perhaps even a vote, they would have been highlighted.'

"We regret that the Government did not see fit to refer its proposals for its e-petitions system to us or to place its plans formally before the House for debate and decision before the scheme was introduced."

I think the MPs are right that plenty of the problems thrown up were totally foreseeable.

That said, however, the government's use of ePetitions as a test of its move towards more agility in IT was always likely to involve something of a culture clash when pitched against the less-than-agile decision-making processes in Parliament.

If it had been left to Parliament, it seems more than possible that assorted committees and officials would still be pondering the £1.3m price tag previously estimated for the first year of such a project, while the government got it built and running for around £132,000.

It isn't ideal, but this is an issue where the 'just do it' approach was probably the right one. If the committee and the House wanted more control over the system then they could and should have built it themselves (although the procedure committee would probably argue that no time was ever given to vote on its previous proposals, which is a separate set of problems).

Without the government getting on with it, however, the significant level of public interest and engagement which has been generated (and which the committee welcomed) would never have materialised.

Disruptive technology wins out, and can now be iterated and improved having been introduced. Not a smooth process in this case given the inter-institutional tensions, but on balance probably as good as it was going to get. Better some innovation than none.

Ministers have been warned their plans for a Public Data Corporation (PDC) "negatively affected the global credibility" of their open data commitments.

The latest minutes of the Cabinet Office's transparency board suggest business minister Ed Davey faced some scepticism when he discussed the PDC plans at the October meeting.

The Board told the minister "they were likely to be challenging in order to get a solution which achieved their aims", say the minutes.

"Clearly their main focus would be on how the proposals could best support Open Data and Transparency objectives, but they were also concerned on behalf of all users of the PDC's data."

During the discussions the Board also indicated that the PDC proposal has damaged the government's reputation on open data.

"It was important that the Government was able to make a clearer statement soon, in particular to reassure some parts of the Open Data community that the Public Data Corporation would be a step forward for Open Data, not a step backwards.

"Members considered that the consultation paper had already negatively affected the global credibility of the UK Government's commitment to Open Data.

"It was essential not only that governance of the PDC had opening up data at its core but also that it was driven by the needs of all data users."

Other points made at the meeting were that the value of the data was in its use rather than its sale and there should be "a clear road map" for releasing more data after the creation of the PDC.

There was also concern that "if there was greater involvement of the private sector (in line with one of the PDC objectives), the public interest in and ownership of core reference data was safeguarded"

Having written previously about the downside of the government's decision to scrap the Co-ordinated Online Register of Electors (CORE), it is worth mentioning a report published today by the Commons political and constitutional reform committee.

The bulk of the report looks at issues related to individual voter registration, but CORE gets a passing mention.

"A central electoral register, such as the one that is in place in Northern Ireland, would have made identifying duplicate entries much simpler, but in July 2011 the government decided to abandon plans for a Co-ordinated Online Register of Electors on the basis that it was not "proportionate, cost effective or consistent with the government's policy on databases and reducing the number of non-departmental public bodies".

"The Electoral Commission and Dr Stuart Wilks-Heeg, director of Democratic Audit, both told us that without a central register, identifying duplicate entries would be difficult and resource-intensive, and in some cases impossible."

It is worth noting in passing that the MPs seem to look on CORE as a tool to effectively manage the electoral register, while in contrast the government spun it as being "principally to help political parties".

Both of them, however, miss the wider point about opening up the electoral system which I covered in the previous post.

Data matching not going well

The report goes on to say that the government's alternative to a central database "relies largely on data-matching with information held by other public bodies".

But the evidence on this does not appear to bode well.

Indeed, the first question would be how much of the £11m "saving" from scrapping CORE will have to be spent on running these data-matching processes.

Quite possibly more than £11m.

Data-matching pilots are currently underway, and the government hopes to assess early in 2012 whether they should be rolled out more widely.

But the MPs said:

"Representatives of three of the local authorities involved in the data-matching pilots told us that 'for all of us... it is very, very labour intensive'. All three authorities had hired additional staff to help run data matching, boosting staffing levels in their electoral registration sections by 50-100 per cent for the duration of the pilot. If it is to be successful, additional resource will be needed not only to match data, but also to follow it up with letters, and house enquiries if appropriate."

The data from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) seems to be particularly unhelpful.

"Julian Bassham, electoral services manager for the London Borough of Southwark, told us that data-matching 'has been more successful for us at this stage in telling us what we do know rather than what we don't know... At the moment it does not look, from our side, like the DWP data will necessarily answer those questions'."

In Southwark a startling 25 per cent of DWP records "could not be matched to properties in the borough as known to the local authority".

Friday's report suggests the problems are partly due to data consistency and standards, with addresses be stored differently or house names having changed.

But the DWP also seems to be providing both not enough and too much data: no information on nationality and therefore entitlement to vote, but also too many unneeded records

"Without nationality information, it is impossible to know if someone is likely to be eligible to vote or not. We also heard that people are not removed from the DWP database when they die or leave the country, meaning that large numbers of records on the database are essentially inaccurate and confusing to electoral administrators."

Given such unpromising prospects, it isn't surprising that the Electoral Commission said it wishes to see "further options" for identifying unregistered electors "not only in the event that data matching is less successful than we hope, but also to deal with 'at risk' groups who are less easily picked up through the data matching approach".

Unsurprisingly, the MPs conclude:

"The evidence we have received... suggests that data matching will be of limited effectiveness, especially in identifying potential electors."