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.

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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"

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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."

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This follows the news that despite reaching the required thresholds, two petitions have not been scheduled for debate as promised by ministers.

The statement flags up the lack of a coherent end-to-end process for the ePetitions, which were basically grafted on to existing systems.

This is the text of the press release:

Select Committee Press Notice

E-petitions

In July 2011, the Government created a new website which enables people to create and sign e-petitions. The Government also decided that once a petition has been signed by 100,000 people, the Leader of the House would write to the Backbench Business Committee to inform the Committee about the petition and to ask the Committee to consider finding time for a debate on it.

The Backbench Business Committee believes the e-petitions site is a very welcome initiative which has the potential to provide a new way for people to make their views known to Parliament and to have them debated. However, the Committee is concerned that some potential problems with the system need to be addressed in order to make it successful.

The Backbench Business Committee’s key concerns are:

• The Government is responsible for giving time to the Backbench Business Committee, and the time available to us is very limited – less than one day a fortnight. The Government has not provided any additional time to debate e-petitions and our existing limited supply is already oversubscribed.
•  The Committee has no power to schedule debates unless some Members of Parliament come forward to tell us that they wish to take part in them. However the Government has not provided any way to link petitions to Members of Parliament who wish to sponsor them on the e-petitions site, or any advice to petitioners on what they might need to do. Unfortunately, this means that no Members of Parliament have yet come to ask us for a debate on an e-petition.
• We want to work to make the new e-petitions a successful way for people to trigger debates in Parliament.

The Backbench Business Committee will:

• publish advice on our website to help organisers of petitioners know how to take their case forward.
• continue to press the Government to provide specific time for debates on e-petitions so that there is an effective way for the public to engage with Parliament.
• hold individual and group meetings with campaign groups and organisers of e-petitions to discuss how best to get their issues on the agenda.

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It's well worth a read, and has interesting sections on engaging users in service design and opening up online channels for service delivery by third parties.

The report says the government could "transform the way it delivers public services... by using technology to involve users in the design and continuous improvement of its services".

As discussed in this post and work done by the AlphaGov team, the MPs say that public feedback "need not be limited to the initial design process alone: technology offers Government the opportunity to refine and improve the design of its services based on the real time flow of citizen feedback".

"We recommend that Departments exploit the internet and other channels to enable users to provide direct online feedback both in the design of services and in their ongoing operation and improvement."

The MPs add:

"IT enabled public services should be provided on an open platform with open interfaces. Government should provide the necessary open infrastructure that empowers people inside and outside of Government to innovate. Making this happen will be part of the transition we have mentioned above from an organisation-centric view of public services to one based on the needs of the citizen. There are obvious parallels between this approach and the Government desire to open up the delivery of public services to non-state actors as part of its Big Society agenda.

"Government should open up online service delivery to non-public sector organisations and explore ways in which public services can be offered through other websites, applications, devices and providers. This should be developed by providing an open Government platform around which others can innovate and improve, built on the principles of open data, open standards and open source.

"In doing so Government will need to address issues of liability for the external delivery of Government services. Moving to a model where third parties provide online Government services will require clarity about where citizens should turn for help when they encounter difficulties, as well as clarifying who is accountable for service delivery."

This final point is interesting, and arguably one of the less-discussed effects of the Martha Lane Fox and AlphaGov-led moves towards allowing third parties to deliver online services via APIs.

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James Allen reports on a recent discussion in which representatives of three F1 teams discussed their differing approach to social media and online engagement with their fans.

John Allert, McLaren: "Our drivers (Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton) have total autonomy on what they tweet. Sometimes they have too much, but that's the magic of the medium. That it's real. Anything you read from our two drivers has been tapped out with their own thumbs and you can see the spelling mistakes to prove it!"

Luca Colajanni, Ferrari: "Social networking and the internet as a whole presents a big issue: anonymity. I often have to deal with rumours spread on websites, of which I don't know the source. I can mention one today from a Dutch website, which says Flavio Briatore is coming Ferrari. It's complete bullshit! As it's nearly impossible to control, sometimes you have to take decisions that are unpopular. Unlike McLaren, we don't let our drivers use Twitter because we don't want them writing something that can be misinterpreted. We want control and we need to find the right balance."

Adam Parr, Williams: "I'm a bit old-fashioned, I don't tweet and I'm not on Facebook. I struggle a bit with it because sometimes you can get a bit too involved in other people's lives. I had a very interesting meeting in New York the day before yesterday with a fashion label and they said people like Burberry are using social networking almost exclusively now. It's foolish to ignore it, but I struggle with it personally."

The really interesting thing is how those three teams between them manage to personify the three main views towards online engagement.

From McLaren there is an understanding that it has to be "real" and the tweets must genuinely come from their drivers. And even though they know that comes with some risks, they trust their employees to help them engage with their fans.

Words to sum up the McLaren approach to social media might be: Open, transparent, trusting, empowering, decentralised, networked, engaged, risk-taking, forward-looking.

Ferrari clearly takes the opposite view, believing that it must have top-down control of all its communications. But Colajanni places too much emphasis on those who publish anonymous "bullshit". The internet is full of that, of course, but Ferrari might be expected to realise that people don't stop driving cars because there are car crashes.

It also seems to suggest a strange lack of confidence in his employees not to trust them to publish reasonable messages, which would strike me as being demoralising in most normal circumstances. And, of course, it is totally at odds with how they treat other media, given that their drivers are frequently speaking to print and broadcast media.

Keywords: Controlled, centralised, suspicious, sceptical, conservative, traditional, negative, pessimistic.

And for Williams, the position seems to be one of knowing there is something that a lot of their peers are doing which leaves them fearing that they might be missing a trick in a competitive market. But not having any personal experience and not really understanding the culture of those who use it creates uncertainty about how to proceed and what it might mean for their organisation.

Keywords: Unsure, curious, cautious, private, undecided, ignorant, torn.

So it is interesting how these three representatives of the teams between them have managed to represent the spectrum of views towards online engagement.

This encompasses those who might be described as understanding social media, those who consciously reject it and those who suspect there is something they should be doing but don't know what that is.

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Image from 123rf.com

The Commons local government and communities committee has an interesting report on localism out today.

After a quick skim through it, the most interesting point to me seemed to be the luke warm reaction to the way in which the Department for Community and Local Government replaced Total Place with 'community budgets'.

The MPs said the new scheme "is welcome but so far limited; there is no guarantee or even indication at this stage that all government departments will be willing to devolve budgetary control to the extent needed to make it a success".

They also contrasted unfavourably the 16 community budget pilots (which focus on families with complex needs) with the "wide range of policy areas addressed by the Total Place pilots".

The report noted there is "some dissatisfaction" with the government's approach and added:

"So far, the signs about whether the government is prepared to tackle the obstacles to meaningful place-based budgeting are mixed."

While the community budgets are to be focused on high-need families with significant benefit costs, there is said to be no evidence of the Department for Work and Pensions making a financial contribution.

And other key departments seem disinterested in the DCLG's scheme.

"We asked the Minister for Policing, Nick Herbert and the Minister for Employment, Chris Grayling, what contribution their departments were intending to make to the community budgets programme. Neither volunteered any information on this point, although Mr Herbert commented that Home Office involvement 'is quite possible'."

The MPs hoped this lack of interest "does not presage a damp squib".

Other government reforms such as GP commissioning, elected police commissioners and free schools "may fragment accountability, and make it more difficult to corral public resources in any one area into a Total Place-type vision".

And the committee said:

"We support the Government's community budgets programme. Although it seems to us an overly cautious, slow start to a programme which ought eventually to be revolutionary, we do not doubt the Government's intention to expand and build on it rapidly. It is inescapable, however, that the model's success will depend on the willingness of each government department to relinquish some control over its own budgets. We are mindful of criticism of a previous initiative, Local Area Agreements, that the promise of 'freedoms and flexibilities' to local authorities to enable them to join up services was realised in only a limited way."

It is pretty hard not to conclude that the MPs think the government is now re-learning the lessons of the Total Place pilots, except with less ambition.

And paradoxically, by focusing solely on families with complex needs rather than the broad range of subjects covered by Total Place, the whole set of community budget pilots could be undermined if the DWP and Home Office remain unenthusiastic.

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This is a question prompted by some slides published by the Alphagov team which look at ideas for "closing the feedback loop" by improving online consultation and policy engagement across government.

Co-author of the slides Steph Gray has been seeking "some more first-principles thinking on consultation", and many of the important issues have been covered in the explanatory post from Neil Williams and in follow-ups by Simon Burall of Involve here and here (the comments on these posts are worth reading).

This Andrea Di Maio post on where to use technology in the policy-making process is also worth reading in the Alphagov context and in light of the specification for the new DirectGov ePetitions system which tends to suggest the costs of moderating comments on government websites is a problem.

Anyway, there is not much I could add to what has already been covered elsewhere, so instead this post is heading off at a tangent to deconstruct the metaphor of the feedback loop.

This is excessively pedantic, I realise. In principle, obviously the concept of feedback and corrective action is great. But perhaps there are some distinct senses in which this can be analysed and applied.

A traditional policy cycle

In its Green Book, the Treasury explicitly spells out its view of how the policy cycle begins with a rationale which leads to objectives, appraisal, monitoring, evaluation and feedback.

Whether policy-making can actually be done in neat cycles like this is an issue discussed in the Institute for Government (IfG) report Policy-Making in the Real World.

Interestingly, the IfG comes to a similar set of conclusions to the Alphagov team, suggesting that "we need to bring the policy process closer to the real world, and bring the real world closer to the policy process".

While policy design is a broader topic of which consulting and seeking feedback is a subset, the desired outcomes are essentially the same.

Still, if there is an underlying assumption to both the Alphagov and IfG thinking, it seems to be that through feedback and iteration, policies can be improved over time by taking them in a particular direction.

To me, though, that idea seems fairly top-down and Whitehall-centric.

I think there is a parallel here with Simon Burall's post which argued that the idea there is a "real, knowable Public Opinion waiting to be discovered" should be abandoned.

The idea that there is a platonic policy on any issue which the government can slowly move towards is equally fanciful.

So perhaps a feedback loop really looks something like this (as you can tell, I'm not a graphic artist).

Here each loop may be some localist microinnovation broadly heading in the same direction as the thrust of government policy.

But there is still something missing, I think, around understanding the complexity of a landscape which has more localism and diverse service providers and greater personalisation.

Zooming out

Maybe a better image, then, would be this.

Image from 123rf.com

Here the trunk of the tree is the original policy intention.

In the case of, say, health service or school reforms then the trunk might be the plan to create new GP consortiums or more academies, but there would also be a pretty significant branches near the base of the trunk given that the opt-in nature of these bodies means that existing structures can continue almost in parallel.

Feedback on one set of policies or organisations might be entirely different to feedback on another. This points to why the idea of a single loop is problematic.

The Alphagov team also suggests using the website to gather feedback on both the delivery and policy at the point at which citizens interact with a government service.

However, the tree image can prompt us think about the blurred line between policy and delivery.

If the trunk is the policy, by the time we reach one of the many individual leaves at the end of the branches then we may well be talking about operational issues.

This might range from the seating arrangements in a Jobcentre Plus in Norfolk to the visiting hours at a hospital in Swansea.

But it can be unclear at which point along the branches the policy becomes an operational judgement. To take a current example, are recent criticisms of the Care Quality Commission due to management misjudgements or policy confusion? Will citizens know enough to be able to make a meaningful distinction?

And if the policy is fundamentally flawed in some way, no amount of feedback and tinkering with delivery is going to improve it (what impact would feedback on the Child Support Agency have had?).

So having deconstructed to death the word 'loop', my conclusion seems to be that even circles can be too linear.

A question of leadership

One other thing is missing so far from both the loop and tree metaphors though: Where is the beginning?

In part this is an issue about co-creation and how early in the process citizens get to have their say (even to the extent of defining what the problems are that need to be addressed).

But it is also a question of leadership and not ignoring the role of politics and politicians in this process.

One purpose of consultation and engagement in the policy sense is to help leaders make better decisions with a broader range of information and a wider spread of views.

Another purpose is to educate the participants in the difficulties of making choices in government.

A minister, or indeed a civil servant, needs to lead debate online as they do in other media if they are to do their job effectively. This is particularly the case when ministers have manifestos to implement and political agendas which they are elected to follow.

Public feedback is never going to be the only driver of innovation or policy, so the explanations of choices which might be provided back to citizens as part of the loop may be intensely political. But that is not a negative thing.

What makes policy trees bear fruit?

Let's stick with the tree imagery a moment longer and consider that co-creation may perhaps be viewed as the roots, the trunk is policy, branches are innovation and leaves are delivery.

In the terminology of Sir Michael Barber (head of the Number 10 Delivery Unit under Tony Blair), a line drawn from the trunk to any given leaf would constitute the delivery chain.

The current government's approach to structural reform and incentivisation, however, would seem to suggest that feedback at the level of each individual leaf is what matters.

This is stretching the metaphor of the tree beyond breaking point, but it might just point to one more lesson about these contrasting approaches.

Under Labour it was the flow up through the trunk and out to the leaves which was important.

The coalition believes that it's the sunlight of transparency and competition at the leaf level which matters most.

But actually both are needed if the tree is to remain healthy.

Update June 6: This additional post from Involve and this one from the Democratic Society are also well worth reading.

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His main points covered the effect of technology on accountability, policy-making and delivering public services.

It's always difficult to know quite what to make when politicians talk about these issues.

On the one hand, any sign that they are on board with this agenda is positive.

But on the other, the extent to which they are able to grapple with the details of public engagement seems questionable. As Steph Gray notes (honestly not just linking to that post because it links back to this blog), the examples of crowd-sourcing that Osborne cited are not outstanding successes (more of the first step on a learning curve).

In some ways, it always seems to me something of a paradox that politicians, who's jobs depend on being in touch with the electorate, can be so bad at understanding engagement.

But perhaps once in government they undergo a transformation into leaders and managers with a day-to-day focus which requires that they and their departments devise policy solutions, not suggest the public does it for them.

Last August, when I wrote about open data, it seemed to me that what the politicians expected to achieve was a mixture of armchair auditing, a rebuilding of public trust in politics, more jobs and public service improvements.

This was more or less the same ground that Osborne covered today.

But I still wonder about the questions I asked last year about these goals:

Is it what politicians expect from the open data movement, and if so are they expecting too much?

Or is it what the open data movement has promised to politicians, and if so is more being promised than can really be delivered?

The lesson of recent events in the US is that what politicians give, they can easily enough take away again. So I think the questions remain valid.

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There were two points which intrigued me.

The first is the paradox that while stressing the principles of simplicity, agility and flexibility throughout, implementation will actually require a complex programme of change across government. This will take in areas from procurement and project management to communications, policy planning and delivery.

And this leads to a second paradox. If the strategy is correct in asserting that the best way to deliver complex projects is using the Agile methodolgy, then it follows that this is also the best way to implement the IT strategy itself.

In effect, the strategy will have to serve as its own giant pilot scheme, learning through trial and error as it proceeds.

Anyway, the full text of the article is online here.

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