CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 663-i HOUSE OF COMMONS ORAL EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION COMMITTEE PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT IN POLICY-MAKING TUESDAY 13 NOVEMBER 2012 DAVID BABBS, STEPHAN SHAKESPEARE AND TOM STEINBERG ROGER HAMPSON, CATARINA TULLY AND PROFESSOR BETH NOVECK Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 88 USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT 1. This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others. 2. The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. 1 Oral Evidence Taken before the Public Administration Committee on Tuesday 13 November 2012 Members present: Mr Bernard Jenkin (Chair) Alun Cairns Paul Flynn Robert Halfon David Heyes Kelvin Hopkins Greg Mulholland Lindsay Roy ________________ Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: David Babbs, Executive Director, 38 Degrees, Stephan Shakespeare, Founder and Global Chief Executive Officer, YouGov, and Tom Steinberg, Founder and Director, mySociety, gave evidence. Q1 Chair: Good morning and welcome to this first evidence session on open source policy-making. Could I welcome our witnesses, and ask each of you to identify yourselves for the record? Tom Steinberg: Tom Steinberg, the director of mySociety. David Babbs: David Babbs, director of 38 Degrees. Stephan Shakespeare: Stephan Shakespeare, CEO of YouGov. Q2 Robert Halfon: In essence, the kernel of this inquiry is to see how the Government’s digital engagement can move from being a very good encyclopaedia of information to being a Wikipedia, where people have genuine engagement. How do you think the Government has progressed so far? Tom Steinberg: I have been watching the field of both this Government and many others as they have tried to use new technologies to listen to and engage with the public for more than a decade. The scorecard is pretty poor, but not really just here; it is essentially largely everywhere. The primary failing that we have had is lots of experiments that are skin deep, by which I mean: “We will set up a website here to ask people about X,” but behind the scenes the processes remain largely unchanged, which is very common. It is very unusual to see even the very modest step that happened here in Parliament: agreeing to have debates when a certain number of people sign something. That counts as a relatively big achievement in terms of form or process change that frankly would not have happened without someone building an internet tool that was participative in nature. David Babbs: I asked 38 Degrees members what I should say before coming here and how positive they felt about efforts to improve engagement online and more generally. I think they would agree with a verdict of patchy, probably leaning towards poor. There is a sense from 38 Degrees members that both technologically and culturally there is a very long 2 way to go before the Government gets anywhere near getting the most out of public engagement, either in terms of legitimacy or the quality of the resulting public policy. Stephan Shakespeare: I think the words and the intention of Government are clearly in the right direction here. The acknowledgement about open policy-making is to be welcomed; you know that the people behind this believe and care about it. But a while ago, although still within this Government, there was a Cabinet Office consultation on public service reform. They wanted to change everything, and said, “Here is a place you can input,” and it was a box. In one sense it is incredibly open to say, “Look, anybody can come to this box and say what they think,” but it has no understanding of practical ways to get people involved. So I would echo what the other two have said. There is an intention and it is clearly positive, but it has not happened in any real sense. Q3 Robert Halfon: Where should the Government begin to introduce new open models of policy-making? Are there areas of policy that are easier to do than others? David Babbs: My sense is there is a prior challenge before you talk about specific models, which is around a culture of flexibility in terms of being able to consider public engagement and be innovative in what you do. To give you an example, I was delighted to be invited to speak at this Committee, and I think our members felt very positive about that. I saw that immediately because the culture of 38 Degrees is an opportunity to find out more about what our members would like us to say. However, because of the way Select Committees are set up at present, it was hard to determine exactly what the questions were. Your clerks were very clear that it was not within their gift to give me a clear sense of exactly what lines of questioning you were going to pursue, although they gave me useful general guidance. The timing of it meant that it was hard to do as much with our membership as I would have liked. It is an example of good will, but within a very old fashioned way of doing things, which meant that the scope for actually trying to do it in a different was very limited. Before you can get on to individual mechanisms, you have to think about what the culture underlying it is: why people want to engage and whether there is flexibility to improvise a bit. If you are going to get a really good quality public engagement, it does need an element of flexibility and improvisation, because it is a conversation with people and that is how conversations work. Does that make sense? Q4 Chair: Yes. How much time would you have needed? David Babbs: Probably about a week more, and a little more detail as to exactly what you wanted to know from them. Q5 Chair: The questions in our Issues and Questions paper tend to be how and what and why questions rather than the kind of binary questions one would use in large-scale surveys. Is that an unfair point to make? David Babbs: Slightly, yes, in that it is possible to ask open questions as well. Indeed I did, and have got word clouds, text mining, analysis and example comments that reflect what people said. Is it possible to engage with large numbers of people in a more qualitative way and get data from that, but it does take a little longer to do properly. I have not had time to read every individual comment, for example, but I have had time to read representative samples and run it through software to get stuff out. Q6 Chair: So is your message that, if we are going to do this open source policy-making, it is all going to take longer? 3 David Babbs: I am not sure that overall it is about length of time. It is more about an overall approach, and at what stage in it you are thinking. You could have met on the same day, but you would have just needed to give me slightly different information and lead-in. I am not sure that is the same as slowing down the overall process. Obviously I would then be sitting here able to give you higher quality insight, which would probably be a good thing. Q7 David Heyes: I should maybe have declared an interest, Chair. I am a member of 38 Degrees, or at least on the mailing list, which is all that is needed to become a member; I think it is as simple as that. David Babbs: That is correct. Q8 David Heyes: You referred to your membership to kind of legitimise the questions, the role and responses you might give to this Committee today in the same way that politicians refer to their electorate to legitimise their position on things. I do not recall being asked by you for any views. I would surely have noticed if you were asking me as a member for comments on your appearance before the Public Administration Committee. I do not remember you asking me. David Babbs: No, we did a random sample on this occasion. Q9 David Heyes: A random sample? David Babbs: Yes, we asked quarter of a million out of 1.2 million people, simply because we did another survey just a couple of weeks ago, which you probably may recall getting because it was sent to all our members. It was about us being interviewed by the Sunday Times Magazine. We asked them to do that, and felt we were bombarding people with surveys. Q10 Chair: What was the response rate? David Babbs: To this survey? Chair: Yes. David Babbs: About 25,000 people responded. Q11 Chair: Is that enough? David Babbs: It is the lower end of what we had hoped for, which reflects the fact that we had just sent a survey the week before, which had over 100,000 responses. Q12 Alun Cairns: Can I come back to your comment in relation to bombarding people with surveys? Let us assume that every Government Department changed its process; would that not result in you bombarding people with surveys day in, day out? David Babbs: I guess the point is that it is opt in. Those that wished to had an opportunity to do it. As to whether we should have sent that email to everyone rather than a random sample, I guess this comes back to the culture of experimentation in the organisation.