Good afternoon to you both and welcome back to the Procedure Committee. We are grateful for your time this afternoon. We hope to conclude last week’s evidence session, which was interrupted by Divisions. We have heard so much useful evidence from you both already, and we look forward to hearing more today. Without further ado, I will pass over to my colleague Bambos, who was interrupted so rudely by the Divisions last week.

I will ask my question from last week again, as I do not think that you had the opportunity to answer it fully. As you both know, the Table Office checks and, where necessary, sub-edits WPQs under the authority of the Speaker and in line with the rules set out in “Erskine May”. Those rules state that questions must have a factual basis, must be within ministerial responsibility and must not be about matters that are sub judice, nor about matters where there is a Government block because the Government have previously declined to answer the questions. Do you think that the rules of order for WPQs remain appropriate?

I think so, generally. I think that last week I alluded to other concerns that I have about resources in the Table Office, particularly in relation to Opposition days and ensuring that we respond appropriately to amendments. But it is always about making reviews on a regular basis. If we see a huge increase in written parliamentary questions, which is obviously the reason the Procedure Committee is looking at this, and if a review might be helpful to address that challenge, we should absolutely look at it.

I caveat my remarks by saying at the outset that we have a good working relationship with the Table Office. Even though we do not always agree, everybody who works there is always very courteous and often tries to help us to find a way through. The problem is perhaps not so much the rules as the interpretation of them. The trickiest one is the factual basis rule. Sometimes one has to speculate from something if one is asking a question. You are inevitably asking a question about something that you do not know, and the level of not knowing may vary. A good example is that the Government will go out and brief a paper about something that they are doing, but the story will not include an official quotation from a Minister; it will be, “Sources within the Department for Education say—”. Sometimes if we ask a question off the back of that, we will be asked what our basis is for it. We will say, “Well, it’s this news story,” and sometimes we are told that that is not enough. On basis, we are in the slightly odd situation where you might have a question that you could definitely ask in the Chamber on a subject that the Government have briefed out, but briefed out in a particular way, and the Table Office is not quite sure whether it should allow the question to go through. Most people would agree that Members of the House ought to be able to ask questions about such things, and it is for the Government to then say either, “We’re not going to tell you,” or, “Here is the detail.” We feel that MPs should not be told, “You can’t ask a question on something like that.”

That is true for FOIs as well, isn’t it? You know that a Department holds information, you have an idea of what that information is, and you are trying to frame the FOI or the written parliamentary question to appropriately capture it. I think last week we discussed how written parliamentary questions should be a very meaningful way for parliamentarians to engage with Government and should be our first port of call. If there is a feeling that the Government are utilising that process to not answer or obfuscate, that needs to be addressed.

We would like to see some clarity given to the Table Office, so that it knows what it can let through. We do not want to get rid of the factual basis rule altogether, but we think that there should be more scope for Members to ask questions. Often the Government blocks what we would consider to be perfectly legitimate questions. Once the Government have blocked, there is then a period when the Table Office—understandably, because of the rules—feels that it cannot allow similar questions. We often try to reframe the question in a slightly different way so that we can go again, because we feel that the obstruction was unreasonable. I would like it if the Table Office were reassured that that is okay. If the Government want to push us back again, they are at liberty to do so, but it should be the Government saying, “We’re not going to give you the information,” rather than the Table Office saying, “You can’t have access to the information.” On readily available information, “readily available” is one of those concepts that sound perfectly reasonable in their expression, but often are not. That is to say, you might ask for some information that you cannot find online and be told that it is readily available on gov.uk, which is an enormous website that contains all Government information. If the Government or the Table Office feels that something is readily available, it ought to be able to point to it itself quite quickly. My team and I are pretty experienced at finding things, and if we can find things ourselves, we will, because that is much quicker than putting down a parliamentary question, whose answer will take days or longer to come back. The tension in the Table Office rules is revealed by the fact that the House of Lords Table Office often behaves in a more permissive way. I appreciate that the two Houses are separate and have their own rules, and that just because one House does something one way, that does not mean that the other House needs to. However, the end result of this process has been that my colleagues in the Lords often get answers to questions that I cannot table. That feels a bit wrong. It feels as if elected Members are not getting the same opportunities to ask questions as Members of the upper House. Ideally, the Commons would of its own volition synchronise its rules, or understanding of the rules, with those of the Lords so that we have similar access to questions. I put all this in the context that I know that the Table Office works very hard and is overburdened. But I think a little more clarity would enable it to get quite a lot of questions off its desk and into Government Departments where they belong and where they will not be a burden for the Table Office at all. They will be a burden on Government Departments, but it is Government Departments’ job to answer our questions.

Thank you very much. That takes us neatly to a question from James. Just so that colleagues are aware, the Minister in the Chamber is on their feet, so we expect a Division soon.

This follows on from what you have said; you may want to build on it, or you may feel that you have covered it already. You have said that you have a good working relationship with the Table Office, which is good to hear, but are there any areas in which you feel that the service offered by the Table Office in handling WPQs could be improved?

To be honest, we probably touched on it in relation to the last question, but I think we are expecting a lot of the Table Office. Alex is right to say that it is always as helpful as it can be and courteous in the way it carries out its work. But there is a resource issue in relation to the Table Office—there is no doubt about it—and in some ways that is potentially driven by the changes that we have seen on MemberHub: the access that can be delegated to staff and so on. There are basically more people who can submit work to the Table Office. It is therefore not surprising that the Table Office, from a resource perspective, may find things more challenging. That would be the key consideration that I would ask the Committee to look at further.

My colleagues would often find it easier to resolve queries via email, rather than by having to go into the Table Office in person, when they are about simple things. I understand the Table Office’s argument—“We’ll end up with email chains from 650 Members, and this will become a full-time job on its own”—but I think it would be useful to dig into whether anything can be done to speed up that process, for everyone’s benefit. We just want to find the system that is most effective in clearing queries as fast as possible. Having spoken to the Table Office, I know that it is open to that. I also know that it requires some of its capacity to solve the problems, but you may be able to assist it in finding solutions.

How satisfied are you with the timeliness of Government responses to written PQs?

I think we have been quite clear to the Committee already that we are not. We believe that the volume of written parliamentary questions, which is one of the things that this Committee is considering, has been driven by the delays in responses. I think we have all been in the Chamber when points of order have been made by Members in relation to timeliness of responses to written parliamentary questions, particularly named day questions. Also, I have spoken to colleagues who are submitting multiple short written parliamentary questions—again, I think I said that last week—where a longer question, if the system were working the way it should, would elicit the response that it seems to need multiple questions to get. There is no doubt that the Committee is looking at this because of the volume. The volume will obviously be part of the reason for the delays that we are seeing, but the delays appear to be excessive.

I totally concur. There are two reasons why Government Departments do not answer questions in a timely way. Sometimes, it is because they do not have capacity; I am afraid I would argue that this is one of their essential duties and they need to find capacity. The other reason is that it is not in their interest to answer the questions; that is obviously not acceptable and not in keeping with the ministerial code or the expectations of the House. Such a thing may exist, but if it does not, the Procedure Committee may wish to consider requiring some sort of league table of Government Departments by the volume of questions they receive and the speed at which they return them. That would probably encourage good behaviour.

That is an excellent suggestion. We have done that, and we have had low-performing Departments come before our Committee to ask them questions.

You are way ahead of me.

We have had written evidence from the Government, which said that “such high volumes inevitably impact the ability of departments to process and answer them quickly and effectively, and on the ability of policy teams to carry out their other responsibilities.” Do you both accept the suggestion that the volume of questions is placing significant pressure on the system? It may be taking Ministers’ and civil servants’ time away from other duties.

I would say two things. We discussed the reason for the volume last time. Partially, the uptick after a more fallow period after the election was because there were lots of new MPs learning how the House worked. It is also the case that when questionable things are going on in Government, that will attract attention. Obviously, the best way the Government can deal with that is to resolve those problems, but if the Government were to answer the questions directly, we would ask far fewer of them. Speaking for the official Opposition, the bulk of our questions are going after things where the Government will not answer a straight question and it makes us think that they have something to hide, so we will obviously chase that. Often, after a campaign to find out a piece of information, you find that you have gone through six months, many parliamentary questions and then an FOI at the end of it in order to reveal a piece of information that could have been given up six months ago after one parliamentary question. I sometimes think that Government Departments are their own worst enemy in this: if they were to stick to their obligations to be honest and transparent, they would not find that they get so many questions. I know from having been a Minister in three Government Departments up to 2024 that there are times when you get swamped as a Department, but it is incumbent on Ministers and the civil service to find capacity to deal with the backlog. Otherwise, you never get over it and it creates an ongoing problem. I do not think that it was a Department that I was in at the time, but I remember a Department saying, “Okay—we are going to take the next week and pull people in from other divisions to clear the backlog, because we are getting criticised in the House, and if we do not clear it, it will always be with us.” Sometimes you have to do that. Initial transparency is the Government’s friend, but being prepared to make temporary shifts in personnel to clear the backlog is also essential.

So, in your experience as a Minister, the volume of questions ends up detracting from other departmental priorities.

Yes, absolutely, but that tends to be the Department’s fault, rather than the fault of Members asking questions.

When I think about written parliamentary questions, there are two distinct types. There are the questions that Front Benchers—I am sitting here as the Chief Whip for the third party—ask in relation to their portfolio, and there is a political campaigning aspect to that. The other piece is Back Benchers, who might have particular departmental interests, but who often ask written parliamentary questions in relation to constituency casework. It is important that we keep that balance. For me, what drives a lot of written parliamentary questions, from a Front-Bencher perspective, is seeking information—[Interruption.]

Order. Sitting suspended for a Division in the House. On resuming—

We now resume our questions on written parliamentary questions. I was just asking the Lib Dem Chief Whip, Wendy Chamberlain, about the Government’s written evidence to our Committee, which suggested that the volume of questions coming in was taking Ministers and civil servants away from other responsibilities in Departments to answer them. Do you have any reflections on whether you found that to be credible evidence?

In my response before we suspended, I was talking about the different types of written parliamentary questions and categorising them as Front-Bench, departmentally focused questions and, potentially, Back-Bench, more constituency-focused questions. My view is that a lot of the time we are asking written parliamentary questions in relation to announcements that the Government have made about strategies, delivery plans and so on. That should not be a distraction from the workload, because those considerations should already be part of a Department’s thinking: “What questions will MPs ask, either on a constituency basis or an Opposition party basis, and what level of detail do we need to provide?” Then, when written parliamentary questions appeared, they would be much more straightforward to respond to, because the answers would be set and ready to go.

Yes.

How satisfied are you with the quality of Government responses to written questions? If you feel that the responses are unsatisfactory for any reason, what action would you take?

I would say that the Procedure Committee’s inquiry is part of Parliament’s response to the poor value that we are seeing from written parliamentary questions. I think we said last week, and I am sure Alex agreed, that we often found that the answers we were being given were pretty vague. That actually just meant that more written parliamentary questions were asked, and that multiple written parliamentary questions were asked, because we were not getting that information. I think it has also led to increased numbers of MPs submitting FOIs, as well as using the Commons Library. Part of it is about educating Members. If we should be going to the Library in the first instance, obviously Members and their staff should be doing that, but there is absolutely no doubt about the quality of responses that we are getting from Government. Again, we are all MPs and I am sure we have all heard points of order about that in the Chamber. I am sure that the Government’s evidence has talked about the volume of questions, and how that might detract; I am sure that that will be one of their arguments in relation to the quality of responses as well. But basically, in the current form, they are just not delivering the scrutiny of Government Departments to which Parliament has the right.

I think we touched on this last time: at the most basic level, the Government and Ministers have a responsibility, in “Erskine May” and under the ministerial code, to be open and transparent. That is to say that they should share information with us, with caveats. Those caveats are quite clearly laid out: things that are sub judice, the formulation of policy, private information about specific individuals and so on. We understand that in normal times those things are off limits. But often, when we ask questions, the Government say things like, “Well, we don’t have any plans to publish that.” That is a bit of a circular argument. It’s like, “Well, we’re telling you to make a plan to publish it, because we’ve asked you about it. If you don’t have a good reason not to, under the ministerial code and in line with “Erskine May” and the 1997 resolution of the House, you should cough it up.” If we get an answer like that, obviously we will try again and again and again. Eventually, we will end up making FOIs and then we will get the information. We get answers like “No plans to publish” or “Not subject to external publication”—well, says who, and why? If there is a public duty test, tell us what the public duty test is; explain why you are not publishing it. “Not routinely published” is the same: if it were routinely published, we would not have to ask a question to get it. Then there are more devious answers. Sometimes answers will point to data that does not exist, such as pointing to datasets that do not contain the information that we have asked for. Sometimes, as we touched on with gov.uk, we get the needle-in-a-haystack approach, which is, “Yes, the information exists; it is somewhere in all of the Government’s published data.” The ease with which Government Departments should be able to provide hyperlinks really could deal with that. Sometimes we get the Government answering a different question from the one that was asked. All this is set out in the written evidence that I provided to the Committee. Under these circumstances, the best thing would probably be if there were an understanding with the Table Office that we could ask pursuant questions to say, “What is the public duty test here on not providing the information we have requested?” You can tell us it does not exist—that is fine; we would accept that to a certain extent—or you can justify why you are not handing it over, but just saying, “We are not giving it to you” is definitely not in the spirit of the rules.

Would the action that you would take be to ask further questions or raise a point of order?

Yes, we might get to that. We might draw attention to it on the Floor of the House, or we might use FOI. As I say, some Government Departments do not understand that when they try to hide things from us, it makes us believe that there is something worth finding. Often, they would do better just to tell us what it is and show us that there are more fun ways of spending our time.

I will follow up on that before I ask my substantive question. Alex, I suppose it depends how charitable you are going to be, but you mentioned examples where the data is not in the datasets. Is that potentially because a junior civil servant is pulling it together, or the Minister is not on top of their brief and checking the dataset before it is sent out, or is it the Department deliberately trying to slow down the Opposition?

You would need to ask the Government Departments.

What about when you were a Minister?

Oh, it would never have been the Minister’s fault in those circumstances! Of course mistakes happen, and sometimes political games are played, but what we ought to move towards, in line with the rules of the House and the rules for Ministers, is the Government either being open about why they are not handing things over, or saying, “We do not have that information,” or “Here’s where it is.” The information might be published, but that does not mean that anybody knows where it is. If we do not know where it is and the Table Office does not know where it is, the chances are that it is not readily available.

I will move on to my substantive question, which you will be pleased to hear is the final question of the session: are there any other matters relating to your or your colleagues’ experiences of WPQs that you would like to place on the record? It is a catch-all question at the end.

I do not think that there is anything else. We have covered the main themes. It is very good that the Procedure Committee is also reaching out to Back Benchers to get their input on written parliamentary questions. Alex has just mentioned political games, which may be too strong a term. The Opposition, whether that be the official Opposition or other parties, are politicians, and we are looking for information from a political perspective, but for Back Benchers, in the main, it is in relation to constituent casework. For many of us, that is the most important part of our work and the service that we want to deliver to our constituents. I would be very interested to read the session you have with them, because that is some of the most critical work that written parliamentary questions deliver.

I agree with what Wendy says. To recap a point that we have been over several times, because it is very important, there is a slight danger that over time we will end up in a system where MPs stop relying on parliamentary questions because the process is too slow and the outcome is unreliable when you know that if you put in an FOI, the Government have a legal obligation to respond to you within 28 days, or whatever it is. That would be sad, inconvenient for Members and bad for Government. It is quite right that people who are elected to represent their constituents and who work in official Opposition positions or on Select Committees can ask Government Departments for information reasonably quickly, and that it will be provided. My concern is that we are sliding away from a good long-standing practice of the House into a more legalistic game through FOI. That is to be avoided.

This is where the role of the House in educating the wider public is very important. I found it interesting that in the last Parliament there were a number of newspaper articles that asked, “How hard is your MP working?”, and written parliamentary questions were part of that. Dare I say it, I was very happy to do well in those assessments. I think I would do less well now, given that I am Chief Whip for the third party. The volume of parliamentary questions is part of what the Committee is looking at. If the assessment of how good your MP is includes the volume of written parliamentary questions that they input, and not other measures, I do not think we should be surprised to see an increase. I think that education for the wider public around how parliamentary questions can and should be used is also important.

My last question was going to be about exactly that. Do you think that that has driven a change since those league tables were published and Members have jumped on written parliamentary questions as the easiest way to get up that league table? Have any colleagues expressed that concern to you?

From a personal perspective, no, but people are always looking for qualitative and quantitative data to rank MPs. Our performance as MPs will always be, ultimately, entirely subjective and, rightly, our constituents will decide accordingly. But there is no doubt that some of that more quantitative stuff will have an impact. When we were all first elected, we wanted to speak in the Chamber as much as possible, to be seen and be visible. I remember the now Leader of the House saying to me that he was brought in to see Betty Boothroyd, the then Speaker, and she said, “You’ll get to speak three times a Session.” There is no doubt that times have changed. As a House, we need to think about how we respond appropriately to those changes externally.

That is a nice way of rounding off our evidence session. If there is anything further that either of you wants to bring to the Committee’s attention, we will be happy to hear from you in writing. If you write to us, the Clerks will make sure that we see it promptly.