Speeches by Burghart.

“Yes, absolutely.”

“Neither of us can understand why we would not get a straight answer to that, particularly because I suspect very strongly, based on previous precedent, that if we were to make a freedom of information request for that information, we would receive an answer within 28 days. Having received another non-answer, that is pr…”

“I do not wish to mislead the Committee, but I imagine that was a named day question because, obviously, we had a number of debates in the Chamber that touched on Labour Together and the potential conflict of interest within the propriety and ethics team. I would need to check, but I imagine that I would have seen that …”

“Off the top of my head, Sir Christopher, I do not remember. I am very happy to go away and find out for you.”

“Obviously, there are times when one just wants an answer quickly—because perhaps there is a parliamentary debate coming up, or you have got oral questions or whatever. One is to hit a deadline. I certainly use named day parliamentary questions when I think I am going to have to wait a very long time for an answer. I kn…”

“We had a case yesterday. We have been asking questions about how money was spent on the refurbishment of Downing Street. They were repeated questions over probably a five-month period saying, “Here’s the budget. We can see it has been spent. What has it been spent on?” We got stonewalled repeatedly, and then we put in …”

“I will say this now, but it might be relevant to other things that we will talk about later. There is clear disparity in the regimes in that with an FOI there is a clear appeals process. MPs do not have the appeals process if the Government are clearly not fulfilling their obligations to the House. I have no simple sol…”

“Building on what Wendy just said, if we take a step back and look at how the House expects Ministers to behave, looking in “Erskine May”, the ministerial code and the Nolan principles, there is a very clear duty to be open and accountable. Indeed, it is explicit in the ministerial code, in “Erskine May” and from a 1997…”

“We certainly do. This is a big topic. As you may have seen in my submission, this is a big issue that we are concerned with. It is very useful to have parliamentary questions and the FOI regime, but increasingly we are finding with some Government Departments that we do not get answers through parliamentary questions, …”

“As a Member of Parliament and as a Member of the Front Bench, you obviously have people within the party who are sometimes not in Parliament who suggest parliamentary questions for you to ask, but any question I ask is my question. It will always go through the filter of what my team and I are doing. It would be quite …”

“I agree with what Wendy said.”

“I haven’t considered this one deeply. One should look at the hours of the House. It is certainly conceivable that something might be said in Parliament that a Member then wants to dig into. On Mondays, we are here till 10 pm, on Tuesdays till 7 pm and so on. I would not want us to end up in the position where, as Wendy…”

“Just to probe that, why do you ask the question? What would be the driver for change?”

“I would not because, as I say, when the House is sitting you have an alternative, which is to come in in person and speak to the Table Office. You just do not have that if you represent a seat in Scotland or even further afield, so it makes sense that the calibration is slightly different during recess.”

“Research does not stop because it is recess or because you are in your constituency. There is great value in being able to continue to put down questions, even if they are not submitted to Departments until the House returns, so I think that is helpful. When we are here, there is obviously a limit on how many questions…”

“Thank you very much for the opportunity to give evidence to the Committee. I am grateful to you all for doing this inquiry, because, as I am sure we will uncover over this session, there are necessary improvements that can be made to the way things work. As we all know, written parliamentary questions are a fundamental…”

“Particularly in the context of receiving large numbers of inadequate responses, I could see that the Government might well say, “We will put a limit, and then we will fill up that limit with inadequate answers.” That would significantly reduce the level of scrutiny that the Executive would receive, so I would be quite …”

“No, I don’t agree.”

“I think that AI is increasingly going to be used in work and life, across the board. The key thing, obviously, is that you have a Member who owns what the question is. Sometimes a suggested question might be drafted by a researcher, and sometimes in the future it might be drafted by AI, but ultimately, if I ask a quest…”

“I would raise two things about what you have just said. After a kind of pause at the start, I think that the uptick is just representative of the fact that we had a huge number of new MPs in this Parliament who probably—I know from when I was new—took a little time to work out what mechanisms were useful to them in the…”