Speeches by Burghart.

“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 ove…”

“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 …”

“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 i…”

“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 …”

“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 an…”

“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 ans…”

“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…”

“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…”

“As you touched on, when you get poor answers, it encourages you to try again because you believe that the Government are hiding something. When we get answers of the sort that Christopher has just raised, we seek more information, so it generates more work. Also, at the start of a Parliament, when you have new Minister…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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…”