I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while, but then I’ve been meaning to do a bunch of stuff.
Below is the letter I wrote to Beverley Hughes, the Minister who told Parliament that only 2000 people had responded to the ID Cards consultation, when we know for a fact that five thousand or so replied via our Website. It’s not a ball-buster, I’m afraid, because we did want to open up some sort of communication channel. Also, mad political haranguing works a lot better on Newsnight than it does in a private letter. As the letter rather sinisterly implies, we’re saving the louder bleating until later.
We sent this a couple of weeks ago. We still haven’t heard a reply. So now we’re stepping up the sabre-rattling a bit.
Dear Beverley,
I’ve been eagerly looking forward to your department’s report on the Entitlement Card consultation you concluded earlier this year. I’m one of a who participated in the discussion, along with five thousand others who entered in their opinions of your paper via http://www.stand.org.uk/ , a Website I help run.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I read in Hansard for April 28th that you had only received two thousand replies in total to the consultation.
I hear that you have decided to collapse all five thousand communications that you received via our site into a single vote.
[ This hint came from “ministerial sources” – which is to say, somebody who works closer to government than us told us that he’d heard that this happened. ].
I suppose the idea is that all five thousand entries were engineered by us, or that they all come from members of the same vast organisation, speaking as one united voice.
The chilling reality – chilling, at least, for me – is that STAND is about four or five somewhat stressed looking people, working part-time from their homes and occasionally gathering in a pub. And we can’t even agree on which pub, let alone a coherent political platform.
Aware of our own limitations, we try and keep as thin an interface between us, and what we feel is our job – which is putting people online in touch with the parliamentary process. We do enough to achieve just that, then step out of the way and let you people talk amongst yourselves.
That does have some political connotations. We’re mostly interested in putting people in touch with Parliament via the Net. In the online world some political areas are hotter than others. Digital security; censorship; the telecoms industry and radio spectrum allocation; privacy and large-scale computer initiatives; digital democracy itself. These are the topics that excite the most debate online.
Sometimes, as the name implies, we take a STAND on one of these issues. The ID Cards consultation was one. We said we thought ID cards were a bad idea.
But more importantly, we said we thought that the consultation had not sought out critical views during its collection period.
In order to solicit opinions from a wider base than previously, we put together a link between the Web and your consultation email address (and, for good measure, let people contact their local MP on the matter). We publicised it in a few areas where people who are online a lot tend to gather.
We felt that most people using our service would be against the ID card – but not exclusively. We wanted people who felt that the ID card was a good idea should also have a say. Accordingly, we allowed people to write whatever they wanted using our system. And so, as far as we can gather, they did.
Now we hear that you are viewing all of those separately considered opinions as one collective petition.
Apart from being somewhat concerned for the people who expressed a positive opinion being ascribed into what I presume would be a single negative vote, this seems to lead to a terrible waste of resources, opportunity and time on both our sides.
Frankly, if we were forewarned that this would happen, we would have told people to sign a petition (in fact, two petitions), and engineered some way of conveying that to you. It would certainly have saved some time and effort on both our sides.
As it is, I’m pretty disappointed. And I don’t think I’m the only one.
I feel that there were a lot of people involved in the ID Card consultation for whom this would be their first experience of directly contributing to a government initiative. To turn to them now and explain that their voice counts for nothing – or 1/5000th of a voice, whichever is greater – seems to me to convey the exact opposite of what a consultation is meant to achieve. They spent a lot of time working on their thoughts: far more, I’d wager, than we spent enabling their thoughts to be forwarded. They’re going to feel more disenfranchised than ever after this.
Obviously, we’re going to contest this decision, and are proceeding to kick up the usual fuss through the usual channels.
But, to be honest, whatever happens here, the most important step for us is to ensure that this never happens again. We’re going to continue to put together feedback loops to link what you do, to what the wider public thinks. That’s something that i think we can all agree is a good thing.
We’d love to avoid such short-circuits in the future. What we really need to proceed is solid criteria by which contributions are decided to come from one source, or from many.
Would your department – perhaps in co-operation with the Cabinet Office – be prepared to draft a quick set of guidelines for this?
It would make our life easier; I think you would make better informed decisions from a wider variety of sources; and your consultations would be rather less controversial.
Best wishes,
Danny O’Brien
— standing in for Stand.org.uk