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Government Communications

My Lords, I will come to our esteemed chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, at the end of my speech. I want to begin by commending the contribution of my noble friend Lord Parekh. He is not a member of the Communications Committee, but his measured and non-partisan analysis of the appalling political culture into which we have sunk in the past few years could make one feel—as I often do these days—like cutting one’s throat, while at the same time giving one a reason to feel that perhaps all is not lost and that we can recover from this slough of despond into which we seem to have fallen. Perhaps then we can find ways of making those of us directly involved in the political process, those commenting on it and the public whom we all seek to serve not only feel better but look better. I intend to make a very short contribution to the debate, not least because most things have already been said, as is inevitably the case when you are the tail-end Charlie. I want to make three brief points. First, I do not want to get too far into the vexed territory of special advisers. I think that enough has been said on that subject here and, unfortunately, elsewhere. I am sure that your Lordships will be glad to hear that I do not feel compelled to add to that quantum, nor do I want to go too much into "on the record" and "off the record" briefing, which was none the less an interesting element of some of the evidence we heard. I would recommend to noble Lords who have not read the report in detail to look at that evidence, particularly from some of the journalists. However, I will just observe that the tension between the wish of any Government to be open and their anxiety to be in control of the interpretation of their policies has been around a long time. It seems to me unlikely that it will ever go away, no matter what forms of structures are put in place. When this tension is allied to a natural journalistic fondness for having an inside track, the phenomenon of the unattributable briefing and the prevalence of unnamed "senior sources" will continue to influence our perception of how we are governed as it comes to us via the media. I would refer your Lordships to the evidence we heard from the respected Guardian journalist, Jackie Ashley. Speaking of her off-the-record contacts, she said: ""What they say to me when they know it is unattributable is what they actually think … What do I do as a journalist? Do I say I will not take an unattributable quote, so I am not going to represent what you and a lot of your colleagues are saying, or do I say I will only take something with your name to it, in which case I am not giving the readers a true sense of what is happening in Parliament?"." I refer to that quote because what it points up is that we all live to some extent in an ambivalent relationship to the way that information is conveyed. We want to feel, when we read about the Government—any Government—in the newspapers or on websites or wherever, that we are getting information that the Government do not want to give us. That is part of what it is to be human. We think that we are entitled to know things that people do not want to tell us, and we believe that what we do not know is being withheld from us for malign and deliberate reasons. At the same time, we want to feel that everything is on the record, everything is open to us and that there is no culture of secrecy. We would be really miserable if there were no culture of secrecy; it would leave us with nothing to feel paranoid about. We need to examine our own motives as citizens in thinking about how government information is conveyed. It is clear from much of the evidence that we heard that there is still value in a system of regular, on-the-record press briefings and that these should be as open and as accessible as possible, and that, in the main, major policy announcements should be made to Parliament before they are shared with John Humphrys. I am glad to see that the Government’s response reinforces this view, albeit a little complacently, as others has pointed out. I hope that my noble friend will underline this again, when he comes to reply. On the role of the voluntary sector, we heard evidence, chiefly from the CABs, as other noble Lords have mentioned, that there is work to do to ensure that a lot of the important information that the Government need to provide to citizens, the sort of information that rarely gets anywhere near the news—nitty-gritty stuff about tax, healthcare, education and benefits—to which people need access to improve, or just get on with, their lives, is still not getting through as efficiently as it should. The voluntary sector is absolutely crucial to improving the penetration of this kind of information into harder-to-reach sections of the community, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Eccles, referred, which perhaps do not have access to computers or are hindered through language or cultural difficulties from using the most widely available routes to information. I cannot compete with the experience and depth of knowledge of my colleagues the noble Baronesses, Lady Howe and Lady Eccles, on this issue, but I would ask my noble friend if he could say a bit more than is in the Government’s response about how better working with the voluntary sector is to be achieved, and specifically about the role of the Office of the Third Sector in bringing about a more integrated approach across departments to improve the take-up of benefits. The CAB’s evidence on what it described as the "fragmented" administration of benefits between departments was very telling. Finally, I address the issue raised principally by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, and by others as well, on the numbers of people employed in government communications. My noble friend Lord Grocott, who is not in his place today, was a formidable member of this committee until a few months ago, and I mean no disrespect to his successor when I say that he is missed. As the committee embarked on the inquiry that gave rise to this report, and at intervals throughout, my noble friend reminded us that when thinking about government communications, we should not only be considering how the Government communicate with citizens, but crucially how the citizen communicates with the Government. Nowadays, the range of ways in which he or she can do that is vast—far greater than we could have imagined a generation ago. There are websites, blogs, e-mail, e-petitions, requests under Freedom of Information legislation, telephones and there is even old-fashioned snail mail, which still works. There are, no doubt, many more which I have not identified. The figures provided by the Department of Health—I refer your Lordships to pages 86 to 90 of the report—are instructive in terms of the numbers of ways in which communication from the citizen to departments is being conducted. Of course, quite a lot of this traffic is generated by journalists and others with a professional rather than a personal interest in eliciting information, but it all adds up to a great deal of what might be called noise in the system and to the necessity for a lot of people to be engaged in trying to manage it and make sense of it. Although the committee expressed concerns about the numbers and the costs of communications staff in government departments, I do not find it too hard to understand why there has been in some cases a significant increase in both over recent years. There is a high expectation among certain groups that information will be forthcoming quickly and that it will be both accurate and comprehensive. This is not an unreasonable expectation, of course, but it is not always easy to meet, given the number of different ways in which it can be demanded. At present we see—this was the thrust of the contribution made by my noble friend Lord Parekh—an exceptionally low level of trust in, and a high level of pretty intrusive interrogation of, government information. Money spent on attempting to make sure that it is as robust as it can be seems to me to be in principle a good investment, although clearly such expenditure should be regularly and rigorously reviewed. I said that I would be brief but I have not been; I am sorry about that. I add only my thanks to our chairman for leading us so ably on this occasion, as he has on all others, and for his excellent, although occasionally discomfiting, opening speech. I also add my thanks to our team of clerks, who provided us with their usual excellent service. As ever with these inquiries, I learnt a huge amount more than I contributed. However, rather more importantly than adding to the sum of my knowledge, the report provides, I believe, a valuable and timely overview of a highly topical set of issues. I hope that the Government will take its recommendations seriously.