Management Toolkit

Lords call for parliament to get more online

Kable

Published: 17 Jul 2009 15:49 BST

A House of Lords committee has called for parliament to make greater use of the internet to engage with the public.

The Information Committee has issued a report, Are the Lords listening? Creating connections between people and Parliament, that says the House should do more to communicate its activity and make it easier for people to understand its work.

The report says parliament does well at using its website to inform people, but needs to continually develop the way it uses the internet, especially in providing a channel for two-way communication.

Among the recommendations are a pilot exercise in which an online debate is run in parallel with a debate in the Lords chamber, and that pre-legislative scrutiny committees should invite public comments on draft bills through parliament's website. It also says outsiders should be allowed to embed the House's proceedings on their websites to distribute the proceedings as widely as possible.

The committee has already invited the BBC and the House of Lords administration to see how they can work together on the BBC's forthcoming Democracy Live website.

The report also addressed the issue of making parliamentary data more widely available. The committee said it is impressed with developments in the online Hansard, but points to problems such as in moving from one data set to another.

"If people cannot readily find information on the parliamentary website it might as well not be there," the report says.

To remedy this, it recommends further integration of the various information sets — such as bills, Hansard and records of division — on the parliamentary website, and that they are presented in a way to make legislation more transparent. It also says it should be possible to examine online how a bill was amended in parliament, and that the House should look at creating a system of electronic alerts on the progress of particular bills.

It also responds to the campaign for the re-use of public-sector information by advocating that data from the House should be made available online in an open standardised format that allows people to analyse and re-use it.