The House of Lords, like the Commons, has a Question Time, though it differs in important respects from the Commons. In addition to oral questions, it is possible to table questions for written answer. The Government is expected to answer a written question within ten working days. Most Departments manage to do so, but following complaints about how long some Departments took to answer, the practice was introduced of publishing in the daily House of Lords Business details of questions that remain unanswered after ten working days. This is intended as a means of shaming Departments.
At the moment, 29 questions remain unanswered. Of these, 19 are due to be answered by the Department for Education and five by the Cabinet Office. Of the Cabinet Office questions, two are mine. One was supposed to be answered by 8 June and the other by 13 June. The first asks what training previously provided to ministers and senior civil servants by the National School of Government is not provided by Civil Service Learning. (The National School of Government was abolished earlier this year, and replaced by a predominantly web-based method of training known as Civil Service Learning.) The second asks how many civil servants of Permanent Secretary or equivalent rank presently in post have received dedicated training on the constitutional significance of Parliament and the conventions governing the relationship between Parliament and Government; and whether it is a requirement that those appointed as Permanent Secretaries have received such training.
The questions, especially the latter, arise out of my interest in pursuing the requirement of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 – section 3(6) – which places an obligation on the Minister for the Civil Service (the PM) to have regard to the need to ensure that civil servants who advise Ministers are aware of the constitutional significance of Parliament and of the conventions governing the relationship between Parliament and Her Majesty’s Government. If I don’t get answers soon, I may resort to tabling a question asking when I will be receiving answers!
UPDATE: Lo and behold, the answers arrive! Given the content, it is not clear why they took so long to draft. They don’t really provide substantive responses, which could be part of the reason they took so long….
One must be careful, we don’t want to undermine public confidence or in any way suggest that Mr Speaker is running a knocking shop.
Dear Lord Norton.
I shall tend to think that this problem resides in the administrative structure of the Parliament which needs to be reorganised in order to meet the expectations of the huge volume of administrative jobs in the drafting of so many questions to be answered.As a result I do think additional recruitment of administrative clerks in both the house of lords and the Minstries is a must, to ensure the smooth trend of the questions and answers in the proper time .
Secondly , dear Lord, it does seem to me that a 10 days period time to answer so many questions is not enough for those ministers especially where statistical references are concerned . I would suggest a period of 2 weeks to allow them to answer all the questions .
God bless the United Kingdom. God save the QUEEN.
Nazma FOURRE
I thought “publicly naming” aimed to ‘blame’ as well as secondarily to ‘shame’, the alleged offender ?
The need here is surely to have every question ‘timely answered’
(yet for some questions ten days could be far too long, a ‘useless-eternity’,
an instance being currently ‘going to war with ‘the destructively-&-inhumanly-dictatorial, Syrian tyranny’;
whilst others timeframes may extend into months even years,
the latter instantiations would no doubt be mostly concerning Constitutional Changes, wherein one might be lucky to get a responsible and constructive answer within 100 years).
So one would have thought that the ‘naming’ and ‘leaking’ to the Public about a Department’s apparent tardiness, would have a main ‘smoke-alarm’ aim;
more akin to “Call out the crisis-management” than to
“This is WickedLeaks at your Civic Service”.
——
One of the principles of Conflict Resolution is:
Tackle the problem
rather than
Attacking the persons.
========
Democratic Instantiation from a Citizen:
There have been repeatedly submitted, for several years, four questions asking for the Government to give every Recipient of State Welfare Payments the information and means for independently calculating whether s/he is being (or ever has been) over- or under- paid;
a kindred question being “What is the Government doing to ‘tie’ welfare-payments to the Essential-Expenses of each recipient ?
(Sub-instance: I telephoned the Australian Pensions Department on behalf of my caree neighbour who had been unknowingly overpaid for ten-years (and although the Laws are clearly Unreasonable and ‘Divine-Right-of-Government’-like,-in the end the frail, impaired, disabled and educationally-disadvantaged lady was judged wholly guilty and must repay the whole of that Debt hiddenly-originated by the Australian Government itself),
and I was told
(‘) The Government pays what it can afford to pay.
The Government does not take into account even the recipient’s unavoidable expenses.
The Government considers the way a recipient spends their entitlement to be their private affair and neither interferes with nor requires accountability from the recipient(‘).
Note 1: Neither has the UK Government, nor its NGOs such as the Citizens Advice Bureau and Mind, recognised these needs, and constructively answered the above questions as yet.
Note 2: This submission is almost 400 words long; so if it can not be published on such a ‘direct-with-public’ e-site as this Lords of the Blog one,
then I feel I have to put it on the opening welcome-page of my non-profit democratic-citizen’s website
http://www.minority-of-one.net
or on
http://www.lifefresh.co.uk
(which I don’t like doing because I am alone and can not always, noblesse-oblige-wise, remove questions and submissions which have eventually been published or properly answered by responsible-parties).
Dear Lord Norton,
It does seem to me that the election of lords is not a good solution as lords are not acquainted with the public as much as Members of Parliament do,and the choice of electors might be confused in their election of their lords.
The election of lords smells the end of the monarchical tradition and the house of lords.
I shall request if I might to reintegrate the hereditary peers who have lost their rights since the reform acts of 1999 and to continue the appointments of peers for democratical equality ratio in their numbers with those of the 699 members of Parliament.This would be avantageous so far as laws are voted by both houses.
God bless the United Kingdom. God save the QUEEN.
Nazma FOURRE
@Lord Norton:
Now you mustn’t be unfair, it is after all, holiday season.