Some colleagues are complaining that their in-boxes are being clogged with invitations to join particular all-party groups. Many are established groups being re-formed in the new Parliament and others are new creations. I have previously written about the growth in the number of such groups.
Such groups can form a useful purpose in providing a forum for like-minded parliamentarians to discuss a particular issue and to engage with people outside Parliament involved in the area. Some are extremely active (as on breast cancer, for example), others largely exist in name only.
I don’t have a problem with all the e-mails. It is fairly easy to delete those that relate to all-party groups in which one does not have an interest, and I’m highly selective. I join very few. I recognise the point about the sheer number of such groups. There seems to be a group now for virtually everything. Next week, there will be more than fifty all-party groups holding meetings. These include the CND group, the group for Paediatric Mobility, the Historic Vehicles Group, the Bolivia Group, and the Oil and Gas Group. The activity of such groups does impose an opportunity cost.
Though many parliamentarians express the view that there are too many groups, they are inclined to believe this does not include the groups in which they are involved. There are certain restrictions that apply in setting up groups (the number of signatures to be obtained on a cross-party basis for example) and I am not sure if one should increase those restrictions or simply let what amount to market forces operate. If parliamentarians wish to establish such groups, why shouldn’t they?
The People have great strings of Needs.
There is at least an equal number of Hows to match those needs.
The job and duty of Governance is to
.1 list every one of those needs
.2 add to each an importance and time-line
urgency
,3 add to each at least one possible How
.4 conduct public-questionnaires to place
all those entries into order-of-
preference.
Before long the List will stabilise and can be numbered, say 100 down as far as 1 for number-of-‘votes’ per item.
NB No item gets dropped of or allowed to ‘slip through a crack in the table or a gap between the floorboards.
Each prospective parliamentary-advocate and party-of-advocates (MPs and Lords, no ampersand)publishes his’her’its List prioritisation as an elctioneering manifesto.
The hustings steeplechases begin, and finally The People do the usual pencil-marks on a voting-slip in favour of whosoever has in that voter’s view ‘got the list right’.
I see no problem, my lords.
All-party groups ?
Better than no-party groups or autocratic-party groups;
even better than Eclectic groups’; all of which ‘dump’ numerous needs (and hows) from such necessary-and-sufficient Total Lists, and all of which thereby over-feed their own needs and hows.
Using a list stretching from 0001 to 1000 could work easily, too.
The main need is for every need to remain on the table, pre- during- and post-legislation; in fact, I strongly suggest that every need including need #0001 be catered for in every relevant Bill.
That is what is meant by win-win-win; in which there has to be no room whatsoever for Lose-lose-lose, Win-lose-lose, nor even Win-win-win-win-win-lose !
Let’s go for reforms that will set up win-win-win Governance.
Add please to my above previous:
Throughout the organisation and administration of this All-Needs Governance List the already recommended Cooperative Problem Solving, Collaborative Conflict Resolution, and All-Round Six Thinking-Skills would be ‘indispensable’, my lords.
Lord Norton, I want to introduce you to a particular branch of science that you may not have come across as an academic that of ‘Industrial Engineering’.
What has inspired this post is a combination of Lord Blagger and his efficiency fixations and recently having had to listen to an MCSE bemoaning the lost opportunities and efficiencies of government IT infrastructures maintained and designed by third party providers across its agencies.
There are many peers in the house that will have some familiarity with Industrial Engineering as manufacturing and usually in the form of time and motion studies. However, very few British companies if any employ a full blown Industrial Engineering department as an executive function tasked with improving processes at all levels of the enterprise. Why, senior management job protection?
You will also be surprised to learn that only four UK universities service this branch of science academically. This says a lot about our manufacturing base compared with that of say the USA or the Philippines.
I find it quite astonishing that governments have not taken to creating a department on a par with the National Audit Office tasked with improving processes at every level of government including Parliament. The task is somewhat different from the NAOs role of demonstrating value for money.
If we are to see efficiencies throughout the public sector including local government then it seems sensible that an executive branch of state should take up the challenge for us. Alas, at every level of state one would find opposition to this because despite the reality every public sector worker including peers and MPs expect to have a job for life and the whole ethos is about maintaining job protection.
Ref: Postgraduate Curriculum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_engineering
United Kingdom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_with_industrial_engineering_faculty
May I suggest that a portal for all APGs be set up, with a public blog per group in which they actively encourage debate with the public.
I am concerned that some seem to be acting as old-fashioned closed shops, missing the point of their raison d’être. Or, to use the modern vernacular recently championed on this blog, they are well dodgy.
laddytizzy: A very good point. Some are much better at engagement than others. To some extent, it is affected by the resources available to each group.
From an external perspective, I do think that these groups are to be encouraged, and can make Westminster more accessible. It is so much easier if one can find a cross party group interested in a particular issue than having to research through all the MPs and peers from scratch or, even worse, rely on hit and miss, with all the implications for inboxes and mailbags at that end.
The encouragement of Westminster’s inhabitants to see things from a cross-party perspective is also very positive.
But then, given that many exist in name only, as you say, perhaps we are being sent false signals? Somewhat irritating for outsiders to contact a group on whatever, only to discover (if we do) that it does not exist in practice.
Could mergers be a possibility in some cases? A Bolivia group, perhaps, into a larger South America group, a Paediatric Mobility group into a general Paediatric group? Or are there too many big fish in small pools to keep happy?
Would it perhaps be an idea for groups to officially dissolve should they fail to hold a quorate meeting, say, at least once a month while Parliament is in session, given that they could always reform if there’s the interest?
Stephen Paterson: I very much agree with your comments. They can be a very good thing, but there is the danger of being sent false or misleading signals. There are some minimum requirements regarding meetings, primarily in relation to holding an AGM, and I have wondered whether there may be a case for monitoring the number of meetings and, indeed, the attendance, but there are resource implications. Some groups do on occasional hold meetings jointly with other groups, but I take your point about mergers. At the moment, the trend seems to be in the other direction.
Quite a few only meet once a year but now with e-list posts, some groups might exist only on members’ email inbox.