Submitting evidence to Parliamentary inquiries is one of the ways in which we can have an effect on the way things work in this country.
As you may recall, we recently contributed to the Scottish Parliament’s Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee on Freedom of Information reform, and now we’ve submitted written evidence to the UK Procedure Committee’s inquiry on Written Questions.
This time, we’re making the case for more alignment between FOI requests and Parliament’s Written Questions system. Written Questions are a mechanism by which MPs and Lords can hold Ministers to account, in much the same way that the public can request information from government authorities through FOI.
We have recommended that a rejected parliamentary question should be retrospectively converted to an FOI request to allow making an appeal; and that given the influence of FOI in Parliament (both by parliamentarians, and in how they use FOI requests made by others), government statistics on FOI effectiveness should be scrutinised alongside Written Question statistics.
Finally, reflecting one of the findings in our WhoFundsThem work, we think that when a Member submits a Written Question and declares an interest, they should be required to say what that interest is.
For much more detail on each of these points, you can see our submission on the Parliament website.
