New opportunities for the public to engage with parliament

The Government is proposing to introduce a ‘public reading stage’ for Bills to give the public an opportunity to comment on proposed legislation online. The new proposals are being trialled on the Protection of Freedoms Bill and members of the public were invited to submit comments on the Bill’s clauses.

This is an interesting new development in the Government’s attempts to open up Government to a wider audience. However, like any process, it will require evaluation to ensure it’s a valuable way for the public to engage.

For example, questions have been raised about accessibility. Unlike Green or White papers, legislation is not written to be read by a lay audience. The complexity of the legislative process and the technicalities of the language employed are such that this stage is a challenging one in which to engage the public. If people are to give valuable input they may need further support and information. While Bill explanatory notes are helpful, they are also very dense. Although legislation is necessarily complex, steps could be taken to make it more accessible, such as explanations integrated with the Bill itself, hyperlinks to useful resources or a glossary.

As we suggested in the bulletin last year, during the first stage of public engagement for the Protection of Freedoms Bill, it is also important to consider how the process could be designed to be more deliberative, learning from some of the growing body of knowledge on creating constructive conversations online.

To think about how to move forward, the Government will need to take time to assess the results this time round. It needs to ask:

• Who has engaged and how are they engaging?
• How much are people interacting, and returning to the site to reply to fellow participants?
• Is the site encouraging responses largely from campaigners and experts or from a wide range of diverse people?

In particular, the Government needs to assess the exercise against its own aims of ‘improv[ing] the level of debate and scrutiny of bills’ creating ‘better laws – and more trust in our politics’.