Useful tools: Write to Them

One of the most useful tools for interacting with party politics, on the occasions it becomes necessary, is Write to Them. It always slightly startles me when I see someone encouraging people to write to their MP about an issue and not linking to Write to Them, because it's just so useful. So: a quick summary, to hopefully make it more widely known about.

Enter your postcode (they have advice if your postcode isn't obvious) and you will then be able to contact any of your elected representatives (local councils, devolved administrations, MPs, and European representatives) - advice on which representative deals with what - or any member of the House of Lords.

Essentially it takes all the boring work out of:

• Finding out who your representatives are
• Finding out what party your representatives are
• Finding out how to contact them
• Finding stamps, fax machines, or whatever devices are needed

...leaving much more time to do the necessary hard work of researching the issue and constructing a persuasive message.

Sadly, it can't guarantee a reply (and certainly not a useful one), but most messages are replied to within 2-3 weeks.

Useful tools: government consultations

On some issues, the government has a firm idea of what it wants to do, and it will go ahead and do it regardless of public opinion, expert advice, whether what it wants to do is even physically possible, and so on.

Government, however, is huge. The vast majority of issues it deals with never make it to Parliament itself, and are not so much of a party-political line in the sand. On these, the government departments tend to have more of an interest in making sure that their actions are reasonable, and that there are no embarassingly obvious-in-retrospect details that they happen to have overlooked.

Enter, the government consultation. It's easy to be cynical about them, since the majority of high-profile consultations are on the high-profile "we're doing this anyway" issues. The majority of consultations, however, are not high-profile. Some of them, the department running the consultation may consider itself lucky to get even 10 replies.

These consultations take place in the background - away from the shouting matches of Parliament, and the criticism of the tabloid press - and so they're one of the easier ways to get the government to actually listen. Of course, they won't be listening on a topic of supreme importance, but there is a good opportunity here to get some small improvements made.

I've responded to several of these "background" consultations, and in all cases the final proposal was better than the original proposal in at least one way that I had requested. Furthermore, in a couple of cases where the consultation results were published in enough detail, I was the only respondee raising certain points that became part of the final proposal.

This is not due to my secretly being an influential lobbyist (I'm not) or particularly persuasive (likewise) but because the set up of consultations is very favourable to the government listening, and because the response rate is so low that one's submissions rarely get lost in the noise.

It's therefore a great opportunity to get some non-default perspectives into government thinking.

So: a few tips for replying to consultations.

1. First, find your consultation. This is harder than it looks. Well-known organisations may get an invitation to the consultation, if it's relevant to their field. Ordinary citizens and residents do not. So, you either have to hear about it in passing elsewhere, or go looking for it. There is a search. It's not particularly good. (Still, this keeps most of the reactionary journalists away - too much effort for them - so the obscurity isn't all bad)
2. Remember that you don't need to answer all the questions. If you only have things to say on one or two, it's still worth saying them. You don't necessarily have to spend a lot of time replying.
3. If you are aware of research studies that support your argument, provide the references in your reply when summarising what they say. This will make it much easier for the civil servants who process your response to also obtain the research, if they want to.
4. "Form" responses to consultations are almost certainly pointless (though having several people co-sign a single submission is fine)
5. Check the deadlines. Consultations usually run for a few months, though because of the first point there's a fair chance you'll only find out about it a few days before the deadline.
6. Remember that you don't need to have formal qualifications or experience in an area to put forward an opinion. (Though it may be worthwhile to mention them, if you do). Generally you will be required to specify whether you are replying as an individual or on behalf of an organisation.
7. Submission formats for consultations vary. Try to use their preferred format unless it's inaccessible for you. (This being the government, they should be reasonably good about providing accessible formats if you ask)
8. Finally, tell other people about the consultation! That's how I usually find out about them.

A few current consultations that you might be interested in. The first two I've already posted about - the rest are ones I've just found now:

• Sex education (closes 30 November 2011) - more details, and my response
• EHRC religious discrimination law (closes 5 September 2011) - more details, and my response
• Family migration (closes 6 October 2011) - a consultation on the criteria for allowing family members who are not EU citizens to move to the UK.
• A new mandatory power of possession for anti-social behaviour: Consultation (closes 7 November 2011) - a consultation on allowing social landlords to evict people involved in criminal behaviour, as a reaction to the riots. This one probably counts as "we're going to do it anyway" but there may be some scope for toning down the worst aspects.
• Making Open Data Real: A Public Consultation (closes 27 October 2011) - a good opportunity to ask for a more consolidated consultation list?

Feel free to link to other consultations and/or your responses in comments.

Useful Tools: They Work For You

There are quite a number of useful tools for activists that often get ignored, or that people haven't yet heard about, which can save a lot of time and effort to get the information you need.

This post looks at one that is very useful for keeping an eye on Parliament: "They Work For You".

Please leave recommendations for other tools in the comments - I have a few more I want to do, but since these are far less famous than they deserve, there's probably plenty more that I don't know about.

They Work For You

They Work For You - http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ - is a heavily reformatted Hansard (the official record of the UK Parliament). It has several advantages over using the original:

1. A nicer interface than Hansard, with speeches more clearly separated; photographs, party affiliations, constituency and Ministerial responsibilities of MPs displayed; as well as inline links and cross-references for common terms.

2. An excellent search that actually has a good chance of finding what you were looking for. Having performed a search, you can then set up an alert (either email or RSS) and be updated every time a new entry matching your search appears.

   Without this facility, the Parliamentary Timeline wouldn't have existed - it quite literally turned it from impossible to practical.

3. Link to a single speech on its own or in the context of the debate. You can do this with Hansard, but not quite as easily.

4. The same good interface covers Commons debates, Lords debates, Westminster Hall "informal" debates, and Written answers and statements. This is where a lot of the work of Parliament goes on, largely out of public view. Some of the answers include quite detailed quantitative data - it's often worth checking here before making a Freedom of Information request to a government department: you can save yourself some time if an MP has got a suitable answer already.

5. Summaries of MPs, including data drawn from other sites. Very useful for seeing what your own MP is up to, or finding out which Lords might be interested in your issues.
6. Also covers the three devolved Parliaments and Assemblies to the same standard, and with the same search interface.

It's extremely useful if the issue that you're dealing with is political in the Parliamentary sense. Less useful otherwise, but there might be something interesting hidden in a written answer or an un-publicised debate.