Remember: They work for us

On 20 July, Anthony Wright MP asked the following question of Douglas Alexander, in the House of Commons: "What steps are being taken to ensure that Government websites are designed around the needs of the general public?"

The reason I was able to find this exchange easily was that I used They Work For You, not the official online Hansard report. They Work For You accurately indexes the topic 'government websites' for 20 July, and links to exactly that exchange, clearly differentiating visually between the question setter and the government spokesman, and even providing photos of the relevant individuals together with linked information on their voting record and registered interests. I can even link to any component of any debate or parliamentary question. And I can comment on anything I read there.

Douglas Alexander responded to the question from Anthony Wright as follows: "Designing services around customer needs has always been at the heart of the Government drive to put services online. [...] Directgov was designed around the needs of the user by bringing together information, from across many Departments, in a way that makes it easy for people to find what they want online."

But I encounter severe difficulties finding this exchange on the official Hansard report. While the daily index for questions on 20 July does include the topic 'government websites', the landing page shows no sign of this heading. The record is sequenced by 'columns' (from the paper version?), but column numbers do not necessarily appear on the same webpage as the following content. Even though I know what I'm looking for, I have problems finding it: it's on a different page (not on the link provided by Hansard).

In general, the Hansard page design, a replica of the traditional print publication, is not helpful. For example, text width is excessive. Many of the landing pages involve scrolling large amounts of undifferentiated text. I'm not given any background information on the speakers, and the website's use of frames makes any linking (only possible to large chunks of text) a little trickier. Online Hansard is a data dump.

Its fundamental problem is that it's not designed around the needs of the user. Only the dogged - political journalists, say, or MPs - would persist with it. The people who run Hansard clearly know little about the Web. They Work For You would have no reason to exist if Hansard provided a user-centred offical record of parliamentary proceedings.

I now hear from reliable sources that Hansard is none too happy about They Work For You, and would rather it disappeared. If true, this head-in-the-sand attitude is a little surprising. They Work For You is produced by a group of volunteers, aiming to make parliamentary proceedings - the words of our political representatives - more accessible to the general public, and in general contributing to the raising of political awareness and increase in informed debate. I thought one of the great concerns of our time - among parliamentarians, at least - was a perceived decline in political engagement.

Hansard sits in a curious position: it is controlled and run by Parliament, not by the government or civil service. While the official report is sold to the public by The Stationary Office, the copyright is apparently not held by TSO, but by Parliament, in the figure of the Speaker of the House of Commons. Something of Hansard's chequered history can be found on the Hansard site itself, which indicates that those responsible for producing the daily official report have chopped and changed over time, the present arrangment only being settled on in the 20th century, following evidence presented to a parliamentary committee by a range of witnesses.

Perhaps it's time - now we've moved from the print to the digital age - to once again debate how the offical record is produced. Remember, they really do work for us.