I noticed a Sky News story yesterday fretting that the number of written parliamentary questions has doubled, with a faint note of alarm about MPs using AI to generate them. The implication was clear enough: this is somehow cheating, or gaming the system, or at least terribly inconvenient for Whitehall.
This is a curious complaint. Written questions exist for one reason only: to force information out of the executive that it would otherwise prefer to keep diffuse, delayed, or buried in footnotes. They are not a genteel correspondence course. They are a lever. If better tools allow MPs to pull that lever more effectively, that is not abuse. It is progress.
The subtext, of course, is not really about artificial intelligence. It is about volume. Departments are irritated because scrutiny now arrives faster, in greater quantity, and with fewer obvious gaps to hide in. AI is very good at noticing patterns, inconsistencies, and missing data. That makes it rather well suited to parliamentary oversight. The horror seems to be that MPs might ask better questions with less effort. One struggles to see the constitutional tragedy.
There is also something faintly nostalgic in the objection, as if scrutiny is only legitimate when it is slow, manual, and exhausting for the person doing it. Parliament is not obliged to preserve inefficient working practices to spare the feelings of the executive. The job of MPs is to hold government to account, not to protect departments from administrative inconvenience.
If AI can be used to ask questions, it can equally be used to answer them. Indeed, that is where the real gains lie. A large proportion of written answers are formulaic, data-heavy, or variations on things already said last month. An AI system could draft first responses, collate figures, and flag inconsistencies with previous answers in seconds. Civil servants could then focus on accuracy, judgement, and the bits that actually require human responsibility. Ministers would still sign the answers. Accountability would not evaporate. Only the tedium would.
What this episode really reveals is an executive unused to scrutiny becoming cheaper and more effective. When a handful of MPs can interrogate policy with industrial efficiency, the balance of effort shifts slightly away from the state and back towards Parliament. That is uncomfortable for those on the receiving end. It is also rather the point.
If government wants fewer written questions, the remedy is disarmingly simple. Publish clearer data. Give straighter answers. Stop hiding behind process and ambiguity. Until then, complaining about MPs using modern tools to ask awkward questions sounds less like a defence of good governance and more like a plea for a quieter life.
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