Procedure and House Affairs committee  Basically, what happens is that members will receive a text message when the division begins. The division is kicked off, they receive a text message and they get an email as well. They can choose to receive that email in a second mailbox. They get one sent to their parliamentary account and they can choose to send an email to another account.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Sorry; when you say “response”, what do you mean?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I would say that almost without exception, the members we spoke to, or the members we received feedback from, regardless of their political view, as Ms. Bradley said, around whether they believe remote voting is the right or wrong thing, were hugely appreciative of the work and felt it was easy for them to use.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, definitely—well, by and large, yes, that is how we would build the products.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  What we knew from our general statistics was that about two-thirds of members were tabling questions through the MemberHub. The procedure allows members to delegate certain tasks to their staff to do on their behalf, and tabling an oral question is one of them. What we found once we dug into a bit more detail was that of that two-thirds, it was pretty much fifty-fifty between members who were doing it themselves and members who were letting their staff do it for them.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I suppose the obvious point is that the decisions were made primarily by other people. The clerks—we don't have any Commons clerks, unfortunately, on this call—who kind of run the division business know who the key stakeholder members are. The most obvious people were those on the Procedure Committee, because they are responsible for making recommendations to the House about what they should do.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I can give you an example, although not about voting. We have OneDrive, which we use to keep all of our files in. Everyone has OneDrive so they can get their phone numbers and documents wherever they are. Last week I was deleting a huge pile of files that I didn't need anymore, and in about 10 seconds a cyber-person had contacted me, asking, “Are you doing something on your OneDrive?”

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I can only really talk about the voting, because that's the piece that I've been involved in. The way we built it, we know it is secure. Mr. Burton mentioned this a bit beforehand. We worked quite closely with our own cybersecurity team, but we also had the system verified by the National Cyber Security Centre.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The system we use to authenticate is the same one that members use for logging on to everything else. We have a single sign-on process, which is powered by the Microsoft Azure Active Directory service. We didn't try to build something of our own; we wanted to go off the back of the industry leader for this kind of thing.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The short answer is yes. As for the longer answer, obviously we have a lot of monitoring in place as well to keep an eye on anything. We have a dedicated cyber-team that are watching our network all the time, and they have all kinds of alerts and processes in place to look for unexpected traffic on the network.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Exactly. I do apologize to them for that. Thank you very much for indulging me and not making me send you notes. I'm going to talk about five specific points around the remote voting solution we built for the Commons and are now putting in place for the Lords. At the end, I guess you can ask me questions, as you wish.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for inviting me to attend. This is the first-ever committee I have attended formally, certainly outside of the U.K. I spoke with our procedure committee, which wasn't as formal as this, so I hope you will all be gentle with me.