Modernisation Committee
Tuesday 10 June 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 10 June 2025.
Lucy Powell (Chair); Mr Alex Barros-Curtis; Markus Campbell-Savours; Sarah Coombes; Chris Elmore; Marie Goldman; Joy Morrissey.
Questions 63-86
Witness:Dr Ruth Fox, Director of the Hansard Society.
Q63 Chair: I thank everyone for coming to this Session, which is part of the Modernisation Committee’s inquiry into accessibility. I also thank Dr Ruth Fox from the Hansard Society. We are grateful you are here today to give us your thoughts and those of the Hansard Society about how we can modernise some of our practices, language, rules of the House and so forth in service of accessibility, and more broadly as well.
We have a number of pieces of work that cut across this particular inquiry, around how we can better support MPs with more certainty and help them to be more effective as Back Benchers, whether they are from small parties or not; I am sure some of what you will talk about will cut across that. We are also looking at how to make the House more family friendly and accessible for those with childcare responsibilities, and so on.
There is a whole range of things that I am sure we will touch on. This is part of our accessibility inquiry, but we are really happy to cut across some of those things. We have heard from former and current MPs, peers, staff and many others as well, but we are particularly keen to hear from you today about the implications for our procedures, customs, practices, language, and how we describe things—whether they are as accessible as they can be, both for the public and for those with accessibility needs.
I know you have a draft of a paper that you are hoping to publish later this month, so I will not refer to it directly, but may I say that has been a really useful and excellent draft paper? There are very clear and good things in it, and I am sure everyone else will look forward to reading it when it is published. I may refer to it, but if I do, I will make that clear.
By way of introduction, would you like to say a bit about what the paper is striving to do, the thinking behind it and some of your thoughts?
Dr Fox: First of all, thank you for the invitation, and apologies that the report is not entirely finished. We were hoping to get it done for today, but I think it is fair to say that the complexity of some of it needed a little bit more digging into. And this week is not the best for publishing reports, with other clashing business that we are involved in—which we might come on to in relation to things like understanding the spending review, estimates and so on.
For context as to why we have undertaken this study of the language, customs and procedures of the House: we have come to it through three avenues—or for three reasons. The first is that the society has had a long history of working on these matters, going right back to the Puttnam Commission 20 years ago or so. At various points in that period there have been recommendations for things like a language review and a Standing Orders review, but they have not happened, for a variety of reasons. It has not changed.
The second reason relates to research that I have been involved in the society over the past 10 or 15 years that, engaging with the public about their attitudes to Parliament. We used to have an annual audit of political engagement, for about 17 years, prior to covid, where we would look at public attitudes to politics, political engagement and the institution itself. We also used to do periodic focus group research attached to that.
A regular theme of those focus groups that would come out from engaging with the public was that, while they may be interested, they found that when they watched it or saw clips on the news and so on, the language was quite jargonistic and difficult to understand. At times even I was quite surprised by the level at which the public thought about these things. Because I am accustomed to this, things like “Bill” make sense, but when we talked about legislation and how the laws are made to a number of focus groups—not just one, but across the country—even something that I thought was straightforward as that was not interpreted in the way that I had expected. For the members of those focus groups, a Bill was something like a utility bill—it was something that they paid—and they could not understand why you were allowed to amend it, because they were not. So what was this Bill that you had in front of you?
I think we have to be honest that there is only so far that we can go. Every organisation and institution has its own language, customs and so on, but where that happens and it is fundamental to the purpose of the institution making laws, we have to question whether there is a better way to describe things.
The third element of why we come to this is my own personal experience commentating on BBC Parliament for a couple of years with my colleague, the then BBC parliamentary correspondent Mark Darcy, during all the big Brexit votes—and commentating on the media in other circumstances, but particularly during Brexit. I was trying to explain what was happening procedurally in the Chamber and in the House when those Brexit votes were taking place. We covered the two Prorogations, and things like indicative votes and so on. I was thinking about how to explain what is happening in language for the ordinary member of the public who is interested enough to tune into BBC Parliament—at times, they were record-breaking viewing figures, so there was a lot of interest. How do you explain to those people what is going on and what language you use? That convinced me that, while it may not be possible to eradicate all the issues around language, there is scope for doing better.
Q64 Chair: That is really helpful. From the Committee’s point of view, as well as accessibility, we are understanding the changing nature of being a Member of Parliament over the last few years—the constituency demands, but also what constituents pick up on from social media and elsewhere, and how they communicate with you and the demands of that communication. The multi-party nature of our politics now has been reflected in Parliament, so how do the smaller parties interact, when we are set up as a Government and an Opposition and a lot of our practices follow that? How can we be more inclusive? Those are some of the things that we are thinking about as a Committee.
Before I bring in Marie to talk a bit more about language, one of the things that we have begun to explore, which your draft paper really pulls out, is public understanding of what we do, as you just mentioned. You talked about people not knowing what a Bill is or is not, but it is worse than that, isn’t it? We ascribe the word “Bill” to lots of things that are not really Bills at all—a presentation Bill or a ten-minute rule Bill. We might get hundreds of emails asking us to vote for or support something, which is not ever going anywhere or might not even come to the Floor of the House. You mentioned EDMs as well.
Thinking about the modern role of a Member of Parliament and our relationship with our constituents, who increasingly communicate with us about very specialised things, how can we think about our accessibility in language?
Dr Fox: Some of the procedures present a fiction to the public. The early-day motion is a particularly egregious one, because it has both a campaign element for just signing up to indicate support for something, and an important procedural element to it for statutory instruments or other documents laid before the House. There is almost no chance that they are going to get debated, never mind get a vote on them. With private Members’ Bills, people do not really understand what a private Member is. They confuse private Members’ Bills with Government Bills, but then you have private Bills. They do not understand the private Member’s Bill procedure either, as I am finding with the assisted dying Bill.
Chair: I don’t think many people here do, to be honest.
Dr Fox: You get both the question of language and whether it is really conveying accurately the realism of the procedures and the realistic chances of an outcome, and the question of, if you change that, do you need to also adapt the procedure a little? That comes to broader questions about procedural reform and Standing Order reform.
Q65 Marie Goldman: Thank you for being here and, belatedly, for the commentary you did during the Brexit votes, because I was part of your audience and you explained a lot to me that I did not know. I am trying to find a different way to ask this question, because there is a danger that we just spend the time agreeing with each other, which is not very helpful.
I am a big fan of simplifying the language, because I completely agree with what has just been said about misleading the public when something has no chance of becoming legislation, and yet we get lots of emails saying, “Please sign this EDM.” Somebody described EDMs to me as posh tweets, which I think is quite an accurate description. Talking about the use of plain English, which I am a big fan of, could you say something about the downsides of switching to a more plain-English version of how we do things?
Dr Fox: In drafting our report, we found that trying to put a plain English interpretation on things actually lends itself to greater length, which is potentially an issue. You do not want to lose rigour. You do not want to dumb it down to such an extent, without attaching procedural rigour to it. Those are the two fundamental problems that we have found.
Q66 Marie Goldman: In your focus groups and when talking to the public, were they worried about losing tradition and historical artefacts by changing the language or the way that we do things? How much of that came out through in your focus groups?
Dr Fox: Not a lot. Certainly, people tend to say that they like some of the pageantry. They associate the historical aspects with the pageantry rather than necessarily the procedure—what they see at state opening and the rich colour and pageant of it, and the monarch coming down with the crown from the palace in the state coach and so on. They like that, and you often get the phrase, “We do it so well, don’t we? This is Britain at its best.” Well, historically, we did not do it very well. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we were quite poor at it. There are numerous examples where the King’s Speech and the state opening went awry. That is a bit of a myth that we tell ourselves that we have always been good at this.
They like that, but I do not think they would attach any sense of history or tradition to the description of the legislative process, for example. No one that I have ever met in a focus group would know that First, Second and Third Reading dates back to the 1400s or 1500s, prior to the printing press, when the Clerk of the House had to read the Bill into the record because there were there were no print copies and quite a number of the MPs were illiterate. That is where that comes from, but most members of the public would not know that; frankly, a lot of people who associate with this institution at a professional level would not know that either, yet that continues in our stages.
Chair: I did not know that until I read your paper.
Dr Fox: That continues in the way in which we describe the legislative system. The question is, is that understandable? Most members of the public are not engaging with the legislative process at that kind of intricate level, but if even people who have to engage with it at a professional level find it difficult, that is a problem.
There is a balance. I would not be too worried about the loss of tradition around language. It is more about the pageantry that attaches to the customs, and we are not in favour of getting rid of that. I might tone some of it down, such as the Cap of Maintenance at state opening—do we need all the Heralds and Pursuivants and so on—but fundamentally stick with that system for state opening. There are other areas where you could change the customs, practices and language, but the public would not notice and would not be bothered about it from a tradition or heritage perspective.
Q67 Chair: Before we move on to questions about customs, I have a one on language. Sorry to sound like I am obsessed with Bills—I am the Leader of the House, so obviously I am slightly obsessed with Bills—but where would you strike the balance? We could keep giving Back Benchers all these opportunities to make legislative proposals through devices such as presentation Bills, ten-minute rule Bills and private Member’s Bills, but that leaves us in a situation where there are reams and reams of Bill titles on the Order Paper at any one time, but the Bills have not even been drafted; they are just titles. That snarls up a lot of work for people in Government and Parliament. We then get loads of campaigning emails about supporting these Bills, but the Second Reading is in the middle of recess or something; the Bill is going nowhere.
How do we strike a better balance? Some private Member’s Bills do actually go somewhere. We have a private Member’s Bill—the assisted dying Bill—capturing a lot of public attention at the moment. That is a good thing, but we also have reams and reams of things that are given the name “Bill” but do not have any realistic chance of achieving anything. However, I do not want to deny Back-Bench MPs the chance to do campaigning work.
Dr Fox: There are several aspects in relation to private Member’s Bills. I wrote a paper about reform of private Member’s Bills more than 10 years ago. It said that it is no way to legislate. I gave evidence to the Procedure Committee. Some of our recommendations were reflected in that report, but it just got shelved by the Government. They did not want to engage with it.
One aspect is that there are multiple routes, including presentation Bills and ten-minute rule Bills. You hear people say that a Bill has been presented to the House. No, it has not. A request has been made of the House that the Member be able to present a Bill to the House.
Each Friday, our weekly bulletin explains the events of the House each week. Certainly as of this weekend, none of the private Member’s Bills on the Order Paper, below the assisted dying Bill, has been published or printed. I cannot say in the bulletin what any of the Bills do because I do not know. There is a resource issue for the Clerks as well of how much printing and all that has to be done.
We have said in the past that private Member’s Bills should be reformed. At the moment, there is a ballot. Members put in, and if they are lucky enough to be one of those 20, they get time on the Floor of the House and get to put forward any Bill they want. Like in the House of Lords, Members should have to indicate what the Bill is that they want to put in for. There should be a proper system—something like a sifting system or a Committee that looks at it. A certain amount of time should be allocated. There are arguments about whether it should be on Fridays or other days. That is a wider argument about how parliamentary time is used and whether Friday sittings are any longer a good idea.
There should be a routine for private Member’s Bills; it should not be a lottery. It does seem odd that MPs’ ability to introduce legislation is a lottery—literally. Explaining to people it is literally drawing numbers out of a fishbowl sounds extremely odd. A Committee, or some system for sifting and judging which Bills are most likely to attract support could be a solution.
The other fiction about private Members’ Bills is that a lot of them are not really private Members’ Bills; they are Government handout Bills. There can be a perfectly legitimate need for the legislation, but they are not something that the private Member has thought up or is passionate about and is campaigning on. They are a good route to getting something on the statute book for themselves, but if you want to encourage private Members’ Bills and to have that opportunity for them to come forward with their ideas, that is not what that is achieving. You could hive off time and opportunity for a select number of private Members to put their Bills to the House and garner support for them, so that the ones most likely to attract support and engagement would go forward.
There is also the question of timing—we found that with the assisted dying Bill. Is it a good idea to have the ballot in September, First Reading and presentation in October and then Second Reading for the early Bills in November? That is not a lot of time if you are genuinely presenting a Bill that you passionately care about and want to campaign on. You might not always have that Bill in your locker already, or you might want a process to develop it. The Scottish Parliament offers quite an interesting example.
Chair: We have heard about that, which is great. Thank you. I do not want to deep dive too much into that. Alex will come on to some of our Parliamentary customs.
Q68 Mr Barros-Curtis: Thank you for the report, Dr Fox, and for coming. We hear a lot about the tradition and modernisation question in the realm of customs; you have touched on it already in the exchange about the state opening of Parliament. In the evidence that we have received and in conversations with people in this building, when we talk about modernising customs, people instantly go to the big “pomp and ceremony” things. They think of the state opening of Parliament and how people like to see it.
Is there a list of customs that you think we should be considering for our report, and for any work and recommendations that come out of it? Your report pulls out this point: there is some value, symbolic or otherwise and for historical or other reasons, to traditional customs, but we need to allow Parliament to do what it is here to do in the 21st century, feeding back off the evidence we have had. Do you have a list of customs or areas that could benefit from modernisation and that should not be particularly controversial?
Dr Fox: I have a fairly straightforward one. It is not one that is associated with pageantry, but it is at the heart of the legislative process and is terribly confusing for interested members of the public who are focused for whatever reason—personal interest or professional need—on a particular piece of legislation.
At the end of First Reading, the Speaker says, “Second Reading what day?”, and the Whip says, “Tomorrow.” It is not tomorrow. That is a complete fiction. It has two purposes. It has come down through the years as a long-standing practice. As far as I can recall, it is not written in “Erskine May” or the Standing Orders; it is just a custom of the House. It reinforces the idea that the Government’s legislation is a priority and that the Government can have its way on whatever day it wants. It is also a practical thing to get it listed on the future business paper.
It is not unknown for my phone, my social media or my WhatsApp to go off when a Bill is presented that is attracting a lot of interest. In the last Parliament, that was particularly true of the Data (Use and Access) Bill. The Bill is presented, the Whip stands up and says, “Tomorrow,” and I suddenly get phone calls saying, “Ruth, they said that Second Reading is tomorrow. Really? Is that possible?” I have to say, “No, no. Calm down.” It happens all the time. It very rarely means tomorrow; it is just a mechanism.
That is a pretty straightforward and simple thing that could be fixed and would ensure that those people who are taking an interest in the Bill can understand the procedure. There is no obvious reason why you have to say, “Tomorrow.” It could be something else, and I do not think that that would be particularly controversial. I do not understand why any MP would want to stand behind that and defend it.
Chair: It could just be “Soon” or “In the future”.
Dr Fox: It could be “A future day”, or something like that. That would make more sense.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, there is something with a bit more pageantry, if you like, and a bit more heritage: the approbation ceremony when the Speaker is elected. You elect the speaker; he is your Speaker; it is an election of the House of Commons; and yet the Speaker and a number of MPs have to trail down to the House of Lords to meet the Royal Commissioners, who are all doffing their bicorn hats, with varying degrees of artistic endeavour and technical merit. They then have to be the conduit of the message to the Palace. The Speaker’s appointment has to be approved by the King; previously it was the Queen. The next day, the message comes back through the royal commissioners, so the Speaker, with a few MPs, has to go back down to the opposite end of the House to receive that message and confirm the appointment, and then has to come back to the Commons.
Constitutionally, that does not feel right. It is the election of the House of Commons Speaker, so why do you have to go through the House of Lords? Historically, plenty of messages have gone through the Lords. For example, MPs used to have to go to the House of Lords to hear that Royal Assent had been signified. That is no longer the case. In the last week, you have sent messages to the Palace asking for the monarch to confirm the appointment of the head of the Electoral Commission, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman and so on. Those messages have come directly from the Palace to the to the House, so it can be done. There is no constitutional block on that.
From a constitutional perspective—and also, frankly, from an efficiency and effectiveness perspective—my question would be “Why does that need to happen?” It seems to me an unnecessary ceremony that exists because it has always been done in that way, but its purpose should be questioned. It would be better, from the House’s perspective and from a constitutional perspective, for the Speaker, as a servant of the House and of the state, to hear that message directly read in the Commons, rather than for just a few MPs to hear it if they can get in at the Bar of the House of Lords. Again, that might be controversial for some Members of Parliament who are perhaps of an older—greater—vintage, but it does not seem terribly controversial to me.
Q69 Mr Barros-Curtis: This is interesting. It is triggering a memory of the recent recess, when I read Robert Harris’s excellent latest book, “Precipice”, which is about Asquith’s Government and how we went into world war one. I gave it to my husband to read. There is quite a bit in it about Asquith going to Parliament and some of Parliament’s customs. My husband said, “Gosh, some of it hasn’t really changed,” and that book was set in 1914. I thought that that was actually a very good point. When you are in it, you absorb it and take it for granted. There are some really interesting examples.
Your report talks about practical barriers for us as representatives of those who elect us, or those who do not—we are none the less their representatives. You have talked about accessibility. We also talked about language barriers in the previous question. From your focus groups and elsewhere, are there any common themes among certain groups or classes of individuals when it comes to views about these barriers, such as accessibility, whether physical or otherwise? Or are the groups of individuals who come to you and say, “I don’t get that,” or “That custom seems weird, and it’s limiting my ability to understand what the heck those people on the TV are doing” quite segregated?
Dr Fox: I would not say that it is necessarily as segregated as that. The general public—the constituents you might have at your coffee morning—are aware of Parliament, but they are not particularly interested or engaged. They do not watch that much of it. What they will get of Parliament is what they see on the news or catch on social media, so it will be very much a clipped version of it. That brings its own problems, because invariably what the news will show or what will go viral on social media will be the worst bits. As for other groups, it is those who engage professionally with Parliament and struggle to understand it, interpret what is going on and engage with it. I am not sure it is any more granular than that.
Q70 Chris Elmore: In your report, you talk about seating, including making the Chamber bigger, but we need to bear in mind that the Chamber is significantly empty for an awful lot of the debating time. We see those ridiculous photographs of MPs going into the Chamber to discuss their pay, which clearly cannot be true as we do not set it, and then the Chamber is empty when we are debating child poverty or whatever it is. You talk, over several paragraphs, about prayer cards and reserving seats for Members with disabilities. Could you expand on where you think reform should come and how that would practically work?
Dr Fox: This comes up quite a lot. It is not something that particularly comes up with the public. The question of why the Chamber is so empty comes up a lot, and that goes to broader questions about doing better at conveying the role of Committees and so on. Certainly the Chamber is empty, but there are two things to separate out. There is the question whether, from your perspective, it is appropriate any longer to have seats allocated in relation to prayer cards at a time that is associated with the moment of prayer. Indeed, broader questions have been raised with the Committee in evidence about whether Prayers should continue in their current form, given where we are in terms of religious observance as a population. That is one question—should it be attached to Prayers at all, and should Prayers continue in the same way?
If you are not going to allocate at the beginning of the day through that mechanism, what is the mechanism? That is where it becomes difficult, I am afraid. We thought about how you might do that. One of the problems is that there is no obvious example to call on in another Parliament, because this is pretty much unique. Most other Parliaments have enough seats for their members. Here, it is not just that you do not have enough seats; it is that you have nowhere near enough seats. Most Parliaments will allocate sections for parties. A lot of them have desks allocated as well as seating. They might allocate by constituency or by surname. It is done in lots of different ways.
The question is, do you support the principle of, effectively, first come, first served, where you put down your card to book your seat—the proverbial towel on the sun lounger? Do you think that that continues to be a good idea, when that MP might not actually be turning up until later in the day? Should the ability to get in early benefit those MPs who can do that in order to book their seat? There are certain Members who arguably need a priority spot, for example because they are going to take part in questions. Is there a way to allocate space in that way? Would that attract support? For everybody else, it would be whenever they arrive in the Chamber.
There is clearly a need to address those Members who have issues of disability or illness and might need particular spots in the Chamber to be allocated on a permanent basis. Beyond that, it is very difficult to see how you do it if you do not have some kind of system. Alternatively, you go to not having a system and just say, “There are certain priorities, and beyond that, it is whenever you arrive.”
Chair: This is something we have heard a lot about, especially from MPs with disabilities and impairments, who have all very strongly told us that they do not want special treatment. They want a system that is inclusive and therefore is inclusive for them as well. There are now the pink cards, so that you are able not to be in for Prayers but still get a seat. The seats themselves are pretty uncomfortable for anybody with any kind of extra physical needs. That is a whole other thing—
Dr Fox: You are tempting me into a discussion about R&R.
Chair: Obviously there is a point about R&R—these things are related—but your point about our procedures and how we allocate seats or how people are going to speak, which we might come on to, is a good one.
Markus, do you want to go on to Standing Orders and rules? I will then bring Sarah in.
Q71 Markus Campbell-Savours: I will just start with a comment. I am one of those people who like to read the manual, and I have done since I was a lad. Whether I was a Labour party member or councillor, I was always reading the rulebook, so when I arrived here I went and got myself a copy of the blue book. I found it quite bizarre because how un-user friendly it is. It leaves us with no surprise at the number of dodgy points of order there are, because really no one is clear what order is.
You have talked about this in your report. If we were to recommend something like a modernisation review, what do you think that review might look like, where should we start and who would be the key people to bring into a discussion like that?
Dr Fox: What it might look like involves several elements. There is in existence a set of revisions to Standing Orders that could be approved quite straightforwardly and done quite quickly—not least in relation to gender-neutral language, for example—so there is a set of what I would call low-hanging fruit that a review body, however constituted, could agree on and deal with quite quickly. I don’t think they would be controversial, and they would certainly address things like the discriminatory nature of the orders and tidy up some of the language.
There is then a much bigger question for any review. Where is the redundancy? Could we simplify this by hiving off some of the detail into schedules—like a Bill—to separate out the detail from the headline information in the orders?
This is a rather more complex question. What about the long-standing practices and customs of the House, which have become almost rules of interpretation as to how things should happen in the Chamber? They have developed by convention; they are not formally written down in the Standing Orders, but they are used to interpret the rules. I will give you a couple of examples in a minute. Should those be written down? That is a bigger procedural question. It needs an analysis of the following: what is the purpose of this, and should what has been a convention previously but has been open to interpretation, by the Speaker or the Government, continue to be in place in its current form, as a long-standing practice that is open to discretionary interpretation, or should it be actually put down in the rules because we are of the view that that is important and we need that certainty?
There are multiple levels at which you would have to operate, and then there is a question about which rules we simply no longer need because practices have moved on. Are there ways to simplify this by just taking great chunks out of it? There is a huge section in the Standing Orders about Regional Committees, which are a holdover from the days of the Gordon Brown Government and have never been used since. If they are not going to be used, why have them in there? That fills 30-odd pages. Then there is an exercise on top of that. How do we convert this into plain language?
I do not want to give the impression to anybody that this is anything other than quite a complicated process that will require quite a lot of time and, to be honest, quite a lot of official-led development of the inquiry, supporting Members. There is also the question of how you do it. In other Parliaments, it is done by the Procedure Committee or its equivalent. It could be done by a Sub-Committee of the Procedure Committee. It could be done by a number of members from relevant Committees—the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, the Procedure Committee, this Committee and the Liaison Committee. There are different models that you could develop.
Because we have not had a full-scale review of the collective body of rules for 30 years, the first time that it is done is going to be a very big exercise. The point should be that once that is done, any further reviews and updates should be much more light touch and straightforward. It is then a question of thinking about when those future reviews should be done. Should that be something that is done at the start of a Parliament, or the end of a Parliament to hand over to the new Parliament? Should there be a procedure attached to it, for the House to essentially endorse those rules? It always sits slightly oddly that you are elected, and these rules govern what happens in the Chamber and Committees—they govern your working lives—but you are never invited to endorse them as a body and say, “Yes, we are happy with these rules. We are committed to them.”
You need to think about whether that is best done by a review that reports at the end of the Parliament and hands over to the next one, or whether it is something that should be done by a body of MPs at the start of a new Parliament. It is always an opportunity to think about how procedures have developed over recent years and whether there are any gaps. That is the other thing—gaps emerge that are not filled.
One of my bugbears is that you pass laws that have procedural implications in them—these are statutory obligations—yet nobody in the House acts to determine how those procedural obligations are going to be implemented until it is almost upon you. One example was the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which is now not relevant because it has been repealed. Another was during Brexit, where there were provisions in the European Union (Withdrawal) Act that had procedural consequences. The House of Lords dealt with them 12 months before they became an issue; the House of Commons dealt with them a few days, almost literally, before the procedure was going to have to be agreed for how the approval vote for the withdrawal agreement was going to be dealt with. That ought to be the purview of a review body for the Standing Orders. It should be kept under review, and where statutory obligations apply, that Committee should work to come up with proposals that can then be put to the Government as to how that should be implemented.
Q72 Markus Campbell-Savours: In your report you mention that 10 years ago there was Clerk-led review of the Standing Orders. What went wrong there, and why did we not see the changes?
Dr Fox: Good question. I do not know the answer to that exactly. There have only been six formal reviews of the Standing Orders as a collective body since 1945—five of them at the behest of the Government. This one was at the behest of the then Clerk of the House of Commons, Sir Robert Rogers, now Lord Lisvane—he is a Member of the House of Lords now. On the face of it, they seemed relatively straightforward changes that he was proposing. It was a tidying-up exercise—it was not radical.
One of the key things that he was concerned about was the fact that the language in the Standing Orders is not gender-neutral; they still assume that the Speaker and the Chancellor of the Exchequer will always be a man. If you stand up to request an emergency debate, the MP standing up is a man. I think we have got the number in the report, but the Standing Orders are littered with dozens of references. Standing Order No. 1 about the election of the Speaker would require seven changes to the language just on that single order to make it gender neutral. He provided the Procedure Committee with a track-changes through the Standing Orders—every change that would be required. I think they were weighted green, amber, and red for the level of importance and complexity. He had attached explanatory notes to the tracked changes to explain why they were needed.
It went to the Procedure Committee, which published a report on it. I think the Committee accepted in principle most of the recommendations—not all, but most of them—but then it did not go any further. I was told there was, apparently, a dispute with the Government about it, and about getting the necessary motion tabled to implement it. I do not know the background; it was all swathed in a degree of secrecy, I am afraid. You would have to ask the Clerk at the time.
Chair: In a sense, that is one of the reasons for this Committee: to bring some of these decisions into a more transparent, open space. People do not realise that all these Committees of the House can bring forward recommendations, but they sit on a shelf unless the Government of the day want to put them to the Floor. One of the reasons why I wanted to establish this Committee was to make me more accountable to the House for those decisions, so that things could not just sit on a shelf when a proper Committee of the House had made such recommendations. I think Chris wanted to follow up on the gender-neutral point.
Q73 Chris Elmore: It is a procedural bugbear of mine. I made a point of order on this when Speaker Bercow was in the Chair. Technically, the Speaker cannot call a female Member of Parliament to order, nor can they make her retake her seat. There is also nothing in the Standing Orders that allows women to serve as Members of Parliament. You are right in the sense that it is clearly incorrect, because I am sitting with female colleagues, but there is a thing about the House not acknowledging that women can serve on the Green Benches. The Lords has more progressive Standing Orders than the Commons in acknowledging that women can serve.
I have felt this for a very long time, and my point of order was very long-winded—it actually was a point of order, to go to Markus’s point. It is astonishing the amount of things that women are not allowed to do in the Chamber because the assumption is that Ministers and MPs are men. In fact, from memory, the Standing Orders mention only men serving as Clerks, which would be very confusing for people on this side of the room. It is something that desperately needs changing.
It is not so much about whether it is gender neutral, but there needs to be an acknowledgment that suffrage applies and that women can indeed be elected to Parliament and serve in it. There is a section, which I have now forgotten since I was on the Procedure Committee, about the fact that a woman does not have the right to attend the Chamber. There is something about only men being allowed to walk into the Chamber of the Commons under the Standing Orders. I am probably getting that muddled, but it is an astonishing admission. It says something like, “He may enter the Chamber and take his seat, to which the Speaker may call him to order.” That would suggest that women cannot serve in Parliament—it is mad.
Dr Fox: It is. Speaking as a woman, and given that we have had MPs in the House of Commons for 100 years, it is bizarre and, frankly, slightly offensive—well, it is more than slightly offensive. There is also a reputational issue for the House, and it actually astonished me that it did not come up with the election of the last Speaker in 2019. I thought it might, but there were other bigger issues in play at the time. If an organisation came before a Select Committee of this House and had those procedures or operated in that way—
Chair: A golf club, or a working man’s club.
Dr Fox: Yes. This House would rightly condemn it, yet it has never done anything about fixing it in its own rulebook. Frankly, that is quite an easy, quick win.
Q74 Chair: So you think that is an easy, quick win. I hear what you say, but the bigger review of Standing Orders would be a lot of work and might not have a noticeably great deal of outcome, other than averting a crisis in procedures that we have not hitherto encountered to some degree.
Dr Fox: Yes. I do not necessarily think that it would have a broader public outcome, but it might have an internal outcome for Members, Members’ staff, journalists and people like me, who try to interpret what is happening, in public engagement. It would offset the possible risk of a problem at a later, unknown date. There is always the risk and resilience question about how much time you spend, and when the risk crystalises. We saw during Brexit that it can and does. You are right that it would be a very complicated exercise.
Q75 Markus Campbell-Savours: Do you foresee a rewrite of the Standing Orders in more accessible language, making it a meatier but more readable document? Or do you foresee a document that looks quite similar to what we have now, with the modernisation of some of the language that obviously needs to be changed, but with some kind of official guidance note that sits alongside it, as we have with the code of conduct?
Dr Fox: I am in two minds at the moment about whether you should slim it down and have a lot of the detail in schedules at the back—so that if you are dealing with a particular question, you go to those if you need them—and then have an accompanying companion to the Standing Orders, a bit like the House of Lords, which explains things more in plain English and interprets them, or whether that should all be in one document, with the questions of the length and complexity. I am in two minds, if I am honest.
Q76 Sarah Coombes: I want to ask about your views on how debates proceed in the House of Commons and how that compares with other Parliaments. Among new MPs, the issue of call lists has been a hot topic—
Chair: And for some older MPs.
Sarah Coombes: As well as among some longer-standing MPs. I never realised before I got here that if you wanted to speak in a debate, you might have to wait five or six hours to make what might be, by that time, a three-minute speech. The demands of a modern MP are that people are emailing you all day—you get 300 emails a day—and you need to have constituent meetings and do so many different things. Sometimes MPs think that that is prohibitive to doing the wider job of being an MP.
But we also have our fundamental role. I am the only person who can speak for West Bromwich in Parliament, so that is a core and essential part of my job. That is linked to something that we call the speaking score: the more you speak, the lower down the list you go. Maybe that seems a bit strange, because we are elected to speak for our constituents, but I appreciate that there are 650 of us and there is limited time.
Linked to that is how a debate flows in general. I particularly thought about this during the Report stage of the assisted dying Bill. In Second Reading debates you are generally talking about the Bill, so people can stand up and make speeches, and the debate flows because everyone speaks to different parts, whereas when we were speaking to amendments, people stood up and spoke to one amendment, then someone else stood up and spoke to a completely different one. It was very confusing, even for MPs, let alone the public. What are your views on that?
Dr Fox: On call lists, I understand the pressure, but I have to say that I am not a great fan of them. I understand why there is pressure to introduce them.
If I were to make a recommendation, I would say trial it. I do not think call lists work for all areas of business. You can see how they would work for Second Reading debates, but I do not think they would necessarily work for Committee of the whole House or Report stage, precisely because of the point about speaking to amendments and coming in with interventions, supplementaries and so on. You can see how a call list might work for things like ministerial statements, urgent questions and so on. If you are going to consider it, trial it for certain types of business and see how it works.
My big concern is that—I do not know whether there is a way out of this—the purpose of the debating Chamber is to listen to and engage with the cut and thrust of the discussion. It is not to be out of the Chamber, come in, deliver your three minutes and then depart 10 or 15 minutes later. The risk with that is you end up a little like the US Congress, where they literally read their speeches into the record just for the recording of it, and there is nobody in the Chamber. My concern is you lose that cut and thrust of debate.
That said, on what you said about Report stage on the assisted dying Bill—indeed, the Report stage of most Bills at the moment—I think there is a problem. At some point in recent times, certainly in the last 10 or 15 years, we have moved away from a process of quite rigorous selection and grouping of amendments at Report stage, to create that genuine sense of debate on a small group of amendments. You were having quite focused debates.
At some point—it is not in the rule book—the Speaker decided that for most Bills it would be one group of amendments, which does not make any sense at all, particularly if you have a very big Bill. It makes sense only in the context of the use of time, because you want to avoid needing to move the closure motion to bring debates to an end, and having a Division on all that. You want to avoid multiple votes to create more time for Members to speak.
In the past, fewer Members would speak in debates. There would be less expectation that you would be participating as a Member as regularly as most Members now do and now expect. We had a conference last year where Sir David Davis spoke about his experience as an MP. I cannot remember when he came into the House, but he was there in the 1980s. He said that, as a new Member, he would expect to speak in the Chamber in a major debate perhaps four times a year. The expectation would be that he would have longer, but that he would not participate every week. Obviously, the pressures on MPs were vastly different then. Things have moved on, but the procedures do not reflect that.
Chair: They would only occasionally go to their constituencies at that point.
Dr Fox: Yes. There was less constituency demand, less media, fewer communications outlets that had to be serviced and so on. The demands and the life of an MP were very different.
On the other hand, we have moved to a situation where, unless you can expand the time available, all that the MPs other than Front Benchers will get is a few minutes. Either Members have to work out a way to expand the time in the Chamber—I cannot see a route towards that, or not one that would be popular—or fewer Members can speak on everything. Maybe there needs to be a discussion about how you choose which debates you take part in.
Then there is a broader procedural question about things like how much time is given to Bills in particular—to legislation. The question about participating in debates is broader than legislation, but is adequate time being made available? I am very conscious that the Leader of the House will have a particular view. How is parliamentary time in the week, the month, the Session and across the Parliament used? Is it as effective as it could be? That is the only way you will create more time for participation.
Q77 Chair: In the interests of balance, on the point about call lists, I was here during covid and everything else and there is a perception that people are calling for a version of what we had in covid. That is not what people are calling for. That was obviously put in place to keep people apart and out of the Chamber. That goes to your point about reducing debate.
What people are really asking for—we have heard this from all sorts of quarters through this Committee—is more certainty about their likelihood to be called to speak and at roughly what stage in the debate they might be called to speak, rather than something rigid. The truth is that there is a call list—a call list exists. It is just that nobody knows about it apart from the Chair, and sometimes the Whips—that can depend. What we were talking about is that all the normal rules would apply—you would be expected to be in the Chamber for the debate, for speeches, before and after, and all that kind of thing, but perhaps just have more certainty. We have heard that particularly from the smaller parties.
I will bring others in, but we are also looking at the use of time. You just touched on the allocation of time. Are we getting the balance right in terms of those opportunities—Backbench Business, Opposition debates, petitions debates? For example, could we make more use of Westminster Hall in that context, which is increasingly popular and often oversubscribed?
On the point about the smaller parties that Sarah made when she talked about the speaker scoring, we heard from the smaller parties that if you represent a smaller party in this place, you do not have the benefit of the Whips—the usual channels—to inform you of what is going on and you are much more likely to speak or feel like you are speaking on behalf of your party across a range of debates. They have particular pressures on them. They might want to, or almost have to, be in to represent the Green party, or whatever, in various debates, but they are almost penalised for that because they are lower down on the scoring sheet.
Those are some of the things that we are grappling with. There was a very, very strong message from current and former disabled MPs and those with impairments that a call list was an absolute no-brainer and that there was no world in which we could be an inclusive Parliament unless we gave them more certainty around that in some form.
Dr Fox: That is why I would say to focus on the bits of business for which that call list approach would potentially work and then pilot it—test it out. One concern I have had in the past is that the House tends to adopt a change and that’s it—it is set in stone. It might not always work as you think, because there are unintended consequences, so you need that ability to come back and say, “It’s not quite right; we need to revise it a bit at the edges or change it a little.” That is why I generally suggest trialling rather than absolutely committing yourself from the start.
Q78 Chair: What is your perception of that point about the allocation of time? We give a lot of time to the Backbench Business Committee and petitions debates, which are well viewed and of interest to the public, but are consigned to a Monday afternoon in Westminster Hall. There is a multiparty state, albeit that the official Opposition have a primacy role. The allocation of time to the smaller parties is extremely limited. I know we could have the whole session on that, but do you have a view?
Dr Fox: I am having a meeting on Thursday with an academic colleague to talk through embarking on a small project on this to come up with a paper to address the question of time.
Q79 Chair: If you want to do that more quickly than you might otherwise do, we are actively looking at it.
Dr Fox: My view is quite radical. I would stop Friday sittings, change the arrangement of business on Monday to Thursday and rethink that. I would have Committee weeks when the Chamber is not sitting, to focus more on Committee activity. The perception of the House is so much through the Chamber. The image of the Chamber being empty undermines the institution.
Committee weeks might be used to offset and make more time available for other business, which would otherwise clash sometimes with Committee work. Think through, for example, estimates days. Estimates day debates, to which you give over two or three days per Session, are not that well attended. Last year, there was one on the defence estimate that was not well attended, despite defence spending being such an important issue. Is that the best way to scrutinise estimates? Or would that be better done by departmental Select Committees on an estimates week?
Look at what the New Zealand Parliament is doing. They have set aside a week to examine the public spending proposals of the Government. Their Committees are looking at it. Ministers are expected to make themselves available. They have lots of papers prepared and they really drill down into it. That is opposed to us, where we effectively have a pretty generic debate on the public spending proposals of maybe three Departments, nominated through the Backbench Business Committee.
Do we need all those debates that have become a regular thing? Debates on particular days—St George’s day, Welsh day and so on. There is some value to them, and I can understand why, but are there better routes for that? Basically, it is looking at the different types of business.
Very radically, I would abolish Sessions and have Parliament run through. I would do away with the hard stop and have a much longer pipeline. I understand the advantage to Government of that, but I do not think it is great for management of parliamentary business or management of legislation. There are lots of different things you could do within the limitation. There is only so much time with infinite demands on it, so it is about prioritising it.
Chair: That is really helpful. Alex, you wanted to come in.
Q80 Mr Barros-Curtis: We have slightly moved on from my question, which I will come back to. I am not sure I could support not having a St David’s day debate—for the record, I do not support that as a Welsh MP—but I appreciate the radicalism and there are some really interesting ideas there. It would be good to learn more from you about your conversation with your colleague later this week.
Rowing slightly back, I note what you said about call lists and trials, on which you made some interesting observations. Would you have a philosophical or professional objection if for a Second Reading—let’s stick with Second Readings for argument’s sake—there was not a call list, but the Front Benchers have their respective times and the Speaker’s Office knows how many people have put in to speak? The situation at the moment is that it starts at unlimited time, then it is 15 minutes, then eight minutes. Members sit around. They might prepare, on average, a six-minute speech, and all of a sudden they might have two minutes.
The calculation can be done right from the off that, after the formalities of the Front Bench, x number of people have put in to speech and there is this much time left, so everybody can have six minutes or five minutes, and it can be asserted from that point onwards. Do you see an implication for the quality of the debate, which you were talking about before? Would that be an acceptable compromise—I don’t want to put words in your mouth—for your approach?
Dr Fox: I can see that. I have often thought, in terms of the quality of the debate and your contributions, in the sense of making a professional contribution to the House, that if I were in your place on a Bill or a comprehensive spending review statement, for example, and I got two minutes, I would not be able to realistically say much to add real value. Should there be a minimum number of minutes—four, five or six?
Q81 Chair: And tell people that they won’t get a chance to speak, therefore.
Dr Fox: Yes—and be up front about it.
Q82 Chair: Which is one of the things that having a call list system might encourage.
Dr Fox: I think that is not inappropriate. That puts some pressure on the Speaker’s Office, in terms of working out what that should be and telling Members, “No, you’re not going to get an opportunity.” Obviously, every Member who doesn’t get an opportunity on something that they care passionately about is going to be annoyed. That is the other side of the coin: you can’t please all Members all the time. On the other hand, you are not pleasing all Members now either, so it is a balance.
I would think about what you realistically and reasonably think is a minimum amount of time that any speaker contributing to the debate should have, beyond a supplementary question, to make an actual contribution—a serious point that adds value to the debate. Conversely, you don’t want everybody to have two minutes, with no opportunity other than to make the same point. For somebody listening to the debate, as I do, that is a bit frustrating.
Q83 Marie Goldman: On call lists, you said earlier that if people come into the Chamber just to make their speech and then they leave again, they are not taking part in the debate and listening to colleagues. I completely agree with that. I think it is a very valid point, except that they are not doing it right now. Right now, yes, they have to be in the Chamber at the beginning, but once they have made their speech, they can disappear. So they are doing it in reverse—that’s all. They are not spending any more time in the Chamber. In fact, when they are in the Chamber waiting to be called, a lot of the time they are on their phones.
I have to say that that is understandable because, as Sarah said, 300 emails a day is not unusual for an MP. There are lots of demand on your time. Is having MPs sitting in the Chamber trying to reply to some emails or perhaps some messages from their team—some quick things that they need to respond to—the best way of making sure you have good contributions to the debate?
I wonder whether call lists are an alternative way of doing it. Let’s say that if you have a debate that is expected to run for four hours, you say, “We have four slots of one hour each where these MPs are expected to turn up. They must be there for the whole time, but they will all get called to speak within that time.” I think the best debates are when we get genuine interventions with genuine questions. That is a debate—not a pre-prepared speech, where you say, “Well, whatever anybody else says, this is what I have written on my piece of paper.”
If we want a genuine debating Chamber, we need the Chamber full of enough people to have a proper conversation, with people who have something genuine to contribute—not just because they want a clip to go on social media. We all get that pressure from our constituents, who say, “You didn’t turn up to”—insert name of debate here—when in fact you know you were in something else.
I want us to have a genuine, proper debating Chamber, but I think we are miles from that the vast majority of the time—not all the time. With the exception of things like the assisted dying Bill’s Second Reading, which I though was excellent, in general we are, I am afraid, quite far away from that.
Dr Fox: I agree. I am on the record as saying that I think the House has abdicated its responsibilities as a legislative Chamber for much of the past 10 or 15 years, and the quality of the debate has gone down considerably. It is partly about the pressures on MPs. You can watch and listen to it in your offices. We were an advocate of the broadcasting of parliamentary proceedings, but a consequence of that has been that the Chamber is more empty, because Members do not have to be in there to listen to it—you can access it in other ways—and we have certainly seen that.
On speaker lists, there is then a question about who is chosen to contribute to the debate. At times, the Speaker would have to make quite difficult decisions. The question is therefore: what is the bar and where is it set when it comes to who should contribute in a particular debate? Members might say to the Speaker, “I want to speak in this debate because I’ve got a constituency interest,” but should the bar be higher in terms of specificity? What would be the grounds for saying that MP X has priority over MP Y in this particular hour? How do you decide who are the 10 MPs who get six minutes each in that particular 60-minute slot? You would need to think about where the bar is set.
Q84 Chair: That is more transparent now than it once was. It used to be decided more on seniority or special interest, whereas nowadays it is more on your speaking score—the frequency with which you speak—although obviously there are pleas for special interests or whatever. But it is probably not as transparent as it could be.
Dr Fox: There is also a question about how we conduct legislative debate. The approach is called line by line—in reality it is clause by clause, but it is not necessarily clause by clause because of programming; there are all those sorts of debates—but the nature of it is that you are very constrained in terms of how you debate something in relation to the written text in front of you, the amendment process, the grouping and the amendment paper.
Chair: It is completely impossible.
Dr Fox: One of the things that has come through quite powerfully in the assisted dying Bill debate is that most people do not really understand the clause-by-clause process of Public Bill Committee and Report stage.
Q85 Chair: It has been a real learning curve for everybody on the actual legislative process because, for the most part, when it is Government legislation, you do not really know what is going on, but you just follow other people who are telling you. But in a private Member’s Bill you personally have to know a lot more about the procedure than you would otherwise have to.
Dr Fox: It brings to the fore that it is not a terribly helpful process in terms of achieving what you want to achieve, and how you get to have the intellectual cut and thrust on a particular critical question. You end up discussing, for example, safeguards in the assisted dying Bill in quite an odd way, in relation to the very tight legal text, when what you actually want is a broader discussion about the thematic principles behind it. To some extent you get that at Second Reading, but that is big and broad, and what you want to do is to narrow down the discussion at Committee stage and Report stage, but still discuss things in the way we discuss them here or in a coffee shop.
Chair: To be fair, we do that in Committee, but it just is not in the Chamber.
Dr Fox: Yes, but it is still quite constrained by the nature of the legal text and the ordering of things.
Q86 Joy Morrissey: That is an excellent point about the groupings. How amendments are grouped in Committee and at Report stage deters a lot of Members from getting involved, because if they are not super keen on all the procedure, they may just decide not to engage. Then you come to the voting and there are all the differences we have discussed, like if it is before the knife, it changes the times and the order, so everyone will just shut off and wait for the two people—the nerds like myself and others—who are paying attention to look at it.
Most MPs do not want to get too far down into the procedural detail of it, but that means that a lot of them will not engage in the process when they could contribute. They do not want to be told off because they have made the wrong kind of contribution at the wrong time. It is a bit of a hindrance even for them to look up the amendments. They look through and they are going to find it, but it is going to take forever because nothing’s in order.
Chair: The amendments are not listed in the same order as the grouping—
Mr Barros-Curtis: Or which amendments have been selected for debate and then a vote.
Chair: The amendments are not even in numerical order.
Dr Fox: Just to plug something, an explainer for day two of the Report stage of the assisted dying Bill has gone live on our website today.
Chair: I am talking about any Bill.
Dr Fox: Yes, absolutely, it is the same for any Bill. It is extremely difficult to explain to the watching audience. Even quite established Lobby journalists have not understood what has happened on day one of Report stage at all. For the people watching inside the Chamber, there is a problem if—
Chair: That is what normally happens on Committee corridor with Government legislation and things like that. You arrive as a Back-Bench MP and you do not really know which amendments are being discussed when, or where to find them in the amendment paper or whatever. We could definitely improve some of that.
I am conscious of the time—it is 1 o’clock. Thank you so much, Ruth; that was really good. Please do feel free to give us your inputs on the allocation of time and things. We look forward to the publication of your paper. I know you prepared it anyway, but it will be very useful for this inquiry. Hopefully, we will see much of you as this Committee work gets under way. Thanks very much again and thanks to everybody.