Modernisation Committee

Oral evidence: Access to the House of Commons and its Procedures, HC 755

Tuesday 8 July 2025

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 8 July 2025.

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Members present

Lucy Powell (Chair); Mr Alex Barros-Curtis; Sarah Coombes; Kirith Entwistle; Marie Goldman; Paulette Hamilton; Joy Morrissey; Jesse Norman; Chris Vince.

Examination of witnesses

Questions 125-159

Witnesses: Gemma Collins, Director of Property and Asset Strategy; Marianne Cwynarski, Director General of Operations; Sarah Davies, Clerk Assistant and Managing Director; Tom Goldsmith, Clerk of the House; Margaret McKinnon, Director of the Members’ Services Team.

Q125  Chair: Good morning. Thank you all very much for coming to the Modernisation Committee. We saw some of you previously; I think that was in a private session, though. This is a more public session. We have been doing a big inquiry into accessibility, which has been very broad and taken us in quite a few different directions, and we are really keen to hear from all of you about some of the issues that we have been hearing about and how we might tackle them. First, do you want to introduce yourselves and say what you do?

Margaret McKinnon: Good morning. I am Margaret McKinnon. I am director of the Members’ and Members’ Staff Services Team. Very briefly, my team provides some services directly to Members, such as HR advice and support. We also work with teams across the House on projects and issues that affect Members and their staff overall.

Marianne Cwynarski: Good morning. My name is Marianne Cwynarski. I am director general of the House of Commons, and I am responsible for six very chunky areas: parliamentary maintenance, the customer experience and service delivery—that is like facilities management—digital, security, HR and Strategic Estates, the team that does the big projects across the estate.

Tom Goldsmith: Morning. Tom Goldsmith, Clerk of the House.

Sarah Davies: I am Sarah Davies. I am the Commons Clerk Assistant and I am also managing director of the Chamber and Participation Team. As well as all of the Chamber services, which no doubt we will be talking about today, we manage all of UK Parliament’s education, visitor and public engagement provision. I have a side interest in the use of AI in Parliaments, so perhaps we will touch on some of that as well.

Chair: Hopefully that is a bit more successful than the Wimbledon AI, but anyway, we can discuss that.

Gemma Collins: Hi. I am Gemma Collins. I am director of property and asset strategy and I sit in within Strategic Estates. I have a team of professional experts and subject-matter experts—architects, engineers—and we support the House in setting its short, medium and long-term strategy for the built environment.

Q126  Chair: Thanks very much. We have been doing this accessibility inquiry, which I know you have all been following closely. It was not necessarily an early intention of the Committee, but we had such strong representations about these kind of issues in our general call for views that we felt very strongly compelled to do this particular inquiry. Quite honestly, a lot of what we have heard from Members, former Members, staff and others who follow our events here has been pretty shocking, really. It is not anybody’s fault, but when you look at it through the eyes of someone who experiences it and see all the challenges that they face going about doing their job and their business, it has been quite a challenge.

Can I thank you, first of all, for being so responsive? Even before we have got to any of the conclusions or recommendations, we have had a lot of contact with Tom and Marianne, in particular. I know, Marianne, that you have already put in train a lot of really simple things that should have been in place in the first instance and, Tom, I know that you have taken these issues incredibly seriously as well—as have you all.

To start off with, Tom and perhaps Marianne, do you want to say something about how you feel about this issue in general and whether the Committee’s doing this inquiry has brought some things to the fore that maybe we should all have brought to the fore a long time ago?

Tom Goldsmith: Thank you for the invitation, Chair, and thank you for this inquiry—and, in particular, for the focus on accessibility and thinking particularly about physical accessibility. If you had asked me a year ago how we were doing on physical accessibility in the House, I think I would have said, “Well, we’re doing some good things, we need to do a bit more, but we are getting on with it.” But I do not think anyone could listen to the evidence of your witnesses and the things that people experience in this building on a day-to-day basis and not be shocked by some of the things that colleagues have faced.

It is interesting; you have heard a few times about the social model of disability. What those experiences showed to me was that, although we support it in principle and we want to follow that model, in practice, at the moment, we still often have a situation where, as an organisation, we are not proactively removing barriers; we are making individuals do things. That is not the way that the social model should work. If you look at the resilience and creativity of those people you have heard evidence from about how they go about doing their job in a building that is very, very difficult for them, it makes me determined that we have got to do a lot more on this. I do not want to leave you with the impression that we have not done anything.

Chair: No, no, absolutely.

Tom Goldsmith: You were very fair in your introduction. We have had accessibility as part of our I&D strategy for some time. We have done some good things. In particular, I flag the accessibility audits of buildings, which Gemma can say more about. Those audits have showed us the extent of what we are facing, because they flagged up 1,400 issues that we should tackle. Of those, 400 are short term, 700 medium term and 300 long term. It is really good that we know about those things; what we have got to do is make sure that we have the right systems in place to address them in a strategic way but also quickly, for those things that we can fix quite speedily. Marianne will be able to say a bit more about some of the things that she is putting in place to make sure we do that.

For me, this inquiry has been incredibly helpful in pushing this up the agenda, in all honesty. We are revising our House strategy in the light of the savings programme, which you know about. We are going to make sure that accessibility is front and centre of that. We need to make sure that we have a real culture of thinking about accessibility, and we can talk a bit more about how we might do that.

Q127  Chair: That is great. Thanks so much, Tom. You are absolutely right about the social model and the nature of being inclusive. People do not want special treatment; they want an environment that is inclusive for everybody and therefore you do not have to ask for special arrangements, whether they are physical or procedural. Marianne, do you want to say a little bit about some of what you have done so far and then we will come on to questions on the audits and all that?

Marianne Cwynarski: Thank you, Chair. I would also really like to thank the Committee for spotlighting the issue of accessibility. It has been enormously helpful to me and the teams that I have in the areas of responsibility that we have, because I have been able to practically prioritise what we need to do. I think there was a perception that accessibility—physical accessibility—on the estate was too hard to do anything about, so it was just put in the R&R box. All the small things that colleagues highlighted in evidence to the Committee are things that we can jump on now. We have the momentum now to work through all of those, and the 410 things that have been highlighted that are short term that we should just be getting on with.

I do not want to sound like we are setting up loads of committees, but because this is such a big, cross-House thing, and it is across a lot of my teams, I have set up a group called the estates accessibility group. That is going to really help prioritise those areas that have been highlighted through accessibility audits. There is also going to be a Members user group, so we are going to talk to those Members, get their input and find out what they would like prioritised. Hearing that voice as part of this work is also important to us.

Chair: Great, thanks. I will bring others in as and when, because there are a lot of you and a lot of us. Jesse, over to you.

Q128  Jesse Norman: I have a follow-up question for Marianne and perhaps for Gemma. You have talked about the audits and the priorities. Can you tell us a little bit about what your top three priorities now are for things that you actually want to do, rather than review? What kind of timetable do you have for those?

Marianne Cwynarski: On the accessibility audits, we have got 412 short-term actions. My priority is getting someone in who is a higher technical officer in my maintenance team to just crack through all of those audits in the next 12 months. We have done some specific things, and you will have seen some of them as they are quite visible: the yellow lines on the escalators and better lighting in the colonnades—we had a go at putting some in at the weekend and I wanted it done by today, but it is going to be finished next weekend. A new accessible toilet is going to be fitted during the summer recess on the Library corridor. We have also piloted some lighting on the Library corridor that has improved things; it is still not where it needs to be, but it is a step in the right direction. There are a lot more examples like that. Those are part of the 412. I will hand over to Gemma to talk about the medium and long term.

Chair: You have also done signage along the corridors, which has been good.

Gemma Collins: In terms of the recommendations that have come out of the audits, we have split those into short, medium and long. That is linked to the complexity of how we need to address them. The medium-term actions are of medium complexity to deliver and cannot be delivered by maintenance personnel; they need a design team on them, or need co-ordination of, for example, lighting with another field. Working with our project delivery pipeline, we have ensured that we understand when every action is going to be delivered and by who, but also—this is really important—the impact of getting the action completed. It could be something very small, but it could have a transformational impact on how the person uses the space.

Again, we are talking about numbers, but there are 710 medium actions. One example is that at the moment we have got two projects looking at the Portcullis House security entrance and the basement. That project was set up to drive security improvements, but by working with them and with the access and inclusion strategy groups, we are including over 40 actions in that. What is important is co-ordinating, so as well as providing security benefits, we are providing accessibility benefits at the same time.

Q129  Jesse Norman: Would you be able to share those plans with the Committee, so that we can keep an eye on how you are doing?

Gemma Collins: Yes, absolutely.

Q130  Jesse Norman: That would be great; thank you.

This is a question for the Clerk. Accessibility has received a great deal of support both outside of the Committee and within it. One can think of it as a good in itself for all Members, staff and visitors, but one can also think of it as assisting the functions of Parliament. People who feel excluded find it harder to discharge their functions as parliamentarians in the full sense. Is that something you broadly agree with?

Tom Goldsmith: I think that that is absolutely right. As you say, as a place of work, we should be doing this anyway, but we are a special place of work. We have a unique role in this country’s democracy. It is absolutely the case that when people from outside look at this place, we get legitimacy from being an organisation that reflects the society we are supposed to serve. If we have a building in which MPs and colleagues cannot do their jobs because of basic problems, that sends a very bad message to everyone who watches this place. That can actually end up leading us to have less legitimacy, because people look at us and think, “Why should I respect a place that does not even get some of these important basic things right?”

Q131  Jesse Norman: Right, and legitimacy is an absolutely core part of the functioning, appeal and authority of Parliament.

Tom Goldsmith: Absolutely.

Q132  Jesse Norman: Does part of parliamentary legitimacy come from those traditions and that history? The Hansard Society submission that we received highlighted that there can be improvements in language that increase accessibility, but there can also be changes to language that make it much longer, make it harder to follow or may reduce the mystique of the Commons, if you like. Is there any wisdom in that?

Tom Goldsmith: It is a good point. It is difficult to give a short answer, because whenever we are thinking of reforms to this place or modernisation, which is—

Chair: What we are here to do.

Tom Goldsmith: Yes. There are a few things to consider. One is the law of unintended consequences. For example, if you think about reforming or revising Standing Orders, one of the things I would be very concerned about is that we did not accidentally change procedures by making changes to the language. If we want to consciously change procedures, that is fine, but we do not want to do it by accident.

The other point is that some of the customs and things here that look a bit more like pageantry actually have some substantive meaning behind them, because they represent important concepts about democracy. Having said all that, this place has always evolved, and there will always be things that we can and should do to make it more accessible and comprehensible, both to the people inside and to the people outside.

Q133  Jesse Norman: The parallel case might be the Army. There are lots of words in the Army that are hard to understand, but it is not clear that making those words easy to understand would necessarily have a beneficial effect on the functioning in every case, or on the respect in which the Army is held. Is that a broadly fair comparison?

Tom Goldsmith: For me, it is a balance. Think about some of the changes that have been made in the last 20 or 30 years. The House decided to get rid of the term “spying strangers” when it wanted to sit in private. That seems to me quite a sensible change, because it was changing from something that was utterly incomprehensible to the outside world to something that did what it said on the tin.

Other terms have a very wide understanding, not just here in the House, but with our colleagues in the Lords and Parliaments around the world, particularly Commonwealth Parliaments. That is not to make an argument that we should not consider those things and amend them if there is a good case for doing so, but we need to think about the bigger picture.

Chair: We will come to some of these issues later.

Sarah Davies: I am happy to come back to that later, but exactly—it is a balance.

Chair: We will stick to the physical things for now, but there are lots of procedural issues that are also physical barriers, as we will come on to.

Q134  Marie Goldman: On the physical side of things, as most of you all know, I am quite heavily involved with restoration and renewal side of things and what we do to look after this amazing building that we are sitting in today, which needs quite a lot of love, care and attention. What procedures do we have in place—I use the term “procedures” in a different context; not House procedure—to make sure that when we do the renovation works for the Palace of Westminster and beyond, for instance the northern estate, we do not get ourselves into the same situation? For example, Portcullis House opened 25 years ago, and it is incredibly inaccessible. It is a very modern building, but it is very inaccessible. What are we doing to make sure that R&R does not repeat the mistakes of the past and that we have a newly renovated, rejuvenated and restored estate that is fit for the future?

Tom Goldsmith: I will start on that and then probably pass over, if that is okay. As you know, one of the R&R objectives that will be delivered in the scope agreed is that we will be increasing accessibility, and step-free accessibility. This is quite an astonishing statistic: at the moment, in this building, the step-free areas are about 12%. Under R&R, there was an objective of getting that to 60%, but the plans we have now suggest that you can get it to 70%.

The reality is that it would actually be a bit better than that for almost all users, because that 70% will be on the public visitor routes, in the areas that people really need to get to for business, in the catering areas and in the retail areas. For example, on the Principal Floor, we think that the step-free access will be 93%. If we deliver R&R, that is a great headline benefit. But you are also completely right about designing accessibility in from the start and making sure that we are considering those issues.

Gemma Collins: As Tom says, it is built into the governance—and the Act—that there is a due regard to accessibility, so there is a commitment built into that. It is interesting that, when we look at one of our newest buildings on the estate—Portcullis House—20 years on, it provides us with so many issues. I do think, though, that in terms of accessibility regulations have moved on and there is better understanding.

There has also been much change in regulations to ensure that our buildings are sustainable in terms of being adaptable. The Portcullis House building was our first Parliamentary building built for purpose, whereas, apart from the Palace of Westminster, most of our other buildings are ones that we have had to adapt. I think that is a key point: in terms of any restoration and renewal, or any work that we do now, we should look at the future use of the building. Instead of constraining ourselves with a design that it is fit for only one purpose, it should be adaptable for future use, because we do not know how we are going to operate business in the future. That is one of the things that we undertake.

In terms of other areas that we are also looking at, I think there are some potential benefits. The reason that a major intervention to a building needs people to decant is because of the opportunity that you have to look at key drivers for the House, including health and safety, fire, accessibility and security. Those are really important. At the moment, I think that because of the way that Parliament operates—working within existing buildings—over time, we have layered those on top of each other, and that is what is kind of supporting and creating barriers for us.

R&R gives us the opportunities to think of those from first principles. With that benefit, it is allowing us to set out that vertical and horizontal circulation that allows us to have secure boundaries, but also a fire access strategy that ensures that people can egress on their own in the event of a fire—so there will be self-evacuation. That is another key driver for the R&R programme.

Q135  Marie Goldman: Could I just dig into that a little bit further and how we make sure that this is properly embedded? It feels like safety—and security, in particular—is pretty well embedded in this organisation. We do think a lot about safety and security. But what are your feelings about whether accessibility is yet embedded enough in everything that we do? Is there room for improvement, and what would that improvement look like? For example, when we are planning the changes that we are making to the different buildings, how do we make sure that, at every single twist and turn, everybody is taking accessibility into consideration, just as they are with safety and security?

Tom Goldsmith: I think you have put your finger on something really important there: safety, security and accessibility are three things that we need in order to make sure that everyone can use the estate successfully.

Security is sort of baked into our DNA, really—we have worried about it since at least 1605—and, unfortunately, tragically, there have been awful incidents in all our lifetimes. Security is right at the forefront of our thoughts when we are designing things.

I think that safety is something we are getting much better on. One of the things that I prioritised when I became Clerk almost two years ago was a renewed emphasis and focus on safety. We have a much stronger central team now; we have been doing some safety campaigns; we have the safety transformation project and we have much stronger governance of how we consider safety issues. So it is not perfect yet, but it is going in the right direction.

Of the three, I think accessibility is the one that is lagging, and there are all sorts of things we need to do to get that culture embedded. Marianne talked about the accessibility group at official level that she is setting up with the Lords, which will make sure that we are taking a strategic approach and prioritising the things that will have the biggest impact.

We have got to engage our leaders on this. It is not just enough for five of us to sit here. We have got to make sure that all senior leaders here see this as important. We have a thing called the Commons Leadership Group, which is the 100 or so most senior leaders in the administration. At our last meeting of that group, we had a focus on accessibility. You have to show to all staff and colleagues what you value and what you prize, and we have got to show that with accessibility. We give awards every year for people who go above and beyond in certain areas. We have got to make sure we hold up people for recognition who do that in this area.

We have got to make sure we have got the right training in place for our people. It is not fair to ask our people to handle this well if we are not training them properly. We have got to get that external accreditation that shows that we are doing the right things and that gives us a degree of assurance or tells us where we have to do better. We have got an RNIB employers’ accreditation, but we are working on one for autism. We are working on a Business Disability Forum one, which is a really stretching one. That helps to change the culture. Then you just have to put in some systemic things to make sure it carries on being a focus.

We require every project now to do an accessibility impact statement at the start, but I have quite recently said I will not consider any business case—I see the most high-level, expensive or sensitive business cases—unless there is an accessibility section to it that says what it will do for accessibility. If it does not, I can go back and say, “Well, hang on, have you thought about what this might do for accessibility?”.

Marie Goldman: I was very much hoping that is where we would get to, so it is good to hear that. Thank you very much.

Q136  Chair: That is all really good to hear, and that is exactly where we need to go, but we are quite some way off that right now, aren’t we? It is about how we ensure that those three challenges that you mentioned do not overrule one another, which is very much what we have heard. There is the Peers’ entrance debacle, or issue, where a lot of money has been spent on the new Peers’ entrance, but it is not disabled access and people are required to staff it in order to do that. There are also simple things such as the fact that the accessible door to Portcullis House can only be opened when you have got at least four security staff there. They do not arrive till 8 am, so senior Members of the House in wheelchairs and other Members and so cannot use that entrance until after 8 am. Security has been trumping all else, if you like. We must ensure that it is not a kind of extra section in a report, but that we really have that embedded leadership culture. I know that is what you are striving for, but I think that is what we would be really looking for coming out of this inquiry.

Tom Goldsmith: That is a really fair comment about where we are now, and you have described exactly where we want to get to as well. Hopefully some of those things I have set out will help us to get there. One of your witnesses—I am sorry; I cannot remember who it was, but it was one of the academics—said that she thought it was a very positive thing that on R&R we are building in at an early stage consulting people with disabilities to make sure that some of the design solutions will work. It is obviously something we have not done well enough in some areas.

Chair: No, and it is great for R&R, but it will be 25 to 30 years before we are occupying such a building, if we are lucky. We have got a whole lifetime and generations of people to facilitate before then.

Q137  Kirith Entwistle: On the issue of security and safety, many colleagues have mentioned to me their concerns around the main entrances and exits to the building. For example, when votes finish late on a Monday night, we all pile out of Carriage Gates, and there is very little security presence. That has been flagged as a concern by a lot of colleagues. I just wondered whether things like that are being reviewed and explored as well.

Tom Goldsmith: Absolutely. We keep security under review the whole time. I will feed that back specifically to our security director; I know it is one of the things that she is really alert to, but whenever there are concerns around that, it is really helpful to know about them so we can act on them quickly.

Q138  Paulette Hamilton: My question is a follow-on to what everybody has been saying. I know that we have an Inclusion and Diversity team within Parliament. Is that embedded in the planning and execution of what you are trying to do? I am about co-production—if you are working with people, you do not make the mistakes you have made over the past 25 or 30 years—so my first question is this: is it embedded, and how have you been trying to embed it?

Marianne Cwynarski: We are absolutely committed to ensuring that accessibility and inclusion are considered at every stage of our project development and delivery. Obviously, that has to be grounded in our legal duties as set out in the Equality Act. We have developed internal guidance, developed by the Property and Asset team that Gemma heads up with our Inclusion and Diversity team. We are really keen that it is not treated as an afterthought. Every project is required to complete an access and inclusion impact statement during its very early stage, and that has to be developed with our Inclusion and Diversity team directly.

Q139  Paulette Hamilton: But I am asking how it is being developed. So many of the—I will not say mistakes, but so many of the things that have been developed so far do not seem to have the eye of someone with disabilities or some sort of difference, someone who is living with difference. That just does not seem to exist in a lot of the projects that have been done thus far. What about something simple that keeps the Asian Members, the Pakistani men especially, within the services we provide? They cannot eat the food, and they keep saying, “Why is no one listening to us? We can only have a certain type of food”, and they do not feel that they are being heard—but they are shouting. Even though you have got the Inclusion and Diversity team, how are you ensuring that you guys are hearing what these guys are saying?

Marianne Cwynarski: I have just come from the Administration Committee this morning, and that point about considering diversity in our catering offering was made. I have to be honest; we are not getting it right. I think we understand what we need to do, but I believe there is still work to be done. I have been doing a lot of work in that space to redevelop that team, how we operate the catering team and what our offer is, because it is not just that example that you gave—it is much wider than that.

Q140  Paulette Hamilton: It is, but I only have a few minutes—Lucy is going to be looking at me, and I am really interested in this. Pushing it forward, how can the administration help what you are trying to do, help us to deliver what you are trying to do?

Margaret McKinnon: I think your point about co-design is really important. In setting up the Members Accessibility Group, one of the things we are hoping is that that will be a forum for Members to feed into some of the projects, to help us to prioritise what is important. Things like step-free access we know, but there are lots of other issues that we would want to look at as well. That would give us a cross-party forum to say what matters to Members, and how we can pick off the things that really need to be done first. It is hearing those voices and that lived experience.

I am going along to a ParliAble meeting on Thursday to talk to them about this work, how we can link with them and make sure that we get their views. There are lots of things we can do to tap into the lived experience that is here in the people who work on the estate.

Q141  Paulette Hamilton: For my last question and my pushback, yes, you are hearing, but what process do you have in place to make the changes, because hearing is just not enough? My final point is about the culture of change. Tom, you talked about this change that we need to see around culture. I am a woman of colour, I am a black woman, and it is pretty obvious I am black and pretty obvious that I am a woman, but for many people living with disabilities, it is not always as obvious. How are you going to build in that culture? The culture currently—forgive me—is not here.

Tom Goldsmith: I will take both those points, if I may. One of the ways we make sure that we actually get delivery, and are not just talking about it is that Marianne and I co-chair a group on I&D. We mandate a certain amount centrally, but we also have each of our teams in the House draw up I&D plans. Then we have challenge meetings where we hold colleagues to account for what they are doing, push them to see where we can go further, try to get a focus on delivery, and make sure things are actually happening and we are not just talking about them.

On the cultural point—this is part of what I said already—it is about engaging leaders; making sure that we as a leadership team set the vision for where we want to be on this; making sure it is front and centre in our strategy; and learning from other organisations. We know we have not got all the answers here. We have the House of Lords in the same building; they do not do it perfectly but, partly because of the different demographic of that House, they have some things we could steal. We should make sure we are dealing with that.

We talked about security and safety, and we should look at where we have been relatively successful in improving the culture in those areas, because there are some lessons we can read across to improve our accessibility culture. I go back to where I started in the first answer, which is thinking about the social model. To me that is an important way of thinking about the issue. The problem here is not individuals; it is the organisation, so we need a mindset that says, “We recognise that, and we proactively take away the barriers where we can”.

Paulette Hamilton: I will stop there, and I will hand back to the Chair.

Q142  Chair: Thank you for those great questions. I will move on a bit from that to some of the procedural things, which are also kind of physical. Jesse began the conversation about balancing things as we have always done them and the traditions we have across a whole range of things, starting with the physical nature of the Chamber: the seating not being very good, and there not being enough seating for everybody, to bobbing—how you get called to speak in a debate—how you have to vote, how you bagsy a seat in the first place, and so on. Those are all traditions that many of us hold dear or less dear, but they are massive barriers; you cannot have heard all our evidence without accepting that they are barriers.

You could have a debate to say, “Do we just live with those barriers because they are our traditions, or do you look at some of them and say ‘Actually, they are not serving the purpose of inclusivity’?”. We have heard that strongly from Members, former Members, and particularly peers—as you say, some peers have embraced more change in this regard than we have, for example, with the ability to attend things in a hybrid way when they need to.

Other than this Committee driving that forward, do you think someone should take a bit more control of it? Or could we perhaps do an audit of it? Should there be more of a cultural point around it—that it is not acceptable and therefore something needs to be addressed? Or should it come from a Modernisation Committee that happens to have done this inquiry to then try to push through the forces of small-c conservatism to say, “Hang on a minute, guys, this is not good enough.”

Tom Goldsmith: I will start on that, then I will bring in Sarah. It depends on the particular proposals and areas you are talking about, because you covered quite a lot there. A lot of these things are quite political, if you are thinking about things such as call lists.

Chair: Small-p political.

Tom Goldsmith: Absolutely—not partisan.

Q143  Chair: My point is, should they be? They are political because some people hold them very dear, but those are not people experiencing how much of a barrier it is for other people doing their job and representing their constituents.

Tom Goldsmith: I understand what you are saying, but I think some of the changes in some of the areas you mentioned—not all of them—would require the agreement of the House. A lot of those sorts of changes have to be made by politicians, and it is right that a Committee like this leads it.

Q144  Chair: That is fair enough. Do you accept that there is a more holistic take on some of it? If we are talking about it from an inclusive point of view, we can have all these audits and do all this stuff on physical inclusivity, but because of the way we operate, a lot of the mechanisms inhibit not just Members, but senior staff from doing aspects of their job.

Tom Goldsmith: If you are talking about inclusivity and accessibility in the round, clearly a lot of the House’s procedures and practices have an impact on that. It goes back a little to the exchange that we had earlier: there are some trade-offs to be had in the consequences of changes that are made. As I say, when we talk about how the Chamber works in particular, Members understandably hold those things very dear, so I think those things do have to be led by politicians. We can help, advise and give options.

Sarah Davies: As we move on to this area, we will probably unpick some of the parts that we were talking about in terms of the Chamber itself. We are obviously aware at the moment that the Procedure Committee is looking at three of the connected areas here: call lists, electronic voting and proxy voting. It is clearly an area where there has been evolution over the years, and we have seen that, but as Tom said, this is placed within the context of a framework that the House has set.

So as officials, what we are doing is looking at the systems that we have. You raise a really interesting point that they can be viewed as a totality. A really interesting example is Standing Orders, and where we might want to have some kind of evolution and change. It is really interesting that what the Procedure Committee did in 2015 was the last large-scale exercise of really looking through Standing Orders and saying, “Which ones are really not used any more, which ones could be put in a slightly different form to make them comprehensible, and what is complicated because it needs to be complicated?”

As operators of the Standing Orders, we know that in a really complex situation, you need to have an agreed clear set of rules. There are analogies here with the law, and debate about plain English in the law. You need to have Standing Orders that work. If you have complicated procedures—sometimes rightly, for a reason—those Standing Orders themselves need to be complicated. We will probably come on to this in a moment, but clearly, we have got the Procedure Committee report, and I think that, quite a long time on, a really interesting piece of work could be done in terms of perhaps bringing that back and looking at it again.

Q145  Mr Barros-Curtis: I want to unpick that a little more. I totally recognise that a political charge has to lead this, for obvious reasons. I am not trying to put you in a difficult position, but you must have views on the efficacy of call lists. Obviously, it could be done in very different ways. You could break the debate into two halves, with Members having to be there for the totality of one half. Maybe you could leave for the second half, or vice versa. There are myriad different ways you could do it, but on call lists, proxy voting, hybrid participation and bobbing, while I appreciate that there are different elements to this—you have mentioned that other Committees are looking at it—you must have views on what we should be doing, partly in reflection of the evidence that we have received, and the re-emphasis that this has put on accessibility in all its forms.

We talk about very niche issues here that affect Members of Parliament specifically, but they have a broader impact. Language and terminology impact the ability of the public to understand what is going on, and of our staff to read the Order Paper. A year in, sometimes I still struggle to comprehend it, though I think I am getting better.

I appreciate that this is political, and it is not your decision, and you will faithfully discharge what the House requires you to do, as long as it is lawful. All that aside, what views, thoughts, notes of caution and notes of optimism do you have? As the Chair said, this has come through very strongly. I do not think that us just saying, “Let's look at it later,” will be a very successful way to deal with it. It may be that another Committee and a revision of the Standing Orders are some of the answers, but I think we have to address it because these are very live things that, as you said, Sarah, have evolved, partly because events forced them to in the last few years, but also just because we are in the 21st century. AI and all these things bring great challenges, but opportunities too.

Tom Goldsmith: There are a few things there. I will take bobbing first, because I think that is quite an easy one. There is no magic about bobbing; there is no procedural or constitutional magic about standing up in your place. The main thing is the occupant of the Chair being alert when you want to make a contribution. Obviously, some Members wave their Order Paper.

I know that the Speaker’s Office and the Deputies are very happy to make arrangements that mean that, as long as they are aware that someone wants to participate in a debate, they will do their best to make that work. I think that one is quite an easy one. Call lists are—

Q146  Chair: Not for the visually impaired.

Tom Goldsmith: Yes—the evidence from Steve Darling and Marsha de Cordova on that was really interesting. That is a fair point.

Call lists are more political. I absolutely get why Members want more clarity and want to be able to manage their time better. And particularly for Members with disabilities, sitting in a room for six hours is not really a good thing to have to do.

The reason, I think, why it is political is because any change you make in that area might have an impact on the spontaneity of debate. It might have an impact on attendance in the Chamber, which might impact on both the debate itself and the look to the outside world about what is going on in the Chamber.

There is a real issue, I think, about the authority of the Chair. If we did go to published call lists in advance, I would want to try to make sure that the first 10 minutes of every debate was not taken up with people raising points of order to ask why they were not higher on the list, because lots and lots of Members have very good reasons to be high on the list, and it is a difficult choice that has to be made. So we would have to find a way of saying that that is just not acceptable.

I think you would always want a degree of spontaneity for the Chair, or some room for manoeuvre for the Chair. Let’s say that you are making a speech and you make reference in some detail to another colleague who is looking to get in. The Chair might well want to go to that colleague next, to be able to have that debate and to push back. That is just one example.

You asked me about my opinion. I think it is important that the Chamber remains a debating chamber, and that people are listening to each other and interacting with each other. I have been, as have other colleagues—

Q147  Chair: To be fair, we have heard that very strongly, and no one is talking about the kind of covid version of keeping people out of the Chamber; they are just talking about it being more inclusive. You cannot have heard the session with Rob Halfon and Marie Tidball and not been compelled to do that better.

Tom Goldsmith: Absolutely, Chair. I get the really strong arguments that have come across from your witnesses for them. But I think it is fair just to think about some of the consequences and some of the things that you would have to take into account to try to manage it well, if that is where the House wanted to go.

I know that in your evidence to the Procedure Committee you talked about different models for how you might do this. I think a model that gave some indications of where people might be in the debate, but that also gave some room for manoeuvre to the Chair and protected the authority of the Chair, are things that I would want to see absolutely at the centre of any change, if the House goes that way.

Q148  Mr Barros-Curtis: Absolutely. On spontaneity, from your experiences when you are there, I think that is right, up to a point, because my experience—albeit limited experience of one year, compared to the vast experience around the table—is that that is very true at the beginning, but it does not exist at the end of a debate. If we are down to a two-minute or three-minute debate, nobody is taking interventions. Everybody is rattling through their speech, because they have sat there for five hours trying to get in, and then—whether it is to put out on their socials or not—they have thought, “I’ve sat here for five hours now. I am going to say my piece—what was a six-minute speech is now a two-minute speech.” And that is not right, either.

That does not work, because for the first hour and a half of a debate, you will have the spontaneous interventions and you will have the opposition—both sides—and the sparring. All of that will work. But very quickly—we saw it through the assisted dying debates and in any kind of big-ticket events where people want to get on the record—they don’t take interventions, or actually they are discouraged by the Chair from taking interventions.

So I agree with spontaneity, but it is not a consistent point all the way through. And I think that by some people—not by yourselves—it gets over-egged. It is an important part of the debating chamber, but after a certain time in the day, it kind of falls away—

Tom Goldsmith: I think that is completely fair. That raises a related issue about what you want time limits to do. In circumstances where you have lots of Members seeking to get in, is it better to have a time limit of two minutes, which probably leads to lots of people repeating quite similar points, or should you have it at four or five minutes, accepting that not everyone will get in, but perhaps the debate will be of slightly better quality?

Sarah Davies: It is also a general point about testing and, as Tom mentioned earlier, consequences—testing some of the underlying assumptions when people are thinking about whether to change or not change, and unpicking the assumptions. Another related issue is, following on from Tom mentioning time limits, things such as injury time for interventions. I think that was mentioned in the Government’s submission to the Procedure Committee. All these interconnected rules start to play at that stage, and what is the output? We all know that the Chamber is a very complicated ecosystem of rules and people. Both in thinking about change and about what the reasons might be for not changing, it is important to play through what the consequences might be.

Q149  Mr Barros-Curtis: That is really interesting, Sarah. When you talk about testing, are you suggesting, if there were some sort of agreement about changing x and y but not z, trialling it in Westminster Hall? Are you suggesting that there could be a test of a week or a certain day there, or maybe in the Chamber itself, as a try-before-you-buy sort of thing? Is that what you mean by testing, or are you just thinking theoretically?

Sarah Davies: When I was talking of testing generally, I was saying that I think there is a lot to do when we are looking at the Chamber, because of its complexity, and we should unpick proposals before we even start putting them, as it were, into a live environment. I think there is a lot that we need to do with that. That is not a reason for not doing anything, but it is a reason for really thinking through quite clearly what the practical consequences might be of changes, as we already talked about with Standing Orders. Where we have had changes before, we have often trialled things. They have often been introduced for a pilot period. The House has always welcomed an opportunity to do that, partly because of the law of unintended consequences.

You have to be careful. One thing that might be suitable for one environment might not be suitable for another, so you are always going to need to think about whether, for example, trialling something in Westminster Hall might work or not. Certainly, in previous procedural changes, the idea of trialling or pilots has generally been found to be very helpful. That is also because we have examples of pilots that have not been continued. If you look back to some of the procedural reform in the 1960s, for example, people tried things and then they stopped doing them.

Chair: Or during covid.

Tom Goldsmith: I completely agree with that. I think trialling is a really good idea, whatever the Committee and the House wants to go for. It is interesting—if you look at programming, which was introduced in ’97 or ’98, it did not get into the Standing Orders until 2004. The first Bill that was programmed was the Scotland Bill in, I think, ’97 or ’98. It was used extensively during that period, but it is quite sensible for the House to take its time, look how things are working and reflect on them.

Q150  Sarah Coombes: I have another procedural issue on the core of what we are here for, which is voting. We had a lot of evidence from disabled Members about how difficult it is when they spend sometimes multiple hours voting. Particularly on the days where you have maybe eight votes on something, some Members told us that they struggled to walk the following day. There are really quite significant physical impacts on them. The question is, what do you think we could do to improve the efficiency and accessibility of voting?

In the accessibility-tradition tension, I do not think any of us want to get rid of in-person voting altogether, so I am not saying we go to full digital voting, but what could we possibly do? Could it be hybrid votes—some in person and some online—or some other means? If we have lots of Divisions in a row, could we make better use of deferred Divisions? It has been mentioned that the Reasons Room could become a reasonable adjustments room for Members with accessibility needs, with them able to cast their votes in that room and not go through the Lobbies. What are the possibilities, from your perspective, of improving accessibility for voting?

Sarah Davies: I will start with this one, and then pass back to Tom. I am also mindful that the Procedure Committee is looking at both electronic voting and proxy voting.

Q151   Chair: Although the Procedure Committee is very much looking at full electronic voting.

Sarah Davies: Yes, per the different types. We have clearly been keeping an eye on that, in terms of the evidence received, including by this Committee. On electronic voting, from a technical perspective, a system for that was adopted during the covid pandemic. A version of that system is still operated in the Lords. Having been here through that system, and from when it ceased to be used, it is very clearly a decision for the House as to whether that should be introduced or not. From a practical, technical and security perspective, we know that a huge amount was done to make that practical. There are strong views on multiple sides about its use. At the moment, it is not in use within the House, so this Committee has to consider whether that would be introduced or not. I know that you have taken evidence on that.

On the system of Divisions, you mentioned multiple Divisions over time, and deferred Divisions. Clearly, deferred Divisions were an attempt to start to move in this space, and to develop greater certainty. The problem that was trying to be solved is that, under the old system, there could be votes on delegated legislation quite late at night, well after the moment of interruption. That was perceived to be a potential problem because Members were having to stay quite late for the possibility of a vote that might take place or not. That attempt was conducted both in the context of family-friendly hours and, to a certain extent, accessibility. It was introduced as a limited system for, as it were, self-standing decisions. That is always the complexity of deferred Divisions or Division times. For certain categories of vote, where it is a kind of one-off with no consequentials, you can say that you will move it to a point in the week. There were arguments at the time that it was none the less separating the debate from the decision, and people argued against it on that basis.

The challenge that we have with multiple votes is that quite often those votes will relate to each other, such as a sequence of decisions and outcomes on a Bill. If one of those is not passed, you then have a decision point to take somewhere else. It can materially affect what is happening. That has always been the challenge. When we talk about the network of decision making and so on, that is one of the limitations. I am not saying that no further work could be done to think about extending the deferred Divisions system to more types of business, but that has always been the fundamental complexity. When the House is having eight votes on the trot, it is usually—I am not saying always—because there is complicated business to go through and you have to go through it in a certain sequence to get a decision at the end. So that is electronic voting, deferred Divisions and decision times.

On what we can do around the Lobbies and the system as it is, I personally think that the Reasons Room is a really interesting idea for making sure that people don’t have to go through the Lobbies—it is not something that I had heard about before. I can imagine crowding in with loads of people who have to walk through sequentially. If there is an alternative to doing that, clearly that is something that could be taken forward. I think that is the kind of idea that we would be really interested to investigate. I hope that is, as it were, a start to answering those questions. I will pass over to Tom to make additional points, if he wishes.

Tom Goldsmith: I am not sure that I have any. As I said with bobbing, I think that generally the system of having Members walk through the Division Lobbies is obviously something that lots of Members really value. I hear what you say about not wanting to do away with it in its entirety, but insisting that it is something that Members with disabilities have to do on multiple occasions seems to me something that we should try to move away from. We must have the wit to sort out a system that does that, whether it is in the Reasons Room or somewhere else. That makes sense to me. Deferred Divisions are interesting. On the Order Paper today we have three decisions that, before deferred Divisions, would potentially have been real-life votes. We have a decision on a statutory instrument, which is the absolutely classic use for it; a motion in your name, Chair, about the recess, which is a motion I like very much; and the reappointment of, I think, an electoral commissioner.

Q152   Chair: That is also in my name, I think.

Tom Goldsmith: Yes, but I was more taken by the recess one. All of those are, as Sarah says, completely stand-alone decisions. You can take a decision on those without needing to know any other decisions, and without them influencing any other decisions. As Sarah said, it gets really difficult when you have decisions that are contingent on each other. There is procedural contingency—if you pass one amendment, you then have to consider passing a lot more to make a Bill internally consistent—but there is also an idea of political contingency. With a very big majority, we might not see it very often at the moment. However, there have been times in Committee, when there have been some very close votes, where the Government—I am not talking about this Government but the Government generally—winning or losing a vote by a small margin can then have an impact on whether further questions are even put or not. I would be really wary about going in that direction more for Bills. As Sarah says, we could certainly think about whether there are any other categories of decisions that might benefit from that.

Q153  Sarah Coombes: I think it would be really helpful to think about what more we could use deferred Divisions for. You are the experts and know about those kinds of votes. Also, how could we compress the times of the votes? We can spend three hours voting, and when there is so much other stuff that MPs are expected to do these days, there must be a way in modern times that we can manage to speed up the process a little bit.

It feels a bit like you are going through football turnstiles some days, when you are in the Lobbies. It is so packed and then you are going through one at a time at the very end. When you have lots of votes, you wonder whether this is a good, efficient use of MPs’ time. I completely agree that, on the first three votes, you have managed to grab the Minister, but for the four or five votes afterwards, is there any possible way that we could make this more efficient?

Tom Goldsmith: I completely get the point, but I am struggling a bit to think of quick ways, with the constraints of the Lobby, and if you were not going to change that very much. Obviously, we have pass reader voting now, so we can think about whether there is anything there that might speed it up, but I cannot think of anything at the forefront of my mind. Obviously, the Chair can move quite quickly when the Tellers are appointed. They do not have to wait for the full two minutes to appoint Tellers, if they are there. But these are marginal things, and I absolutely accept the thrust of your point.

Sarah Davies: Going back to the discussion that we had earlier, one of the challenges is that, for first and subsequent Divisions, you have to allow Members enough time to get there. For the first Division, it is 10 minutes. That used to be eight minutes historically but, because of the scale of the works on the northern parliamentary estate, it has now gone up to 10. Tom mentioned the pass readers in the Division Lobbies, and I think there are now four or five readers in each Lobby.

Chair: There are always queues at them.

Sarah Davies: That is definitely something that we could look at. The exit system, via the Tellers, is obviously one by one.

Chair: It is too slow. Just standing back a moment, I am not saying that this is where we need to go, but we are in an age where we are all digitising and using AI. We are rightly wanting the national health service to do more digitally, and we want teachers to make best use of AI to increase productivity and everything else. Is it not slightly mad that you have the 650 lawmakers of the country only being able to cast their votes by endlessly walking around in circles in a physical environment that takes a long time? It is slightly bizarre. If aliens dropped from outer space, we would look a bit ludicrous, wouldn’t we? I know that we are all wedded to it, and there are lots of good reasons for it, but there are lots of times when it is a highly unproductive use of everyone’s time. I do not know why we just always accept it.

Q154  Joy Morrissey: On that point, I have to say that in the last Parliament Chris Elmore on the Labour side was very good at nodding through. I think we sometimes forget about nodding through on our side because we do not have as many older Members. We had to do a lot of nodding through, and to be fair, Chris was great. We should probably offer that to all parties, to be honest. We do it with the two big parties pretty regularly, on a daily basis. The thing with nodding through is that it helps with the counting, and it makes it okay. As you are talking about it now, I could see how we would probably need to revise that to make sure it is available for everybody.

On disabled access, I wonder whether you have looked at the simple idea of the amendments being in order. Sometimes, when people come to the House who might have a visual disability, it is quite overwhelming and almost a deterrent to engaging in the democratic process. Particularly at Report stage, when they want to come and speak to an amendment, they look at it and think, “Oh my gosh, I am just not going to speak.” I know it is a small change, but it would help everybody, particularly new Members who feel that it is very intimidating.

If you have any kind of visual disability or autism, it is quite intimidating to have to pick through and speak on them. It would probably help to have that simple ability, especially when a new Parliament comes in. It would also help Members take an active interest in the voting process—as a Whip, I don’t want Members to take an active interest in how it works—and it would mean that more Members understood how the voting process worked if we took things in chronological order.

Sarah Davies: Can I unpick a little how that would look in practice?

Joy Morrissey: I don’t know how.

Sarah Davies: Stop me if I am going off on the wrong track and I have misunderstood what you said, but you mentioned Report stage. We sometimes talk about the number of different documents that people have to look at in order to interpret what is actually going on at any one time. As somebody who has worked in the Public Bill Office, as well as at the Table, when talking to colleagues about this, I am always going to say that it is terribly complicated.

Your question, very validly, is how do we make that more comprehensible to people working outside? There are steps that have been taken. Over the years, the Public Bill Office has, I think, improved by a factor of about 1,000, in terms of the level of information that it is giving to Members and others about how proceedings will go on a particular day. Your Committee may have heard about how that is received, but I get feedback on the work that they have done to send regular emails once the provisional decisions about separate decision have been made, to explain that to people who have tabled amendments to the Bill. I am sure that there is definitely more we can do, but my point is that, going back five or 10 years, much less was done than what is done now to explain it to people.

We also saw the experiment, as it were, of that supplementary information note that was circulated for the Report stage of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which in a way was a further iteration of that process to produce a note to indicate, once the provisional selection decision had been taken, how that would practically play out. Again, there is a necessary level of complexity in all these things, but certainly the feedback that we got as part of that was that it was helpful.

On the challenge of combining, one of the arguments I have heard sometimes is that the amendment paper and the selection paper could somehow be combined into a single document. There was an experiment done on this, probably about 25 or 30 years ago. The problem with that is that the amendment papers are themselves very long documents. They are technically complicated documents to produce. The selection and grouping is then a layer that is put on top of that. If you try to integrate those two, you end up with a document that is not right, because it is technically quite difficult to achieve for a 1,000 document. You have got quite a long amendment paper, so integrating the amendments and the selection and grouping into a single thing does not work.

Also, the fact is that selection and grouping decisions are only provisional and often are taken on the day that the debate is going to take place. So you have a bit of a problem here. I think it is a bit like some of the Standing Order discussions that we have had of weaving together these technical documents, because I can tell you that when you are at the Table, the authority—the amendment paper—and your treatment of that as the Clerks has to be crystal clear. It’s your Clerk nightmare to come to the end of a Bill and realise that a decision has been missed or not taken. It is this trade-off between accessibility in its wider sense and quick-moving procedure, which has to be absolutely precise.

Chair: And understood. I have got a couple of people to come and then I will bring in Kirith on our last topic.

Q155  Marie Goldman: There are so many things I wanted to pick up on, but I will choose the one thing that both Sarah and Tom have said in different contexts. I just wanted to give you a little bit of food for thought.

One of the things that has come through from our evidence sessions is that people with disabilities do not want to be treated like people with disabilities. They want to be treated as anybody else. So we talk about making adjustments and so on, and Tom, you did talk at the beginning about looking at breaking down barriers, but then equally, both of you have just suggested things that would be making very visible adjustments for people with disabilities, which would be singling them out again. The reasonable adjustments room, for example, is okay as a kind of fallback option, but I definitely do not think it should be our first go-to for how we solve it. A reasonable adjustments room would be for people with disabilities, so instantly you are singling people out. There will be questions: “Why do you get to use that room, and I don’t get to use it?” or “What are they doing in there?” That is singling them out.

Tom, you said that we can deal with bobbing really quickly, and you said that we make adjustments for people who are bobbing. Again, that is singling people out. I just challenge everyone to remember that people with disabilities are people, and we should not be singling them out because they have disabilities.

Tom Goldsmith: It is a really fair challenge. There are different levels at which you can approach these issues. If the House had a will to change its method of voting, generally, to all electronic or to not requiring people to walk through the Lobby, that is how you would deal with that issue. But we cannot make that happen. That has to be driven by the House.

Q156  Marie Goldman: There will be some cases in which we have to make reasonable adjustments, and that will single people out. I would just like us to try quite a bit harder at making that the last resort rather than the first go-to solution.

Tom Goldsmith: As Clerks, we would be absolutely supportive of any solution that gets to the approach that you are talking about. I completely take the general point, but I suppose that the best is the enemy of the good here sometimes. We would like to have a system that did not require anyone to say, “Can you do this thing for me?” or make them have to have special treatment. But if there is not going to be a bigger change, perhaps it is better than doing nothing.

Marie Goldman: You are not the first people to raise it. I just wanted to underline the point that, rather than thinking—I am not saying that you suggested this—that we have got that solution done and dusted, maybe we could try a little harder and find something else.

Chair: I am going to bring Kirith in on our last topic, but the other issue that we have been talking about is Members being able to attend Select Committees in a hybrid way. We are taking that forward, and the Liaison Committee is working up some guidance on that for us. These things might seem small, but there are always a million reasons why people want to stick with the current way of doing it and the tradition, rather than seeing it through a different lens. That is why we need to take on those forces a little bit.

Q157  Jesse Norman: One way to improve the general accessibility of all legislation would be for it to be published four weeks before it was laid in the House on Second Reading, so politicians need to think about that aspect more widely. My very quick question: is this not the wrong way around? Isn’t one way of making people more excited about debates to make debates more effective, by stopping things like reading or repeating the question, or by going back to fundamental principles that would encourage people to think of the House as a deliberative institution?

Tom Goldsmith: Where we can do things to explain what we do better, and especially when we are doing them without accidentally changing the substance of what we do, we should do them, because that is good for communication and engagement. Where I agree is that I do not think that changing some of the names of things will by itself radically change the engagement that people outside this place have with it.

Interestingly, if you think about what happened last week with the universal credit Bill, there was massive interest in what the House was doing. In fact, the potential procedural permutations on that day were quite complex, with reasoned amendments, and all the scenarios that could have played out were quite complex. That did not stop anyone following what was going on or journalists explaining it.

I would not for a moment argue that what happened over Brexit was necessarily the House at its best, but it was the House having the most attention it is ever had in my lifetime. That is because what was being debated was something that people really cared about, and there was a genuine debate about what might happen. That is the driving force for engagement with this place. That does not mean that you should not try to make things clearer and more accessible to the outside world where you can.

Chair: That is a whole other debate, so let’s not get into that now. Sometimes things are taken out of context or people find them interesting, but that is not the main thrust of what we are doing. However, we also have to remember that these days—and we talked about this with the Deputy Speakers last week—there is a lot of personalisation and social media attention, sometimes pushed by political parties on all sides, around how we vote on things, which is not reflective of what we are actually voting on or what the actual meaning of the vote is.

Things might get attention and people might be able to follow them but, for example, a reasoned amendment is not an amendment. Then you are being castigated for voting against something that is not actually what you are voting against—you are voting for a Bill that does lots of other things, rather than against the thing that is not actually an amendment. But that gets absolutely set in stone as what you voted on.

These days, all the minutiae of what we do is massively shared and amplified. There are times when what we are being accused of doing is not actually what we have done. That is a separate conversation. I am conscious of time—Kirith, you had a couple of other bits you wanted to say.

Q158  Kirith Entwistle: I just want to say quickly that I think we should absolutely be taking lessons from the way that the Westminster Hall debating Chamber works. As a new MP, that is very much my comfort zone. It is a very good place to have those really constructive debates because there is a clear time limit, and you know exactly who will be called to speak—you might not know exactly when you are being called to speak, but you know you will be sat in there for 30, 60 or 90 minutes. Let us try to learn some lessons from the way that Chamber works.

We have talked a lot about Members’ accessibility and things like that, but I want to come on to visitors as well. To what extent do you think the current administration is able to meet the needs of disabled visitors—those providing evidence and those who are invited to events on the estate?

Sarah Davies: Perhaps I will start from a general visitor perspective, then others might want to come in on the wider points around the accessibility of the estate.

You mentioned visitors coming in for tours and events. Obviously, we have a huge amount of footfall of people who are not passholders coming on to the estate for a whole range of reasons on any sitting day. You mentioned people coming in to give evidence or to see things. I think it is a real strength; it is important for the public to be able to come in and see proceedings and visit Parliament. One of the really interesting things that my department does is host people and welcome them.

However, we are probably all cognisant of the fact that all those points about the physical accessibility of the building very much apply to visitors coming in. For example, I have brought in people who use a wheelchair. As soon as you go into Westminster Hall, you are suddenly working around the system in terms of the line of route.

Visitor experience colleagues, who are experienced in this, know the routes around. They ensure that they provide a welcoming and inclusive experience. We mentioned that not all disabilities are visible; for people who are neurodiverse, it is about having that level of experience and awareness when taking them around those busy spaces. For some people, that will be quite challenging, so it is about making sure those tours—including, potentially, tours of Elizabeth Tower—are done really well.

There is regular work in this area by the customer-facing teams involved. We are doing that within some of the limitations that the current physical access to the estate can sometimes make quite challenging.

Margaret McKinnon: It is not necessarily just visitors; Members’ staff are another group we want to be mindful of. You will all have staff—some of whom work on the estate, and some in constituencies who come here less often. That is an area where I think there are things we already do, but there is definitely more we can do to support you, as employers of those staff, to help make those adjustments and work out what they are, along with House teams to support with that and work with IPSA. That is another group who are a really big part of the parliamentary community, many of whom use the estate.

Q159  Kirith Entwistle: I would also add House staff to that—for example, catering staff. We had an issue in the Members’ Tea Room recently where I spotted one of the members of staff sitting on a tray on top of a bin, because they were not allowed to have seating behind the counter. I flagged that up to the Speaker’s Office, and there is still no chair available for that person. She has been given time off and things like that, but I am not sure whether by raising it, I made the situation worse, because it still has not been resolved. It is great that we have mechanisms to report those reasonable adjustments or raise issues for staff, but at the moment, the system does not seem to be quite working as well as I would like. That is another area that I would like us to consider.

On more practical mechanisms of support, we contract BSL, audio and easy read translations out to external companies. Is there any merit in moving those in-house?

Sarah Davies: I will take I will take this one, if I may. Obviously, I mentioned AI at the beginning, and there are some possible opportunities there in future. We have been experimenting with easy read, because that is one thing we think that AI can do very well.

BSL is a really interesting one. We have our director of parliamentary broadcasting, Michael MacFarlane, in the audience here. We have talked about how people perceive and look at this place, and they can do because of the extraordinary level of broadcasting work that is done by our broadcasting team. The statistics they have for the number of hours broadcast is terrifying sometimes—on a busy Tuesday, the number of feeds they have ongoing simultaneously. It is a really important part of our public engagement in terms of people being able to look at this place. Obviously, we talk about accessibility in the physical context, but there are some important key points on digital accessibility too, whether that is how our website looks and feels, but also about provision of the broadcasting proceedings in alternative formats.

You mentioned whether those should be contracted, or we should have some kind of in-house provision. Of course, that is probably a field where, typically, those have been done on a contract basis, because at some times of the year, the proceedings flow clearly stops, while in some areas it starts. With that kind of model, having one of the contracting firms on hand has been a sensible way to procure the process. However, we are looking at that provision going forward.

The complexity here—with BSL, for example—is that the costs are going up over time. We are seeing that. There has been an increase in demand for BSL from public sector organisations as a whole so, obviously, it is one of those areas where we need to look at the resources we are putting into it and how those might need to change over time. As part of that model, clearly we would look at different options for procuring it, but my understanding is that, partly because of the ebb and flow of business throughout the year, typically there are providers that are available to do that kind of work. That is actually a very cost-effective way of providing it, albeit one that is becoming more expensive over time.

We may face some quite difficult decisions there ahead, but again it is an area of some experiments with an AI avatar—for example, with BSL—but one of the challenges we face with AI in general in proceedings is the accuracy and technical requirements, even in signing. Signing a Bill is a real skill. We need someone able to sign procedurally what is happening, as well as what is said. We have some challenges there and we will possibly face some quite challenging decisions in the future about where we go with that kind of provision. I want to be straight with that now.

Tom Goldsmith: I will be really brief, but just on that specific issue, I am completely option-agnostic on whether we bring people in or use contractors—it is whatever works best. Sarah makes a very good point about the rhythm of the work. What I am told is that in this area—obviously, this is slightly anecdotal—the people who do this work are really in demand. It is a growth area, as Sarah says, in so many different things.

Chair: Because AI cannot do it, basically. It is like getting your hair cut.

Tom Goldsmith: They have fantastic portfolio careers where they can go around the world doing fascinating pieces of work for all sorts of different organisations. To be really frank, we might just struggle affording them to be here the whole time. If we can do it, absolutely we want to look into it, but that might be one thing we are up against.

Chair: Going all around the world or sitting in the House of Commons Chamber or broadcasting suite.

I extend all our thanks. It was a really interesting and wide-ranging session. Once again, I thank you already for all your work in really engaging with this inquiry and taking on board what we are saying. We are looking to do a report in the autumn, but I am sure it will lead to further pieces of work and so on, because we have opened up various box lids along the way, which is great. Thank you so much for coming.