Select Committee on Modernisation of the House of Commons Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 37-39)

LORD PUTTNAM CBE, MR ANDREW LANSLEY CBE MP, DAME PATRICIA HODGSON DBE AND MS CLARE ETTINGHAUSEN

29 MARCH 2006

  Q37 Chairman: Good morning and thank you for coming this morning. I apologise for the relatively modest numbers. Colleagues have a habit of drifting in; 9.30 is clearly a little early for some of them! We are grateful obviously for you coming today but, more particularly, for the very important report that you have produced[1] which in a sense has formed a backcloth to a great deal of what we have been discussing in the Committee and we thought that, rather than simply rely on our reading, we would hear it from you directly. David, I do not know whether there is anything that you want to say by way of introduction.

  Lord Puttnam: I would like to introduce everyone though they probably do not need an introduction. First of all, Dame Patricia Hodgson, who is Principal Elect at Newnham College Cambridge but probably has been in this room more times than almost any of us representing the interests of the BBC, Clare Ettinghausen who runs the Hansard Society and Andrew Lansley, part of your home team.

  Q38  Chairman: I would not go quite that far! I know that he is moving in our direction . . . !

  Lord Puttnam: Viewed from the other end of the corridor, it looks that way! I would like to make a couple of generalised remarks and then we will deal with individual issues. Context: I think a year ago, you were very, very generous about the report and, if we recognised that there was a problem then, particularly in the area of trust, you have to acknowledge that the problem is significantly worse today. The point that we tried to make in the report was that whilst there are positive things taking place in Parliament all the time—and we can go into some of those this morning if you want—year on year, Parliament is slipping behind when benchmarked against almost any other organisation that in a macro sense is in the communications business, the public facing business. There are a number of reasons for this but we were not convinced that all of them were being addressed. It comes down at the end to the issue of trust. I have spent most of the past year going round—last night in Cheltenham—talking to groups, large and small, about attitudes to Parliament and I have formed a very depressed and distressing view. Trust has broken down. There is not a sense out there of being adequately represented or even when there is a sense of being adequately represented, the public do not believe that they are being adequately communicated with. I know that it is invidious to compare Parliament with any form of corporation but the truth is, in any other parallel area of life, this would be an urgent and very worrying trend and, whilst Parliament is wrestling with some of the problems, there is no sense of them being wrestled with with the urgency that certainly I and I think the rest of the Committee feel they deserve. One simple illustration. We know exactly who speaks for the Government: it is the Prime Minister and Downing Street. It is extremely difficult to define who speaks for Parliament. Believe me, the public out there do not know who speaks for Parliament. The Speaker is an all but anonymous figure and there is no sense that Parliament has a voice or at least a personified voice, and we felt that that was an error. This morning, we should spend at least some time talking about what is happening. Indeed, there are things happening and particularly what is very, very encouraging—and thanks to you, Chairman—are developments on the website, and I actually think that changes to the website will make a profound difference. And not a small difference. I think the ability of people, particularly young people, to interrogate Parliament in their terms and about their issues is a massive step in the right direction. The conversation can turn to, who is to blame for the breakdown in trust? We were criticised somewhat for not focusing at least some of the blame on the media, but the truth is that the media can only reflect what they see in Parliament and personally I think it is a waste of time complaining about the media unless we are absolutely certain that every single nook and cranny of change has been looked at, investigated and optimised and I think our purpose here today is to try to help in that process.

  Dame Patricia Hodgson: I would like to highlight one or two things that are in your control that reinforce exactly what David said. It is about, I think, determining on the purpose of your communication. A sort of quick and dirty feel from my BBC and ITC days would be that something like 70% of coverage is government focused, either government driven or quangos and NGOs engaging with government; most of the rest, party political or individual MPs locally. Almost nothing about Parliament. So, what David says about people not understanding any difference between Parliament and Government or understanding what you do is not surprising. All the polls show that as well but the polls also show a greater respect for individual MPs, their own MPs, and it is about building on that and the work that you do here. I do think the media is blameworthy but the point is that there are things which you can control here whereas you cannot control the media. There are some simple things like bringing interviews off College Green into the workplace and like the experiment in the Lords at the moment to relax the grammar of coverage so that it feels real, like the rest of television. Above all, thinking about the timing of events here. I know that sounds like lese-majesty but almost anybody who wants to influence the public or communicate with the public thinks about when it is going to get coverage and I think that is something you should think about. There are two particular things within your control for which the website is clearly terrifically important. As David says, it is improving exponentially but there is still a long way to go because it is still for aficionados who find it a convenient way of looking at what is happening now. It is not yet setting the agenda in terms of issues. For example, last week, I typed "BBC Charter Review" into the archive search engine and it came up with nothing. Yet, that is a live issue and therefore anyone interested in it is only going to get an angle either from the DCMS, ie government, or the BBC. Whereas, if you think about issues and the young people, the journalists who, if they went to Parliament's website first, you would set the agenda in an independent way, and of course the other is the BBC itself because the Charter and Agreement are currently being debated and there is all the controversy about citizenship and, at the same time, the BBC is being allowed to get away with a bromide about its coverage of this place. You either use or lose this once-in-ten-years' opportunity to write into the Agreement a real commitment to improving the Parliamentary channel and their own website, a commitment which otherwise you will lose to highlights coverage on the main channels and some real cross-promotion from those main channels to the Parliament channel and the website.

  Mr Lansley: The reason I became involved with David and this particular Commission was because I have been concerned for a long time, as I know many of us have, about the lack of trust in politicians and democracy and I know, as I suspect all of you do, that, in constituencies—and this is generally true for a constituency Member of Parliament—you are known and to a much greater extent trusted than the political process as a whole and that is to do with engagement and familiarity. The problem is that there is no engagement and familiarity with Parliament as an institution. To give an example, I served under David on a previous occasion pretty well all the way through the Communications Bill. We did a great deal of work which frankly was not party political at any point in the course of a year-and-a-half's work or so. There is probably one in a thousand of my constituents who know that I did that. I could spend a couple of days arguing about a single mobile phone mast and a very large proportion of my constituents would know about it. The public are engaged with politicians as constituency Members of Parliament, they hear from political parties and they see a great deal of the communications of political parties and government, principally government but secondarily political parties. What they do not find is a space for Parliament. Yet, what we do hear consists in large measure of parliamentarians working together to try and find solutions to problems and to hold government to account and although when you balance the proportion of the time we spend as Members of Parliament on that task with the proportion of communications output which is understood and received by the public, it is a trivial fraction of that total communications output. So, from my point of view, the purpose of this was to find a way in which one can have a space for Parliament as an institution so that there is a point to all the change we have made, going all the way back to having select committees, to having a greater degree of scrutiny and to having a greater independence for backbench Members of Parliament. What is the point of doing all that inside Parliament if Parliament is not at the same time creating the communication strategy which enables that to be effectively delivered to the public? It is not, frankly. Even on the website. I put the word "hospitals" in the other day and the Armed Forces Bill came up. Well, "A", Armed Forces Bill comes first in the alphabet. So, naturally enough, it is the first thing to pop up when you put "hospitals" into the search engine. You could do it this morning. Under "What's on?", it says, "The Immigration, Nationality and Asylum Bill" and you can click on the Bill and what you get of course are the explanatory notes and the text of the Bill. It does not actually tell you what the Lords today are discussing that they are sending back to the Commons. It does not engage with the issues. Frankly, if that is all going to change, it is not going to be by web technologies and new search engines. It can only change, as is true with any communication strategy in any organisation, because one lives that particular change and, at the moment, Parliament does not have a mechanism led by its Members and determined formally inside Parliament of a communication strategy which then informs the whole of the administration as to how this should change.

  Ms Ettinghausen: I will not bore the Committee with all the reasons why the Hansard Society set the Commission up under the chairmanship of Lord Puttnam but, very briefly, it is worth saying that we set it up because we saw and have continued to see Parliament at the centre of a healthy democracy and we were increasingly concerned that there was a problem with the way Parliament communicates itself and that really democracy was moving on and Parliament was being left behind. So that is why we set it up. It is also worth saying that we spent some time at the Hansard Society with various members of this Committee yesterday talking about far more procedural kind of insidery issues about reform of the Committee stage in Parliament or in the Commons and it is really worth saying that there is a link between those sort of more procedural technical issues and the perhaps more kind of jazzy communication issues and they cannot be seen as separate more effective and efficient Parliament covers both of those issues. Thirdly, there is a public appetite for representative democracy. I am interested to see that the Power Inquiry report is there on the table which certainly talks about a more participative democracy and the public really have much more of an appetite for parliamentary style representative democracy. They may not vote but they are very interested in MPs acting on their behalf. They do not want to be consulted on every issue. They would like to know what is going on, but they certainly do not see themselves as activists and political activists in the parliamentary sense. They are very keen on supporting what happens here and I think that is worth noting. Lastly, the Commission felt very strongly that the participation of young people in democracy was very important. We know from statistics that young people are less and less likely to vote but we also know that they are certainly not politically apathetic. We constantly look for new avenues of bringing young people into the political process and what we have found time and time again through the Commission is that there are very few avenues to bring young people or indeed people of all ages into the parliamentary process. One of the two or three things that have happened in the House of Lords since the Puttnam Commission reported is a trial to allow young people to use the House of Lords' Chamber during recess and although it is a discrete exercise with a debating competition taking place there, it may have an effect on young people being able to see their peers in something that they would only normally see adults and older people on television. So, I think it is worth, as the discussion goes on, thinking about avenues where young people may be able to have a way in to what happens here.

  Q39  Chairman: Thank you very much. I think all of us would share your objective and I think it is right that we do what we can to put our own House in order, if you will forgive the pun. After your report was published, I did talk to a number of journalists, particularly television journalists, who said, for example, that it is extremely difficult to persuade news editors to show pictures of green benches. Equally, it is the case that quite often the only coverage of Parliament in our daily newspapers is in the form of a sketch which is hardly likely to inform people—it may entertain them but it clearly gives a particular view of what Members of Parliament do, which is usually not a particularly helpful one. So, whilst I accept that we have to do what we can to make the changes that you describe, particularly in relation to, for example, the website—and a great deal of work is underway on that—I remain slightly unpersuaded that, if we made all of those efforts, if we implemented every one of your 30 steps, we would still find that our media, given the state that it is in, would not respond with any more positive coverage.

  Lord Puttnam: I would like to pick up two things, one very much a point that Patricia made. You do have a one-time-chance in the next 10 years to influence the way in which BBC optimises BBC Parliament. The problem does not lie with the people responsible for BBC Parliament, the problem lies between them and the controllers of finance at the BBC who allocate the resources. There is only a passing reference in the entire White Paper to BBC's parliamentary coverage. This is, in my judgment, crazy and Parliament should be taking a firm line as to the minimum obligations that the BBC takes on to cover Parliament and as technology improves, as it will, the utilisation of the BBC's website and the potential of streaming. There should be a series of quite clear commitments by the BBC and required of the BBC, in exactly the same way that there is an entire page, I am delighted to say, on the BBC's obligations to training over the next 10 years. The fact that there is no similar page on the BBC's obligation to parliamentary and political coverage is a serious oversight and something that you absolutely could influence immediately. Believe me, it does not have to be empty green benches, there are a number of ways in which Parliament can be much more constructively illustrated. The other is that we are moving, in my judgment, inexorably towards state funding of political parties. That throws an enormous amount of responsibility on the degree of interest we take in the citizenship education because we will be funding—and it is going to be very uncomfortable for many us—parties and opinions that we will find seriously unattractive. We have an absolute obligation to make sure that young people in this country understand what is being said, what people like the BNP's Nick Griffin is saying, what the history of extreme politics in Britain and indeed in Europe can lead to. If we do not do that, we could well reap the whirlwind. You cannot impose state funding on the ill-informed and the potentially even ignorant electorate. This is a very, very important moment in Parliament's life. A point at which it has to become far more proactive in the situation of projecting itself to the public and allowing the public to have a full understanding of the very good work that goes on here day in and day out, much of which is not party political and which may not attract the interest of the editors of the tabloids but, I think, sure as hell ought to interest the electorate in understanding that many of their issues are being addressed, and addressed very intelligently.


1   Members Only? Parliament in the Public Eye Back


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2006
Prepared 23 May 2006