Letter from Baroness Thomas of Winchester
I can't possibly begin to answer your all your
questions about outreach because I don't know what you're doing
already except with talks to schools and the Youth Parliament
(and the CD—about which, when I took it for a school visit,
I was critical and which may now have been redone).
All I do know is that there is tremendous ignorance
about the work of Parliament, and that there has to be more thinking
outside rather than inside the box.
As far as the press is concerned, they will
only ever engage with what is going on in the House of Lords on
a "need to know" basis. I think I may have said this
before, so forgive me if I sound like a gramophone record, but
the broadcast journalists simply pick up the phone in a panic
and ring either the Information Office or the Whips Offices to
find out what is happening on an amendment to a Bill if it becomes
newsworthy.
The print journalists have slightly more time,
and some of them are quite knowledgeable, but not all. Could you
"educate" them? I doubt they'd bother, although you
never know.
What someone surely must do is to get to grips
with explanations of amendments at committee and report stages
of legislation—not just for the general public but the House
as well.
When amendments are published—or perhaps
the Marshalled List—there should be a crib available at
the same time of what the amendments mean. Otherwise what is the
bread and butter of the House of Lords goes completely past the
comprehension of most people—including, incidentally, most
Peers. Yes, it will be quite a task for someone, but there must
be ways round it. The whips offices could help, although the equivalent
office for the crossbenchers won't be much help.
If votes are expected, my whips office produces
a "hymn sheet" of explanation, but only for those amendments
on which votes are expected.
We can't say, complacently, that the House is
a revising House if we don't explain how they try to revise.
And it might be quite instructive to ask Government
Ministers or civil servants whether their departments are ever
swayed by debates and questions in the Lords—and amendments
to Bills where there isn't a vote. We hear that sometimes Ministers
say that they tell their departments that certain measures won't
get through the Lords, and that encourages a change of heart.
May 2009
| 
