House of Commons Commission - Twenty-Seventh Annual Report

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House of Commons Commission Twenty-Seventh Annual Report

Supporting the House and its committees

The European Scrutiny Committee scrutinises EU legislative proposals and decides which require further consideration.

Introduction
41. Significant changes to the procedures and practices of the House continue to be major challenges for many House staff. Furthermore, the volume of government legislation, parliamentary questions, and select committee meetings and reports remains at a historically high level. During 2004/05 further changes to sitting hours were agreed, including a reversion to the former, later, hours on Tuesdays and an earlier start on Thursdays, for implementation in the new Parliament. Proceedings on the Prevention of Terrorism Bill on 10 March 2005, when the House sat for over 32 hours, demonstrated that recent changes to sitting hours do not in themselves prevent late or even all night sittings. On that occasion, contingency arrangements were made by staff across the House for the sitting to be extended into a second night or even throughout the weekend.

42. A September sitting took place in 2004 but one will not be possible in 2005 so that time is provided for a permanent security screen to be erected in the Chamber, following a decision of the House in April 2004. The publication of a 12-month calendar of sitting days is now well established but it remains, of necessity, provisional; uncertainty about the timing of a general election and the summoning of the new Parliament existed until the day the Prime Minister announced his intention to seek the dissolution of Parliament.

Offices
43. The Clerk's Department, the Library and the Department of the Official Report are mainly engaged with supporting the business of the House and its committees. The Clerk's Department principally comprises offices which each focus on different aspects of the work of the House. These include the:

Journal Office, which produces the daily and permanent record of the proceedings of the House, receives papers and public petitions, and advises on parliamentary privilege and procedural developments;

Table Office, which receives and edits questions and Early Day Motions, and advises Members on their content, prepares the daily Order Paper and advises the Clerks at the Table during sittings;

Legislation Service, which supports the work of the House and its committees in considering public and private bills, statutory instruments, EU documents, and regulatory reform proposals;
Committee Office, which provides the secretariat of each select committee;
Overseas Office, which provides the secretariat of the delegations of the House to international assemblies and also provides expert advice and support to other Parliaments and assemblies and their staff (see paragraphs 150-151); and
Vote Office, which supplies the House and Members with documents.

44. The Library provides an information and research service to the House and its committees both in support of this core task, and in relation to the support of individual Members and their staff in their multifarious roles. Since the work of the Library in relation to these two core tasks cannot easily be differentiated, the main Library services are all covered in this section. The Library combines a reference and lending library in the main building and outposts in the Derby Gate building and Portcullis House, with an extensive research service. The Library also includes the Information Office and Parliamentary Education Unit, which are covered later in this report (see paragraphs 123-126 and 144-146).

45. The Department of the Official Report produces edited verbatim reports of the proceedings of the House (including sittings in Westminster Hall) and its standing committees. It also processes and prints written answers to parliamentary questions, and written ministerial statements. Select committee proceedings are transcribed by a private firm, WB Gurney and Sons LLP, under contract to both Houses of Parliament.

Sittings of the House

LEVELS OF ACTIVITY

46. The chart below gives information about the number of sitting days, and the average duration of sitting days, in each of the last five years.

Further information about the business of the House and its committees can be found in the annual Sessional Return, the most recent of which covers the 2004-05 session.[10]

REPORTING PROCEEDINGS OF THE HOUSE

47. The edited verbatim reports of proceedings in the House and Westminster Hall - the Official Report, or Hansard - are printed overnight and published on paper. They are also currently available on the internet the day after the debates to which they relate but, following a recommendation of the Modernisation Committee, the reports of proceedings in the Chamber will shortly be available online when they are sent to be printed, usually within four hours of speeches being delivered. In 2004/05, over 13,600 pages of reports of debates in the House and Westminster Hall were published in daily parts.

48. The Department of the Official Report aims to make not more than one significant error per thirteen columns of the final version of text of proceedings in the House. The chart overleaf shows how the department has performed against this target in recent years and gives an indication of recent activity levels.

49. House of Commons and House of Lords Hansards have embarked on a joint project to bring in-house the pagination of reports of proceedings. A page make-up unit has been set up in the House of Commons, and will provide services to both Houses. Full in-house production is expected to start in early 2006.

50. Between January and May 2004, there was a review of reporting services, conducted by an independent consultant and supervised by a steering group comprised of representatives from different departments in the House. The results of that review are being considered by management and staff within the department, and changes designed to achieve improved, more cost-effective services to the House will be implemented over the next year.

Questions

51. Notices of questions and motions are received and processed by the Table Office and printed under the supervision of the Editorial Supervisor of the Vote (in the Clerk's Department). Answers to questions are published in the Official Report and questions and Early Day Motions (EDMs) are indexed by staff of the Library. New technology is transforming aspects of each of these processes, notably the Vote Bundle project which is concerned with printing the daily papers of the House (see paragraph 97) and the Parliamentary Information Management Services (PIMS) project, which replaced the POLIS search engine early in 2005/06 (see paragraphs 86-87).

52. The number of questions and motions dealt with by the Table Office in 2004/05 fell slightly from the previous year but with almost 54,000 written questions and nearly 14,500 oral questions processed the figures are still much higher than in the 1997 Parliament. More than 20 per cent of all questions were tabled electronically by the end of the financial year. The total number of Early Day Motions (EDMs) tabled also fell slightly, but the number of added names increased to over 100,000 names. In the period since the start of the 2004-05 session an average of more than 16 new motions have been tabled each day. The number of errors made declined in most categories to well below the target of 0.05 per cent, despite the complications caused by the transition to a new computer system for processing Early Day Motions and added names in February.

53. The Table Office application of the PIMS project came into operation in Spring 2005 (see also paragraph 87). This part of the project included the development of new systems to

replace methods for entering EDMs and carrying out the shuffle of oral questions. The

former built on the database developed for the Vote Bundle printing project; the latter on the

software developed in 2002/03 for electronic tabling.

54. Moving to new computer systems required additional IT training for all staff in the Upper Table Office, including staff from other offices who work there at night. Staff in the office of the Editorial Supervisor of the Vote (ESV) have taken part in a series of new training programmes as the Vote Bundle project moves towards its final phase. New, specialist staff have been recruited to input amendments to bills in the same software as is used by Parliamentary Counsel to draft Government bills. Planning is well advanced to begin the transfer of inputting of the Order Paper and the remaining daily and weekly business papers of the House from external contractors to the ESV team (see also paragraph 97).

55. The Table Office as usual submitted its annual list of questions which ministers did not answer to the Public Administration Committee. This was published with the Committee's Fifth Report in March 2005.[11] That report also commented on the potential for overlap between the system of parliamentary questions and new rights of public access to official information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Discussions took place between House officials and Government departments about how the two systems worked together. Two other select committee reports commented on aspects of parliamentary questions: in March 2005, the Modernisation Committee recommended (as part of its inquiry into scrutiny of European matters) that there should be some cross-cutting questions sessions on European themes in Westminster Hall[12] and the Procedure Committee's review of the House's sub judice rule recommended some modification of the application of the rule in cases before coroners' courts.[13]

56. The Library met its targets for the input of tabled questions to POLIS (provided via an electronic feed from the Vote Bundle), as well as the target for updating these records with written answer information. The target for the addition of subject index headings to written answers was met for most of the year, but was missed during July and December, largely due to the rise in the number of questions in the run-up to the recesses. This target was also missed for much of February and March, due to the heavy involvement of the Library's indexers in preparing for the introduction of PIMS.

57. Discussions continued with Government departments about the best way to make the texts of letters sent by ministers following parliamentary questions (known as "I will write" letters) available more widely and in July 2004 the Leader of the House announced new arrangements. On those occasions where an "I will write" answer is necessary, a copy of the subsequent substantive response will be sent to Hansard and to the Library, and will be printed with the written answers in the next edition of Hansard. The Library calculates that there were 84 "I will write" letters promised by Ministers in written answers between April and July 2004 and 307 between September 2004 and March 2005. The Public Administration Committee has recommended that the new arrangements be reviewed by the end of the year.

58. Since 2003 the Table Office, Library, Hansard and PCD have worked with the Leader of the House's office and the Government ePC project to establish a means for the electronic transfer of information between Government departments and the House. Whilst the technical solution proved reasonably straightforward, the main challenge was in ensuring conformity with the security protocols used by Government when exchanging electronic information with third parties. Since November 2004 departments have sent the titles of written ministerial statements electronically to the Table Office, via the Government's Knowledge Network, and the electronic texts of the statements themselves are sent to Hansard for printing. Electronic texts of parliamentary questions are sent from the Editorial Supervisor's office to Hansard and the Knowledge Network each night and during the year Hansard has begun to receive electronic copy for written answers from some departments. This is expected to lead to significant savings in the costs of printing the Official Report. The next phase of the project will include examination of ways of sending texts of written statements and written answers to the Library in electronic form and whether this new vehicle for the electronic exchange of information with Government might be used by other parts of the House Service.

Legislation

BILLS

59. The workload of the Public and Private Bill Office has remained heavy, partly because of the continuing volume and complexity of Government legislation and the fact that the vast majority of Government bills are programmed, and partly because of the new factor of carry-over. The number of Government bills increased to 44 in 2004/05 as against 31 in 2003/04, an increase in volume of well over one-third. In addition, there was a five per cent increase in standing committee sittings over the previous year. Private members' bills have remained roughly at the level of the previous year; more effort was made to produce drafts earlier so that members could make a better and more measured input into the content of their bills. The average number of amendments, new clauses and new schedules tabled per sitting day during 2004/05 declined slightly, from 55 in 2003/04 to 49 this year.

60. The number of private bills presented has stabilised, though at a very low level, with only six such bills introduced in November 2004: three in the Commons (one of which was withdrawn before second reading) and three in the Lords. The merger of the Public and Private Bill Offices (see paragraph 54 of last year's report) has led to a much greater degree of flexibility in staff deployment than hitherto. This will be particularly important during proceedings on the Crossrail Bill (introduced on 22 February and reintroduced in the new session on 18 May), since committees on hybrid bills need considerably more administrative back-up than do standing committees.

61. The project to digitise the Private Acts (see paragraph 55 of last year's report) has taken longer then expected because of the need to locate copies of Acts missing from the Private Bill Office collection. It is now nearing completion, but remains well within budget.

62. The following chart provides an indication of the workload of the Public and Private Bill Office over the last five years.[14]

63. Work has continued on developing the FrameMaker software for the production of bills, in consultation with the Parliamentary Counsel Office and the Public Bill Office in the House of Lords. A major revision of the software - FrameMaker 7 - was introduced at the beginning of the new session in November 2004. None of the 139 bills published in session 2004-05 during the financial year was reprinted as a result of error attributable to the Office.

Reporting of standing committees

64. The total number of pages of standing committee debates published in recent years is shown in the chart below:

65. Production targets were met in all cases, and often exceeded. During the year, the committee section conducted a joint training session for freelance reporters with House of Lords Hansard.

Delegated legislation and European scrutiny

66. Information about the volume of work undertaken by the Joint and Select Committees on Statutory Instruments, the Regulatory Reform Committee and the Joint Committee on Human Rights can be found in annex 1. Details of the work of the European Scrutiny Committee, including its main task of scrutinising EU legislative proposals and deciding which require further consideration, can be found in its annual report for 2004.[15] The Modernisation Committee has recently published a report on European Scrutiny.[16]

Select committees
67. The high level of activity by select committees has continued, including because of additional ad-hoc committees on draft bills. The chart below shows the numbers of formal select committee meetings, and reports issued by departmental select committees, over each of the last five financial years.

68. Core tasks for committees, as approved by the Liaison Committee in June 2002,[17] now provide a framework for individual committees to plan the accountability of ministers and their departments to Parliament. Further details on the scrutiny work of select committees can be found in the Liaison Committee's annual report for 2004.[18]

69. Implementation of the review of select committee resources has been completed, enabling committee secretariats to benefit from extra staff and increased co-operation with the Library, including secondments. Three media officers are now in post, expanding the reach of the professional support described in last year's Report, and providing a fuller service to committees as part of the Media and Communications Service (see paragraph 122).

Scrutiny Unit

70.The principal tasks of the Committee Office Scrutiny Unit, set up in November 2002, are to provide specialist support for committees on expenditure matters and draft bills. The Unit reached its full complement in January 2004 with ten specialists and seven core staff, but the short-term nature of many contracts means staff turnover has been high. Work on draft bills has accounted for over two-thirds of staff time, with expenditure-related support accounting for around a quarter. The Unit has been active in working with select committees in promoting the better provision of information on Estimates and other expenditure-related publications across the range of government departments. It has also provided support to the parliamentary observer on the Financial Reporting Advisory Board.

Printing and publication

71. The advantages of the new layout for select committee reports introduced from 1 May 2003 and of sending memoranda of written evidence to the printers in electronic form have continued to benefit both the presentation of reports and the cost of printing. In the month up to the dissolution of Parliament in April 2005 an exceptional number of committee reports were published - some 80, or four times the monthly average for departmental committee reports in 2003/04. The contract with W B Gurney and Sons LLP for transcripts of oral evidence sessions - a significant factor in select committee costs - was extended for one year to July 2006 and will be subject to re-tender in the coming financial year. The number of oral evidence transcripts supplied under this contract in 2004/05 exceeded 1,000 - higher than recorded for any previous year.

Sharing and learning about oversight and scrutiny

72. A further series of day-long seminars was organised at Westminster in conjunction with the Centre for Public Scrutiny, primarily intended for local authority oversight as well as scrutiny chairs and staff. Committee chairmen and staff spoke to participants, who also attended committee hearings. Committee chairmen and staff have also addressed several seminars elsewhere in the UK. In addition, staff have taken part in events to share understanding of committee practice at Westminster and in the devolved parliamentary bodies. The new procedure for joint meetings between the Welsh Affairs Committee and committees of the National Assembly for Wales has been successful in examining draft legislation. Committee staff continue to devote time to meeting visitors to Westminster from Commonwealth and other Parliaments.

Delegations to overseas assemblies
73. The Houses of Parliament send delegations to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), the Assembly of the Western European Union (AWEU), the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE PA) and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly (NATO PA). The European Section of the Overseas Office in the House of Commons assisted the 66 delegation members who attended 10 plenary sessions and nearly 230 committee meetings during the year.

74. The UK delegation continues its high levels of activity at PACE and the AWEU. UK Members chair two AWEU Committees and one PACE Committee and often act as rapporteurs on important issues. Members of the UK delegation to the NATO PA chair two of its five committees.

75. The European Section - assisted by staff from offices throughout both Houses - made the administrative arrangements for, and provided organisational support to, the OSCE PA Annual Session, hosted by the United Kingdom in Edinburgh in July 2004, which was attended by approximately 650 delegates.

76. The Section also makes the arrangements for visits to the UK by committees of the Assemblies: in 2004/05 it facilitated visits by the PACE Economic Affairs and Development Committee, the AWEU Defence Committee, and the NATO PA Sub-Committee on Transatlantic Economic Relations.

Providing information for the House and its committees

House of Commons Library

77. The Library's operations have traditionally supported both the work of the House and its committees and that of individual Members and their staff, without necessarily making any clear distinction between the two tasks. Thus the Library's rich resource of research papers and standard notes supports Members' work in their constituencies as well as informing the legislative process and other types of debate. The increasing emphasis on making pre-prepared information available online has blurred the distinction still further, but responses to enquiries from individual Members, and their staff working on Members' behalf, remain a significant element of the Library's services.

Research and information services

78. The department answers many specific enquiries from Members and their staff arising from

the wide range of Members' parliamentary duties. The total number of requests in 2004/05 for

written and oral briefings and reference information was around 70,000; these ranged from

requests for specific documentation or basic facts to substantial briefings on policy matters.

Recent trends in research and reference enquiries are shown in the table below. The decrease in Members' Library reference enquiries is at least in part due to the closure of the Library during the summer, including during the two-week September sitting.

The Library aims to respond to all these enquiries within the stated deadline or, for those

requests without a deadline, within two weeks. In 2004/05, 96 per cent of enquiries for which a

deadline was specified were answered within that deadline; and 95 per cent of other enquiries

were answered within two weeks.[19]

79. The Library's policy in recent years has been to manage demand and provide a more flexible

service to its users by providing more ready-made briefing information, both in paper form and

electronically. During the year, 94 research papers were published, providing background and

commentary on bills and other topical issues along with regular statistical bulletins. These

included papers produced before the Commons second reading of all major bills. Research

papers are available on the Parliament website as well as internally; during the year such papers

were downloaded on some 887,000 occasions. The chart below shows how the number of

Library publications accessed from both the Parliament website and intranet has increased

considerably in recent years.

80. Standard notes are more informal briefings, held primarily in electronic form and made

available on the parliamentary intranet. They have proved popular with Members and their staff

as they can be easily updated and generally address issues of current interest. By the end of the

year 2,173 standard notes were available on the intranet, and they had been accessed from

there on 121,000 occasions during the year. Standard notes on parliamentary topics were made

generally available to the public via the Parliament website for the first time during the year.

81. 'Debate packs' were introduced in 2003/04. These are collections of readily available material (such as newspaper articles, parliamentary questions, and standard notes) relevant to non-legislative debates taking place in either the Chamber or Westminster Hall. Statistics on the number of debate packs downloaded from the intranet can be found in annex 1.

Network services

82. Research papers and standard notes form the backbone of a much wider range of briefing

material available to Members and their staff via the intranet, which includes subject-specific

links to parliamentary and other material and useful external websites; an increasing number of

constituency and other local-area statistics; 'bill information pages'; and other databases. Significant developments, including enhanced search and retrieval facilities, will be introduced in early 2005/06 as part of the PIMS project (see paragraphs 86-87).

Reading rooms

83. The reading rooms in the Members' Library (primarily for Members' use) and in Derby Gate

(primarily for Members' staff) continue to provide a valuable service but the increasing availability of material online has led to lower levels of usage over the last few years (see paragraph 78). In response to comments in the 2003 survey of services, and as part of the Library's Change Project, changes to the configuration of furniture in the Members' Library were made while the Library was closed for maintenance work in summer 2004. The enquiry points are now more welcoming and enable staff to review information with Members online. Telephone calls are now all dealt with in the Reference Room, allowing staff in the Oriel Room to provide an uninterrupted service to Members.

Book loans

84. The number of book loans in 2004/05 fell by over six per cent to 3,277. The proportion of loans from Library stock fell to 77 per cent. There has been a long-term decline in the number of book loans, reflecting the increasing availability and use of network resources.

PIMS and Change Project

85. The Library's Change Project came to a close at the end of 2004/05. Many of the initial proposals have already been implemented, and further enhancements to Library services are planned for forthcoming years. The action list arising from Change Project reports has now been incorporated into the Library's mainstream business planning, and progress will be monitored regularly. Underpinning all developments is the need to ensure that the Library takes full advantage of PIMS (see below).

86. The POLIS database, which has been the key source for references to parliamentary information for almost 25 years was decommissioned in the Spring of 2005. It was replaced by Parliamentary Information Management Services (PIMS) which provides a new content management system for managing parliamentary information in electronic and printed formats and gives users access to it through a portal with powerful search and retrieval features.

87. Phase One of PIMS centres on the information managed and provided as a service by the Libraries of the two Houses, but also includes applications used by the Table Office (see paragraph 53) and European Scrutiny Committee in the House of Commons. The contract for this new development was let in November 2003. The products selected, and the infrastructure on which they have been built, have been procured and designed with an eye to meeting potential future requirements elsewhere in Parliament. The web development project will aim to extend the capacity of PIMS to incorporate other parliamentary sources, such as those published on the parliamentary intranet, and to improve information provision on the Parliament website. For this reason, the applications software is compliant with recognised industry standards, to permit future integration with other standards-based products; and the technical architecture follows a modular, flexible design so that it can be extended as required.

Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology
88. The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) operates as an independent unit with its own Parliamentary Board, composed of members of the Commons and Lords (plus four non-parliamentary members). Its purpose is to provide advice to Members of the two Houses and to select committees on current and anticipated issues of scientific, technological and medical concern. It is funded from the House of Commons Administration Estimate, 30 per cent of the cost being recovered from the House of Lords.

89. POST regularly provides a wide range of support to select committees, on request. Its regular publications programme also feeds into committee activity, including stimulating decisions to hold an inquiry. Both Houses have requested POST to keep them informed on public dialogue activities in science and technology, and POST has pioneered the use of online discussion to help Parliament consider a broad spectrum of views on current issues.

90. During the year, POST conducted separate pieces of work for a total of six Commons and Lords committees. POST also published 23 'POSTnotes' (parliamentary briefings) on a wide range of subjects and a longer report. This latter, produced in response to a request from the House of Commons Defence Committee, on the vulnerability of nuclear facilities to attack, was the longest, and probably most demanding, report ever produced by POST in its sixteen years of existence. All POST's publications are available on the Parliament website, and through the Parliamentary Bookshop. POST also organised parliamentary seminars and conferences.

91. POST has continued to expand its fellowship and internship schemes, with further learned societies and UK research councils supporting three-month positions for postgraduate students, who work under supervision on a specific publication or on select committee support. On the international front, POST has continued its collaboration with several of its sister offices serving national and regional parliaments in other European countries. It has also strengthened links to international organisations such as UNESCO and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which have become active in promoting parliamentary scientific and technological assessment on a wider international stage.

Vote Office

92. The work of the Vote Office centres on the provision of documents needed by the House so that it can conduct its business. In addition to the papers that the House itself generates, Government papers and memoranda, delegated legislation documents and European documents are all required to be made available. The table below shows the average number of pages of the daily Vote Bundle, which is made up of the key working papers for the House, published over the last five years.

93. The Vote Office has once again planned and executed a number of major exercises in conjunction with the relevant sponsoring Government departments to ensure the timely supply of reports to Parliament on those occasions when they are accompanied by statements known to be of significant parliamentary and public interest (for example the Butler report on intelligence of weapons of mass destruction).

94. The passage of legislation back and forth between the two Houses before agreement is reached, particularly towards the end of a session, continues to be a time of intense activity for the printing services section of the Office, working in close conjunction with the Legislation Service. The arrangements needed at the end of the 2003-04 session placed the customary heavy demand on the Office, but these were surpassed by the work needed to allow for the successive consideration of amendments to the Prevention of Terrorism Bill overnight on Thursday 10 March 2005. Because of the length of time involved, the emergency printing arrangements had to be extended over 24 hours and two shifts; and contingency arrangements put in place to allow for them to be continued over the weekend if necessary.

95. The Vote Office oversees the contract with the Stationery Office for the printing and distribution of the House's own papers. Once again this year has seen record demand. Page volumes of EDMs neared 10,000 for the first time, a rise of 5.4 per cent over last year, and Hansard page volumes exceeded last year's previous high, by some 3.8 per cent. A 24 per cent rise in the number of bill pages can be attributed to the large number of bills introduced in the 2004-05 session and a tax law rewrite bill which, with explanatory notes and other material, exceeded 2,000 pages. Finally, select committee printing exceeded previous levels by some eleven per cent because of a surge in report publishing in March 2005, in advance of the general election.

96. In spite of this record quantity of printing, expenditure on printing has once again been constrained to just over £9 million, broadly similar to last year, mainly due to savings from the implementation of further revisions in production methods. These savings are also reflected in the whole House cost of printing and purchasing documents which, at £11.5 million, was some £500,000 less than last year in spite of the increased volume. Work is well advanced on the arrangements for re-letting these printing, publishing and distribution contracts.

Vote Bundle project
97. The Vote Bundle project, which aims to improve the production methods of House papers by bringing origination and pagination under House control, passed another significant milestone in November 2004 when work on phase three of the project - electronic capture of bill amendments -was completed. Staff in the Office of the Editorial Supervisor of the Vote are now able to key amendment text and proceedings directly into FrameMaker (the software package already used by Parliamentary Counsel and both Houses for the production of bill and act text), for subsequent marshalling and the creation of required amendment and proceedings papers in pdf and electronic (XML) formats. Work is also well in hand to complete phase four, the electronic capture of remaining documents, including particularly the Order Paper, during the coming summer months. As well as the savings accumulated on EDMs over the four years of the project, major savings on production of question papers have come on line since December 2004 and now surpass £1 million. The production methods in use also enable electronic feeds of data to be supplied overnight to Library systems, the Official Report and the Government's Knowledge Network systems, for re-use by Government departments (see paragraph 58).