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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/PM.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. Coming up this week.

Ruth Fox: The Musk Factor. How tweets from the world's richest man are driving Parliament's agenda.

Mark D'Arcy: And what precisely did Parliament vote against this week, amidst calls for a national inquiry into historical child exploitation focused on grooming gangs?

Ruth Fox: And we've got questions in the House about, well, questions in the House.

Mark D'Arcy: But first Ruth, this was definitely the week in which the world's richest man drove the agenda of the House of Commons. There are at least three [00:01:00] substantial Commons events this week that basically were rocket boosted by tweets from Elon Musk.

Ruth Fox: See what you did there Mark.

Mark D'Arcy: Couldn't resist it.

But it's extraordinary how the megaphone given to Elon Musk by his ownership of Twitter, which clearly amplifies his personal tweets that everybody gets them. I don't follow him, but I get his tweets anyway.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I think we call it X now, don't we? But he's always at the top of the list.

Mark D'Arcy: I refuse to call it X.

I'm going to continue calling it Twitter because I'm a stubborn git.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I mean, no matter when you, uh, you turn on X Twitter, whatever we call it, his tweets are always at the top. The algorithm obviously favours him. But as you say, I mean, three interventions this week. So we had the ministerial statement by Yvette Cooper on child sexual exploitation and abuse.

We've had a reasoned amendment from the Conservatives to the Children and Schools Bill to try and force a national inquiry into the grooming gangs, which is at the [00:02:00] heart of the discussion over the last few days on X and in the media that Elon Musk is forcing, and we had an e petition calling for another general election signed by three million people that, again, to use your phrase, was basically put on rocket boosters before Christmas by it being posted about by Elon Musk.

So we may not like it, but he is influencing the political and therefore the parliamentary agenda.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, let's take the election debate first. This was a Petitions Committee debate on a parliamentary petition that has now attracted something north of three million signatures saying that, basically, Parliament should be dissolved, there should be another general election.

And we talked about this a bit before, I mean, three million is a third of the number of people who actually voted for this Labour government. So it's, while it probably does demonstrate that public opinion is not exactly warming to Sir Keir Starmer's administration, it doesn't necessarily suggest that there is such a groundswell that everybody wants him out.

Ruth Fox: No. So this was the petition that was begun [00:03:00] by a publican. I think in the Midlands, a guy called Michael Westwood, who basically is dissatisfied with the Keir Starmer administration because he says that Labour's broken its promises. You know, winter fuel allowance, you can talk about WASPI women, farmers, inheritance tax, and so on.

But what we had was a debate, not in the main chamber, but in Westminster Hall, or in effect on the grand committee chamber of Westminster Hall. And it was led by the chair of the petitions committee, the Liberal Democrat MP Jamie Stone. I thought it was interesting, just in the dynamics of that debate, that he, of course, has quite a difficult role in this, this debate, because he has to present the petition, in effect, and the arguments on behalf of Mr. Westwood and the signatories, without giving an indication of his own personal views. Yeah, so it's quite, it's quite a tricky, and I thought he did, I thought he did it quite well, maintaining a certain neutrality. This is, I've met with Mr Westwood, he said, or I've, you know, had a conversation with him to find out his views. I'm putting his views forward. Of course, one of the [00:04:00] criticisms then came up in the debate from Labour MPs was that this wasn't a genuine statement of the views and opinions of the British people. This had been influenced by Elon Musk on social media, that there'd been foreign interference, that there were a lot of foreign signatories.

Of course, a lot of those could be British citizens who happen to be temporarily or permanently abroad. So the petitions committee seemed content that it was legitimate. The entirety of the three million signatures were clearly not fraudulent. And, uh, yeah, they had a quite a wide ranging debate. It probably would have reached possibly the million signatories on its own, possibly, but it was certainly driven to that, to the scale it is, by social media. Yeah, by the Musk factor.

Mark D'Arcy: Elon Musk has had a number of interventions on this subject. He called for the King to order Parliament to be dissolved and order a new election.

Now, as an American citizen, he may have noticed that the American Revolution was against the arbitrary use of power by George III. And I think that maybe Charles III has learned those lessons. [00:05:00] Even if Elon Musk hasn't remembered them. The monarch can only act on the advice of their government. I mean, his illustrious predecessor, Charles II, you know, the famous rhyme about him was His response to that was, well, my words were my own, but my deeds are those of my advisers.

And his deeds would have to be those of his advisers on this. And there's no way that that keir Starmer is going to advise him to call a general election any time soon.

Ruth Fox: Dissolve himself, yes. No, I don't think so. I mean, there's no outcome from this debate. It's a vote that, you know, the House has debated this, this issue.

Formally, the House has considered it. Beyond that, there's no formal procedures. It meant that the discussion was about all of the sort of policy problems that are at the heart of the government's challenges at the moment. But one of the things that struck me, and I think the government needs to think long and hard about this, is the language of its response, its written response, to the petitioners.

[00:06:00] So you get a debate, or a chance for a debate, if you reach 100, 000 signatures.

Mark D'Arcy: They can have a debate on stuff which gets less than that if they choose to, but it becomes automatic at that point.

Ruth Fox: At 10, 000 signatures, the government provides a written response to any petition that reaches that, that threshold.

Now, I'd say to listeners, go and have a look at the written response from the government to this petition, and see what you think. I thought it was terrible. I mean, to my mind, it was like project management speak on steroids.

Mark D'Arcy: And this, this is actually poor politics.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, it is.

Mark D'Arcy: Not just because it was a pretty strange and tedious document, I mean, I've still got a small bruise on my forehead where narcolepsy overtook me as I was reading about a mission driven government men sort of face down on the pile of papers in front of me.

But there is a point here that these things are read by people. These debates are watched by people. The most watched parliamentary event online after Prime Minister's question time. So they are reasonably significant in terms of having an outside audience. So it is worth putting a bit of effort into [00:07:00] a written response that isn't just some piece of boilerplate management babble.

Ruth Fox: Well, let me give listeners an example. This government was elected on a mandate of change at the July 24 general election. Our full focus is on fixing the foundations, rebuilding Britain, and restoring public confidence in government. Um, Mark's head has hit the table. It gets worse. Mission led government rejects the sticking plaster solutions of the past and unites public and private sectors, national, devolved and local government, business and unions, and the whole of civil society in a shared purpose.

Mark D'Arcy: I think my Starmerite language bingo card is now completely full. I've got a full house.

Ruth Fox: I mean, what the hell does it mean? Pardon my language.

Mark D'Arcy: We're keen to guess. But what it isn't is an effective piece of politics. You know, it is not a vast exercise to come up with a few paragraphs of reasonably cogent political response to this.

And they ought to do it. And it is a mistake not to.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And they have got a story to tell, but they seem incapable [00:08:00] of telling it. And the story is through the legislative program. They could have talked about what the legislation was doing, why they were doing it, what they hope to achieve. But no, there's none of that.

It's just project management babble. So yes, listeners, go and have a look for yourself and judge and let us know what you think. But yes, encouragement to the government. Think about your communications in this.

Mark D'Arcy: But the Musk effect kept on going throughout the week. As you say, there was the big statement by Yvette Cooper, basically responding to the public concern.

That had, uh, been certainly amplified by the Elon Musk tweets about the activities of child grooming gangs. And then of course we got to Wednesday and another Musk eruption at the second reading of the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is a major package of child safeguarding and education reforms that the government's putting forward.

Now, the Conservatives had done what oppositions quite frequently do, which is put down what's known in the trade as a reasoned amendment, which gives the reasons why this bill shouldn't be given a [00:09:00] second reading. And attached to the bottom of that was a sentence about, oh and there should also be an inquiry into these child grooming gangs.

But what you've got to understand about this is what Labour MPs were voting against when they voted down this amendment. Because the amendment didn't just say there should be an inquiry, it said you shouldn't go ahead with this very major piece of government legislation. So for a Labour MP to support the Conservative amendment is for them to strike down a pillar of government policy, and they weren't ever, ever, ever going to do that.

So the packaging of these two things rather blurs the issue. Labour MPs certainly did vote down a parliamentary motion which included this, but the main thing that they were voting down was the suggestion they shouldn't go ahead with the Education Bill.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and as you say, I mean, the reasoned amendment was, I don't know, about eight lines long and the call for an inquiry was the last line.

And lost in all of this, very [00:10:00] much lost in the debate really as well yesterday, was the politics around education and what's actually in this debate. And for the Conservatives, they've got quite serious, significant concerns with the bill because it effectively will overturn significant areas of education policy that they've implemented over the last, what, 14 years?

Both in coalition and subsequently.

Mark D'Arcy: This is the Michael Gove academisation drive to give schools a lot more freedom to decide things for themselves that is, to some extent, being reversed. And there was quite a drumbeat of articles and tweets and appearances by Conservative MPs attacking the bill for changing what they feel is a very successful Conservative policy.

So that has been completely eclipsed, at least for a large amount of the time, by this debate about whether or not there should be a grooming inquiry. And that's rather a pity, because it's a pretty substantial subject. And I think there are a few Labour MPs who are a bit disquiet about this reversal as well.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean most prominently, I think, probably Dame Siobhan McDonagh, the Labour MP [00:11:00] for Mitcham and Morden, been an MP for many years now. She expressed real regret that she was having to speak out as she was in the debate, essentially with real concerns about the direction of her own government's policy, precisely because she felt that school's performance in her constituency had improved, over the course of, of recent years, and she was worried that turning over some of the policies now would see a reversal of that, and would see life chances of, of kids in, in London turned around. So that was probably the most prominent speech, I think, that if, if I were a Labour whip I'd be a little bit concerned about.

But yeah, the problem the Conservatives have got is that they want to on the one hand to be able to hammer the government about education policy because because that is actually one area where out of 14 years of government where they've been criticized so much and where there's so many problems that have emerged or that they've failed to address actually education policy and particularly schools improvement

Mark D'Arcy: And particularly London schools improvement

Ruth Fox: is one of the the real positive [00:12:00] areas that they can talk about and there they were, finding that much of the debate, largely driven by their own party leader, was focused on this inquiry question rather than on education reform.

So we'll have to see how that plays out in the coming weeks in the subsequent stages.

Mark D'Arcy: There's a point here about the nature of parliamentary votes on this kind of thing, that often, What's being talked about is a kind of package deal. There's a package of things in a bill, and if you vote against the whole bill, you may be voting against some good things in the bill that you actually approve of, because you disapprove of the wider package.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, unfortunately that's the nature of parliamentary politics, isn't it? And in a sense, Labour's on the wrong end of what it did to the Conservatives when it was in opposition. It used to do this frequently on reasoned amendments or in Opposition Day debates, trying to, in effect, trap governing party's MPs into voting against something, that makes it politically difficult for them at a constituency level in particular, so that you've got a way to put on your leaflets come the next election that so and so voted against [00:13:00] whatever ex policy it might be that they think is going to influence the electorate.

C'est la vie, that's, I'm afraid, party politics.

Mark D'Arcy: That's show business, yeah.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, we might wish that things were different, we might wish that they took a different approach to politics, we might wish that they didn't play party politics with these issues in quite this way. C'est la vie. But I'm afraid that's the tradecraft.

That's how it's been done for, frankly, for decades. And unless the incentive framework changes, it's not going to alter.

Mark D'Arcy: Precisely so. Now, if the Conservatives want to push the case for this inquiry into grooming gangs, the next thing to do is wait till the bill gets to report stage, and then put down an amendment saying that there should be an inquiry into the grooming gangs and that would be a kind of a clean amendment if you'd like unattached to anything else. It doesn't kill the bill. It's added on to the bill

Ruth Fox: And that will put Labour MPs on the spot

Mark D'Arcy: And that would be a much more difficult proposition for Labour MPs in places where these gangs have been operating. So that I've no doubt will be coming, and it wouldn't totally surprise me if the opposition drummed up a bit [00:14:00] of supporting fire in, perhaps in the shape of a petition to the petitions committee, which I suspect would pretty quickly attract enough signatures to get debated.

And by the time you got to the report stage debate on this bill, you may even have had a petitions committee debate on that issue.

Ruth Fox: That then, I think, focuses the fact that this is not going to go away as a political issue for Keir Starmer. Winning the vote last night, as we're speaking, on a Thursday, it's not going to go away.

He's going to have to come up with a political strategy to deal with this and the question of whether or not there is going to be an inquiry. And it's going to just rumble on and on. Perhaps we should take a step back, Mark, because I'm very conscious that our international listeners might be a bit confused about what we're sort of talking about in terms of an inquiry about grooming gangs. So perhaps we should just set a little bit of context about what this issue is that Elon Musk has picked up on and has sort of driven the agenda around. So this is allegation or more than allegations, you know,

Mark D'Arcy: Confirmed cases where people have been sent to prison.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Of child sexual exploitation by grooming gangs across cities, towns and [00:15:00] cities across the UK.

Mark D'Arcy: Specifically often Asian. Men, specifically, frequently Pakistani Muslim immigrants, and that is where the component that causes a lot of difficulty has come up. Because it's fairly clear that sensitivities about being seen to be racist have interfered with the investigation of some of these cases.

And that is why, you know, a lot of this went on unchecked for too long and unpunished for too long.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And there's been a long running inquiry, by an academic called Alexis Jay, but this went on for a number of years, came up with a lot of recommendations, investigated many aspects of it. And one of the criticisms is that the previous government did not move quickly enough to implement the recommendations.

The current government is being criticised for not publishing data. They say they have published data. They've been criticised for not accepting a request from, I think, the local authority in one of these affected towns, Oldham, [00:16:00] in the northwest of England, for an inquiry into what has happened specifically, and that the minister, Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister in the Home Office, has said, no, we don't need a, an inquiry on this.

We've kind of had enough inquiries into different aspects of it and we're getting on with Implementing

Mark D'Arcy: and back comes Elon Musk with a tweet calling Jess Phillips a I think rape genocide apologist, which is a pretty appalling thing to say about anybody. And Jess Phillips, let's be absolutely clear about this, Jess Phillips has been one of the most influential figures in addressing cases of violence and abuse against women in Parliament for a decade. Yeah. She's the person who's been getting up every year as a backbench MP and reading out a list of all the women who've been killed by the men in their lives.

And it is a fantastically powerful, absolutely horrifying, It just rolls on and on and on and you're sitting there thinking, my God.

Ruth Fox: And actually normally an MP wouldn't get to [00:17:00] speak for as long as she has to have to speak because it takes so long to list the names.

Mark D'Arcy: It takes a distressingly long time and the parade of names is increasingly horrible to listen to.

But what it did, was it moved things and it raised the issue in the most dramatic possible way and it has got government paying attention to an issue which perhaps had been rather dismissed or sidelined or not given the prominence it deserved beforehand and for her to get this accusation is just extraordinary.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, she's always faced quite a lot of harassment and problems on social media from, let's be honest, men who don't like the fact that she speaks out on these issues quite so potently as she does. She's always had, as a consequence in recent years in her political career, security considerations. But I understand in recent days, just on a few interviews, and it sounds like her security situation is now on steroids, that the threats to her, she's got apparently, police close protection. She's [00:18:00] been advised by the police not to go outside on her own. You know, this is just utterly unacceptable. All off the back of one post by Elon Musk and putting this on, on steroids. And I think this is going to be a challenge, I think, for the Speakers Conference, the new Speakers Conference that has been established before Christmas that's going to look at the security of MPs and election candidates.

They're going to have to look at this. Oh, absolutely. And there's no obvious. There's no obvious and easy solution to any of it.

Mark D'Arcy: None at all, because apart from anything else, there's a lasting effect to this kind of thing. Keir Starmer, incidentally, you know, his record as a prosecutor, as head of the Crown Prosecution Service, was that he was the one who got prosecutions moving in the case of the Rochdale grooming scandal, and made sure that the rules were changed to make sure these cases were followed up, rather than shelved at an early stage. So he got the rules changed for the lawyers and for the police. Yet here he is in the firing line again on this stuff, when his record is actually pretty significant. And he was praised by the Alexis Jay Inquiry into these cases.

Ruth Fox: And this is the problem, isn't it? I mean, [00:19:00] it's now going to be a political football between the parties and the misinformation and the disinformation around it is very, very difficult.

One of the questions is, what value is another inquiry going to bring if they haven't yet committed to and implemented all the recommendations of the previous inquiry? How long will it take to set up? How much will it cost? You know, these are the usual criticisms of these kinds of inquiries. And I hadn't realized, Mark, you were actually called up to the Alexis Jay Inquiry because of your past journalistic experience.

Mark D'Arcy: Well I gave written evidence. Years ago I was a journalist reporting on a child abuse case in Leicestershire involving systematic abuse in children's homes run by Leicestershire County Council.

Ruth Fox: And you wrote a book about this.

Mark D'Arcy: And I wrote, I co wrote a book about that with a guy called Paul Gosling. And I out of the blue got a letter from the Jay Inquiry asking all sorts of very detailed questions about the things we'd said in the book.

You know, on page 98, you say, such and such, who told you that? And it's actually quite awkward, because some of the evidence had been given to me off the record by people who didn't want to be [00:20:00] directly quoted. And now I was being asked to say who told me.

Ruth Fox: Which is a no no for a journalist, to give up your source.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes, and we got into a position where I had to ring up my source and see whether he was prepared to be named or not. And he was, I didn't know at the time, the guy was actually terminally ill. But he was prepared to let me give his name to the inquiry, and they then wrote to him. I mean, none of it came to me actually having to physically go and give evidence verbally to the inquirer or anything like that.

But it was an example of the level of detail. They'd taken this book, and they'd gone through it, and they'd found all, combed it for points that they wanted to know more about. And we, uh, had to, uh, answer those incredibly detailed questions. And if you're doing that for one case, and this was one case out of dozens and dozens that they were addressing in that inquiry, if you're going to go through all the different cases of child grooming gangs in different cities across Britain, and look in detail at who did what when, At that level of detail.

This is not something that's going to be done in a couple of weeks. No. This is something that's going to take [00:21:00] years. And you're also looking at stuff that goes straight to people's reputations. The most serious possible thing you can say about someone in this country pretty much at the moment is that they're a child abuser.

Yeah. Or a complicit in child abuse in some way, either by neglect or whatever. Yeah. If those kind of allegations are going to fly about, of course lawyers are going to be involved. And of course there's got to be due process, because if there isn't, you could do equally massive injustice again to someone.

Ruth Fox: Which we've seen in relation to politicians who've been accused of some of these things, and it turns out they're not true.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. So there is no way that this is not going to be an all singing, all dancing lawyer fest, I'm afraid. Yeah. And the idea that the lawyers can be kept out of it, and it can all be done very quickly and generate answers.

And I suppose the other thing to say is, you've then got to hope that the answers are actually implemented. That's it. Or at least listened to by the authorities when those answers are finally produced. And that may well be after the next general election, frankly.

Ruth Fox: And that brings in a whole new set of questions about implementing the recommendations of the Jay Inquiry.

To be very blunt about it, what's the reasons why they haven't done it? [00:22:00] There would be reasons why they've been a bit slow about doing it. But there are also, I'm afraid, reasons of cost, I understand, that, you know, some of the media are reporting that some of the costs of implementing these recommendations are quite high, and that is, I'm afraid, at the moment, a problem.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, governments worry about the cost of inquiries themselves, they then worry about the cost of what the inquiry may recommend, and ministers have to take a view on what they can do. It's very easy for people to say, well, implement in full whatever they recommend. But that's an open ended promise that successive governments are very, very wary of making on any number of issues.

You look no further than the Andrew Dilnot inquiry into adult social care. The idea that a government was going to commit in advance to implement whatever Andrew Dilnot came up with. They were never going to make that commitment.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, but if you were sort of reflecting on this, if you were one of the victims of what has been going on over the years in this, and, and which.

Which probably is still going on in towns and cities across the country, unfortunately. If you were one of the victims, you'd have to say that, um, the politics of this in the last [00:23:00] week has not been very edifying. But it would also be very, you know, very difficult to say that, you know, all the victims want exactly the same thing.

They will all want different things.

Mark D'Arcy: They will all want different things. And I think people have to be extraordinarily careful of the sensitivities. Yeah, just reopening this issue for some people. It is reopening a trauma. That's not to say that these things shouldn't be looked at. That's not even to say that there shouldn't be an inquiry.

But the idea that it is a perfect solution to everything that comes along is a mistaken one because inquiries have upsides and downsides and difficulties and can take a very long time to deliver.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, I think, Mark, we'll leave it there. We'll see how things transpire over the coming weeks and months on this.

It's not going to go away as an issue now, I think, for quite a while. And there's a number of parliamentary tools, procedures at the disposal of MPs that, if they choose to use them, to try and bring this issue, the question of an inquiry, to a head.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, absolutely. Amendment to the Children and Schools Bill, as we've been discussing.

Petitions Committee debate, as we've been discussing. And [00:24:00] just a general continuing raising of the issue of different forms of education questions, local government questions.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well Mark, moving on to another contentious issue at Westminster, and that's the assisted dying bill. So just very briefly update listeners on our plans for covering this.

The public bill committee that's been established to consider the line by line scrutiny of the bill, and will take, unusually for a private member's bill, will take evidence from the public. That committee has been formed just before Christmas. We talked about it on a recent pod, and the committee has now made a call for evidence.

So, listeners, if you have any interest in this bill, any thoughts on it, that committee is open to take views. So, we'll put the link in the show notes, but, um, get your evidence in as quickly as possible would be my advice, because the sooner you do the longer the committee's got to consider it.

Mark D'Arcy: I mean, the call for evidence is actually fairly boilerplate stuff.

It's just saying, if you've got any thoughts on this, on the clauses in the bill or potential changes [00:25:00] to it, send them in. It's not giving any kind of indication of lines of inquiry or anything like that. It's a fairly straightforward document. But towards the end of this month, the committee will be meeting to plan the order in which it wants to take evidence and start having public sessions right at the end of the month, we expect.

Ruth Fox: And listeners, what we're going to do is, um, you know, there's been a huge amount of interest in this bill. It's probably the only piece of legislation in this session, certainly, that is actively engaging a lot of members of the public. I've heard people talking about it in cafes, on the buses, in ways that they're not going to be discussing the Children and Schools Bill, for example.

So we thought, as both, uh, you know, an information and an educational exercise with the podcast, we thought we will cover the Public Bill Committee in some detail. So each week we're going to have a special episode, a bonus episode.

Mark D'Arcy: A mini pod.

Ruth Fox: A mini pod focused on the Assisted Dying Bill, what's happening with it procedurally and in policy terms.

Mark D'Arcy: And what's been said in the committee, if there's something dramatic has occurred there. All that kind of [00:26:00] thing will be in a short, easy to digest mini edition of this podcast. So we'll be talking about doubtless in the main pod a little bit as well, but most of the discussion of the assisted dying bill will be in that sort of ring fenced mini pod.

Ruth Fox: And we hope to talk to some of the main players, the key stakeholders, members of the committee, hopefully the chair of the committee, perhaps Kim Leadbeater herself. We're trying to get them involved as well and to understand the processes and the procedures behind what's going to happen.

Mark D'Arcy: So look out for that.

And in the meantime, let's take a quick break.

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: And we're back. And Ruth, one of the things that's been noticed by a lot of the more eagle eyed scrutineers of the Commons Order Paper is the remarkable number of completely identical questions being put to ministers. In defence questions recently there were, I don't know, any number of MPs who just asked, what's the minister going to do for veterans, or words to that effect.

Ruth Fox: Eight out of 25 questions were the same.

Mark D'Arcy: Identically worded. And you do think, what on earth is going on?

Ruth Fox: Yes, well, amongst those eagle eyed [00:27:00] people are my team, my colleagues at the Hansard Society because I've talked about this before, we produce our weekly Parliament Matters Bulletin. Listeners, if you're not already subscribed, go on our newsletter page on our website and you can get an update on what's happening in Parliament each week, direct to your inbox on a Sunday, to prepare for the week ahead.

It's read by lots of MPs, parliamentary staff, parliamentary clerks. But in that Bulletin, one of the things we've been doing since the start of the session is looking at oral questions and how many of the questions are identical. And the numbers some weeks are extraordinary. So as you say, eight out of 25 at, at defence questions this week, but sometimes it's 10, 12 questions identical.

Sometimes it's two or three are identical, but there's three or four different identical questions in the same set. So what's going on? You know, this is, um, orchestrated by the whips and parliamentary private secretaries, the bag carriers to ministers who are trying to get the questions they want to highlight a particular message by the government or a particular announcement [00:28:00] or some funding news, whatever it may be.

They're trying to orchestrate the question time so that they get the best message out and they get to talk about what the minister wants to talk about. Fine, as far as it goes, that's been going on for years and years, nothing new about that at all, but it's just a little bit.

Mark D'Arcy: It's getting a bit crass, isn't it?

Ruth Fox: It's a bit crass, and we've encouraged this in the newsletters to new MPs, think about this and what it looks like, to outside observers looking at the Order Paper, thinking, really, you all managed to think about the same question, identically worded? Link it to your constituency, link it to your region, link it to something, so that you just do vary it a little bit, and it doesn't look so damned odd.

Yes.

Mark D'Arcy: For a start, a little bit of subtlety in the process would be nice. I mean, the incentive for the individual MPs is if they've got a question down, there's a chance they might get called to put a supplementary. If there are eight of them on the same subject, I don't think all of them would, but some of them might.

Yeah, and that's what they say.

Ruth Fox: That's the reason they do it.

Mark D'Arcy: So the incentive here is you can get up on your hind legs and have a moment of peace. prime time in the chamber saying, isn't [00:29:00] the minister doing a fantastic job and will he consider such and such? And, and who knows, sometimes maybe they may even work in a constituency reference.

Will they do something for the veterans charity in my constituency, perhaps?

Ruth Fox: Yeah. We should say that this is also true sometimes of the opposition parties, not to the same degree as the government bench. But you do sometimes see multiple identical questions from, you know, the Lib Dems or from the Conservatives, for example.

So it's not entirely the government orchestrating things. The opposition parties are also trying to do the same, albeit to a lesser degree.

Mark D'Arcy: There was a time when questions to the House were used very strategically by at least some people on the opposition benches to try and extract information that could then be used in a campaign or in a manifesto or in some kind of political fashion against the government and you'd often get government advisors sitting looking at the latest band of incoming questions and think, hmm, what are they trying to get out of us there?

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, you see this particularly, I think, with written questions as opposed to oral ones. So oral is [00:30:00] about trying to get your message out, get you a couple of minutes on social media, your media clip, your video clip. Yeah. Yeah. Written parliamentary questions, certainly. I mean, I started referring to written PQs as parliamentary google.

And the scale of it is extraordinary. I mean, I had a look at the parliamentary website, and there have been 70 sitting days, and there have been 23, 182 written questions tabled by MPs.

Mark D'Arcy: And this is eager, be they new members, the light of duty gleaming in their eyes, heading out there to scrutinise the government.

Ruth Fox: And the quality of some of them is, is variable. I mean, it's not unusual. It's at the upper end. When I've looked at the sessional data, it's at the upper end of the spectrum, the sort of average number of questions per day that are being submitted. It's at the upper end of the last 10 years. But I mean, it's been pretty high for most of that 10 year period, so not that unusual.

But there's questions about are they being used in the right way? So interestingly, [00:31:00] at the Procedure Committee just before Christmas, the Leader of the House of Commons, Lucy Powell, was asked about this because MPs have two concerns. One is about the extent to which government responds in time, so you're sort of supposed to respond within, I think, five to ten days for a written question.

Are they responding in a timely way, and what's the quality of the responses, of the answers that members are being given? You might say that the answers sometimes match the quality of the question being asked, but she made the point that they are supposed to be about extracting information from the department that you can't otherwise get anywhere else.

Mark D'Arcy: And sometimes the government doesn't want to give that information away. I once heard a story about, and this goes back to the days of the John Major government, so it's fairly ancient history, but Alan Milburn, the future health secretary, was asking ministers for health about the cost of life saving equipment in hospitals, and eventually the government's special advisors decided on the line that ultimately all equipment in hospitals can be considered to be life saving.

So that's the deadest of dead bats. [00:32:00]

Ruth Fox: What we're seeing is sort of these thousands of questions, we should say you were talking about earlier that, you know, they're trying to sort of extract information for campaigns and so on. Particularly once you get into the later into the parliament, they're also trying to extract information for their policy information bank to use in the general election campaign to come.

I mean, you see written questions go up quite dramatically and you see banks of them from the same sort of shadow frontbencher trying to probe their department for lots and lots of data that you know they're squirrelling away for future use in the campaign.

Mark D'Arcy: And you also have to watch for certain particularly hyperactive members.

John Bercow was infamous for putting down thousands and thousands of parliamentary questions and you imagined his office full of American interns cranking these things out. David Davis is someone I would watch very carefully when he puts down a series of questions. You should sit up and take notice.

You know, some of the apex Predators in the Westminster ecosystem are well worth watching just to see what they're up to.

Ruth Fox: Well, one of them at the minute is Rupert Lowe, the Reform MP. The parliamentary website suggests [00:33:00] he's submitted 651 written questions to date. That is a pretty high number.

Mark D'Arcy: That's a pretty high value. And of course, these things cost money to answer.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I mean, depends upon how much research is required by the department, how much time it takes. And there's actually a limit. I mean, the departments can decline to answer them if they think that the cost of it, I think is over what they describe as the advisory cost limit of 850.

So if it's going to cost more than that, then the department can say, no, I don't think so. But otherwise, they can spend up to that answering it. There's also an issue about how this links in with freedom of information, because one of the things Lucy Powell raised at the procedure committee was that an MP had received a response to a written question that was basically, we can't give you this answer yet.

And there's a freedom of information request where it will basically be revealed and she - all will be revealed - and she sort of made the point, and the procedure committee members seem to agree with her, that priority should be written parliamentary questions from MPs, not the freedom of information request.

And she had apparently written to ministers to remind them of [00:34:00] departments of their responsibilities. But yeah, think about that. So already we've had 23, 000 questions. Let's say it costs an average of 250, not 850. That's still an awful lot of money. I mean, this is a costly business.

Mark D'Arcy: I suppose the average comes down a bit.

If you've got 20 identical questions and you give them all the same answer, even so it's not without time.

Ruth Fox: It's productivity within departments and some departments just have a huge number. I mean, it's department of health, just absolutely extraordinary number. And obviously some departments are better than others at managing it.

Step forward, the Home Office, which has historically been quite a poor performer. DEFRA at the moment was. Department for the Environment was being highlighted as a relative poor performer because the Procedure Committee tracks the government responses to this each session.

Mark D'Arcy: When Charles Walker, former Conservative MP Sir Charles Walker, I should say, was chair of the Procedure Committee he used to occasionally haul ministers in and have a go at them for failing to answer questions in a timely manner.

But while we're talking about these things my favourite parliamentary question story is when [00:35:00] someone discovered the text of a ministerial answer lying on the floor in the House of Lords and there was a sort of boilerplate answer to some question. And at the bottom of it was, scrawled the words, This is a rotten answer, but it's probably good enough for their lordships on a hot summer's day.

Ruth Fox: Well, we haven't even begun to talk about House of Lords questions. That's a whole different kettle of fish.

Mark D'Arcy: Whole different ballgame.

Ruth Fox: That's for a different episode.

Mark D'Arcy: And speaking of the House of Lords, peers are, as they regularly have to, mourning the departure of one of their major figures. And in this case, it's Tony Lloyd, better known as Lord Lloyd of Berwick, who was a former law lord.

And his, uh back from the days before the Supreme Court, when the law lords were the judicial committee of the House of Lords and actually gave their judgments in the House of Lords Chamber on a Wednesday afternoon, he was one of those, and he was one of the more significant judges in recent British history.

He, for example, was on the panel of appeal court judges who freed the Birmingham Six, one of the great [00:36:00] miscarriages of justice of recent years. He was the judge who ruled that Gulf War syndrome was real. So he'd had a number of very, very significant judgments. He's one of those people who became a figure in the House of Lords who others followed.

And if he signed an amendment, the government whips would know there was trouble. But he was also a little bit of a test for the members of staff and Today in Parliament. Of course, I was one of them back in the day. One of the things you had to be able to do on Today in Parliament covering the House to utter the phrase, the former Law Lord, Lord Lloyd.

And he's Lord Lloyd of Northumberland. And, um, I once interviewed him for Today in Parliament many years ago. I told him about this pronunciation tongue twister that he had provided us with. And he told me it could have been even worse because he nearly chose to be Lord Lloyd of Ludlow. So we'd then have had to have got out the tongue twister, the former Law Lord, Lord Lloyd of Ludlow, which I think glottal stop too far.

Ruth Fox: When you say test, they actually tested you?

Mark D'Arcy: Don't actually get, it's one of the things you have to be able to say. Okay. [00:37:00] Ideally as quickly as possible. I mean, you know, you don't not get the job if you can't do it in an interview or anything like that. But it's one of the regular, shall we say, pronunciation hurdles that you have to get over.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, Mark, I think probably that's all we've got time for this week. So a couple of things for listeners. We will have another special episode later in the week. Look out for our conversation with Greg Power. Greg is a former Hansard Society member of staff many years ago, former special advisor to the then leader of the House of Commons, Robin Cook.

Mark D'Arcy: And he's written a book, Inside the Political Mind, which looks at why politicians act the way they do. It looks at the incentive structures that dictate why politicians do things that to an outside observer may seem very strange. And he's applied this to the process of parliamentary reform. Why is it that apparently perfectly sensible changes to things like sitting hours in parliament can produce enormous resistance.

And it's all about the way politicians work, the way they operate their lives, the changes that would be forced on them if they had to do things [00:38:00] in a different way. And so it just demonstrates with a bit of kind of behavioral economics and work psychology, if you like, the, it's a very, very difficult business getting people who are entrenched in certain habits to change them.

Ruth Fox: So Greg, Mark and I found ourselves, as you do, at the Parliamentary Nerdathon, that is the annual Study of Parliament Group conference in Oxford this last weekend. So we took the opportunity to sit down with Greg and pick his brains about all of this, about his book, about parliamentary reform and some of the work he does abroad on these issues, helping other parliaments, particularly in countries he's worked in, in places like Iraq and Sudan and so on, to improve some of their parliamentary practices, procedures and, and help MPs to get better at doing their jobs.

So look out for that. And we're often asked by listeners how they can can help the podcast, Mark. So just a new year's resolution for all our listeners. You can help the podcast by sharing it with friends and family, and particularly with the light of the assisted dying bill special podcast [00:39:00] episodes. We want to grow our audience, make sure as many people as possible. possible can hear about what's happening. And a word of mouth marketing is the best marketing around. So please do that and review the podcast on Apple, on Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Cause that really helps.

Mark D'Arcy: We want top marks for artistic impression and technical merit.

Ruth Fox: Helps with the algorithms, I'm told. And of course, ways to support the podcast, you can become a member of the Hansard Society. You can join the society via our website, hansardsociety.org.uk. And of course, a small donation. If all our listeners just donated three pounds a month, we'll keep up the conversation going for the rest of the year.

So you can do that also on our website. So with that, Mark, I'll finish for this week and I will see you next week.

Mark D'Arcy: See you next week. Bye bye.

Ruth Fox: Bye.

Intro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/PM or find us on social media at Hansard Society.