As Clerk of the Parliaments, David Beamish is the most senior official in the House of Lords. The Crown appoints him as head of the permanent administration and the chief procedural adviser to the House.
Lecture transcript
Naomi Kent, Regional Officer, Houses of Parliament's Outreach Service: Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming. I’m Naomi Kent from the Parliamentary Outreach team. I think most of you have had an email or an email conversation with me at some point. Welcome to the second Open Lecture at Parliament.
We had our first Open Lecture in March; some of you were there. It was delivered by Andrew Kennon, who is the Clerk of Committees in the House of Commons. We’re delighted to welcome David Beamish, Clerk of the Parliaments, to deliver our next Open Lecture for us.
This series is part of a new project from Parliament’s Outreach Service, which is about giving universities new resources and services to support them to learn and teach about how Parliament works. Parliament’s Outreach Service is a part of Parliament. We come out and we do free training workshops and talks about how Parliament works, and we run other projects like this as well to open up Parliament to the public.
A couple of very brief things; we are filming the lecture today which you should have been told on your way in, and hopefully if you prefer not to be filmed you've sat at the back or at the sides. The film will be available on the Parliament website quite soon after today, and I will send you the link to that so that you can pass it on to your friends who were not lucky enough to come, or watch it again, as I'm sure you'll want to recapture everything.
David will deliver his lecture and then we will have an extended question and answer session, so don't be shy during that.
We'll have a few roving microphones, and we should have the chance to give you all the information which you want about the House of Lords. We will stop filming at that point; you can draw your own inferences about why we are going to do that. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to David Beamish and thank you very much for coming.
David Beamish, Clerk of the Parliaments: Good morning everybody. It's great to see so many of you here, and thank you very much for coming. As my first slide shows, my name is David Beamish and my rather uninformative job title is Clerk of the Parliaments. That means that I’m the head of the administration, Chief Executive if you like, of the House of Lords.
I'm afraid I started here in 1974, so I’ve been working here rather a long time, hence the title of this talk, 'An Insider's Guide'. Obviously I’ve seen quite a lot change over those years, and I hope during question time you’ll be able to elicit information about any aspects you are particularly interested in.
I’m going to try and avoid bombarding you with facts, but we do have some handouts at the back. The House of Lords information Office produce some very useful materials, including hot-off-the-press latest figures for membership of the House, and a lot of other useful material.
There are also pens from the Parliamentary Outreach Service, which do have a particular use; they’ve got on them the website address, www.parliament.uk, which I commend to you as a useful source of all sorts of information. I’m afraid because there’s so much, it can be a little bit hard to find your way around. Those two things mean I don’t feel I have to give you a chronicle of lots of facts and figures, but do ask me for them if you want to when we get on to the question session.
Just to set the scene, we’re in Portcullis House. The House of Lords occupies the far end of the Palace of Westminster. Here's Portcullis House on the right, and we’re in the area at the end. This is a view from the other side; my office being here and the Chamber behind there. We acquired 10 years ago one serious outbuilding, Millbank House, but have rather less than the House of Commons who have this splendid building that we’re in now, Portcullis House. Millbank House is used for offices for well over 150 Members, and over 200 of my 500 staff, so it’s as much a place of work for us as the main Palace of Westminster.
Turning to the Chamber, the centre of the action so to speak. There is me in the middle in my wig and gown; if you watch question time, you’ll find that it's my job to call on the questions. There I am at the far end of the row. That's setting the scene.
Now in recent weeks there's been quite a lot of publicity of the Government’s plans for reforming the House of Lords, so I thought with that backdrop to this talk, I ought to talk about that a fair bit and set what’s going on now and what the House does in the context of what might happen in the future.
So my next couple of slides are just to introduce where we've got to. (I must apologise for the fact that the writing is spilling over. I've used our nice Gill Sans font that we use in the House of Lords and it's not loaded on this computer so it's substituted a slightly bigger font which is spilling off the end, but I hope you can read it all the same.)
I suppose the key message from this slide is that talk of House of Lords reform has been going on for a long time, and some things indeed have happened. Until 1876 all the Members were hereditary, apart from the Bishops.
In 1911, they curtailed the powers of the House for the first time. Until then, the House could block any Act of Parliament. In 1949 they reduced the powers further by reducing the power of delay from, in crude terms, 2 years to 1 year. In 1958 they introduced Life Peerages more generally.
So there's been a bit of a continuous process, with perhaps the biggest single change being in 1999 when all but 100 or so of the then 750 Members who had inherited their titles (nearly all male I'm afraid) were removed from the House, and it went down from nearly 1,300 Members to more like 700. It’s now back near the 800 mark.
There have been a whole lot of inquiries in recent years. I suppose the story of reform starts in the mid-90s, when the Labour party grasped the issue of House of Lords reform. They came to power in 1997 (I’ll say a little more about this later) with a commitment to remove the hereditary Peers, as happened in 1999. That was the first stage of a two stage reform to replace the House by a democratically, or largely democratically elected chamber, something that had been envisaged as long ago as the preamble to the 1911 Parliament Act.
The House of Lords Bill in 1999 removed the hereditary members, although as the result of a compromise amendment 92 of them stayed on and a few more were given Life Peerages, hence my figure of around 100 or so.
Alongside that they appointed a Royal Commission, which started in March 1999 and reported in January 2000. They produced, as you can see, quite a fat volume, which I think has tended to be largely forgotten. What they ended up with was a recommendation for a largely appointed House with a smallish proportion of elected Members. I can't give you a figure as there were three different models. The one that most Members favoured had 87 elected Members, elected regionally. That didn't really find much favour, so things have moved on since then.
But what's quite interesting about this report is that they did a pretty thorough job and started from first principles. They looked at what you want your second chamber to do, then what powers you need to give it and finally how you should constitute it to deliver that. And the interesting thing for me is that now the argument is really purely about the third of those things.
I think that the key message there was that with the first two we were somewhere near right. People liked the functions that the House of Lords does, which you can broadly classify as a combination of scrutiny of legislation (both to tidy it up and to make the Commons think again on some big issues), scrutiny of the Government through questions and debates, and detailed study of subjects through committees and debates on the floor of the House. Those are the main things that happen.
This report had one or two suggestions, for example, that a reformed House ought to have a Constitution Committee to look at constitutional issues. Well you didn't need reform to deliver that, and within a year or two of the report coming out we’d set one up and it’s now very well established. So that was their approach. I’ll come back to powers later because there’s a bit of an issue there. As you’ll be aware, part of the concern of both Labour and the present Coalition Government has been to preserve what 10 years ago when this was being debated was being talked about as the 'pre-eminence' of the House of Commons; the favoured term now is 'primacy'.
Obviously once you’ve got an elected second chamber that becomes a little bit different. At the moment with an entirely appointed House, the Members recognised when it comes to the crunch that decisions of the Commons have a democratic mandate which the House doesn’t have.
Another thing that the Royal Commission did was to have a look at other second chambers around the world to see if there were any lessons to be learnt. One interesting thing was that on the whole, the answer was not many. The biggest single factor that second chambers had in commons was that they were what the report called 'contested' institutions.
In other words, their nature, their future, were a bit controversial, and there are a number of countries that have abolished their second chambers. In the past I’ve been embarrassed occasionally to sit in conferences in what is described as the 'former second chamber'; Hungary abolished theirs, Sweden abolished theirs, New Zealand theirs. But there are still quite a lot, and most of the big countries of the world have them. It's quite interesting how in some ways the Lords is similar and in others different from other chambers. Starting close to home, here’s the chamber of the House of Commons, and certainly the layout and the size are reasonably close. There's certainly a lot in common, so we’re not out on a limb with what we've got.
Now I thought I'd just do a quick canter round a few other second chambers of the world, just to see what's the same and what's different. I don't know if anyone wants to join in and guess which they are, or tell me which they are. Any idea which this one is?
This is the French Senate. A rather opulent chamber, as you might expect from the French. By world standards, that's a pretty big second chamber with 348 Members, but that's pretty small compared with our nearly 800. Incidentally the number of Members of the Assemble Nationale in France is 577 so substantially more.
The same is true of this next one, possibly even more opulent. That's the Italian Senate; they have 321 Members against 630 in the Lower House.
The next one is very similar indeed; the Rajya Sabha. That's the Upper House of the Indian Parliament. 245 Members, as against 545 in the Lower House. And you’ll notice that all 3 of those have a hemicycle arrangement.
It's interesting in India, because quite a lot of the Commonwealth countries have the 'facing each other' layout that we are used to at Westminster, which is sometimes regarded as the model of all other Parliaments in the former British Empire. You'll doubtless have heard the expression of England being the "Mother of Parliaments".
Incidentally, the design of this Committee Room, which is in common with the design of most other Select Committee rooms is quite an interesting mixture of the two. We have the horseshoe table so you’ve got the 'facing each other', but also an element of the hemicycle. For investigative-type committees of which you may have seen video coverage, for the interrogation of witnesses on the whole we don’t have the adversarial, 'facing each other' layout.
Now here's a rather smaller second chamber. Anyone like to guess which one this one is? I’ll give you a clue – a big country. Another clue – it has exactly 100 Members. It's a sort of 'team photo' for the US Senate a few years ago. They've got a reason for having 100 Members. They've got a Federal structure with 50 states, and unlike the House of Representatives, where they have 432 Members, they have equal representation from all the States, whether it be Delaware with a small population or California with 20 million plus. They've got a reason to have a particular type of chamber, but it is quite interesting that they get away with only 100.
This one has got labels; if you can see the writing, it's even got Black Rod marked over on the left. That's the Australian Senate; elected, but by different means from their House of Representatives. 76 Members, against 150 in the Lower House.
Finally on my little world tour, that’s the Canadian Senate. Now I’ve put that last because my colleagues in the Canadian Senate think that we’re the two most similar Upper Houses in the world. We're both appointed; they used to be appointed for life, but they now have to retire at 75.
But an important difference is they've only got just over 100 Members and as you can see there's room for each of them to have an individual seat. That, incidentally, is true of most Parliaments including the European Parliament even though they've got 700 and a huge hemicycle. We certainly haven't got room for that. Their House of Commons has 300 Members, so again it's much smaller than the Lower House, which is therefore a bit of a contrast with the House of Lords, where these days the benches are rather crowded. We've had about 120 new Members appointed since the election in 2010. Some seats below Bar at the top of this picture, which up until 2010 were seats for visitors, had to be allocated to Members during question time. In that photo they’re not quite full, but they often are. So we do have a seriously large Chamber.
I suppose one reason that we are as we are is historical, and it's quite interesting how striking the similarities are if you go back in time. These two pictures show, on the left, Queen Anne in Parliament, in other words the beginning of the 18th century. It's much easier to get pictures of the opening of Parliament with everybody in their robes than of normal sittings, but you get the idea that the layout is similar. This is a different room in the old Palace that was burnt down in 1834.
This one is from the early 19th century. I think it claims to be a debate in the House of Lords but I don't think the artist could have been there because they've all got robes on, which they certainly wouldn't have worn except for State Opening. A slightly bigger room, because in 1801 Ireland became part of the United Kingdom and they acquired 28 extra Members from the Irish House of Lords, so they moved to a different room.
As you can see, it's all pretty similar. Here is the last State Opening from 2010. We get rather fed up here when the press love using pictures like this to illustrate Parliament because you only get that once a year and we haven't had it for two years. But that will be the next sitting, incidentally, 9 May, next Wednesday, next State Opening. I'm lucky, I get a reserved seat about there. The Members who arrive early get a good seat there, but I get one reserved. The Commons stand at the Bar with the Speaker here and the Prime Minister here and behind the other Members. But that is not the typical scene.
This is one that always amuses me, again to show you how far it goes back. This is Henry VIII in Parliament, a Herald's drawing, and the bit in the middle I've enlarged on the right to show that we get slightly better treatment as clerks these days. They're kneeling on the floor there with their quill pens. Well, at least I have a seat and indeed a laptop at the table to work from.
Talking of laptops, here's a thing from the Daily Telegraph about a year ago which amused me. The article is called "Apple iPad enters the House of Lords" and indeed there's been stuff in the media recently about the extent to which iPads are entering, but they've slightly messed up with their choice of photo. Anyone know what that photo shows? It's not a normal sitting of the House. You can see all sorts of furniture down in the foreground. What this actually is, taken in September 2009, was one of the final judicial sittings of the House of Lords.
There's another bit of history you should be aware of. For most of my time working in the House of Lords, one of its roles was the final Court of Appeal of the United Kingdom, which I used to be able to mention in talks as quite a significant role. Here is the actually final judgement; they took a photo of it as it was a slightly historic moment at the end of September, before they all went off to the Supreme Court. So to that extent we've lost a few Members but it hasn't made a significant difference because of all the others appointed.
Going back to the House and a little bit about how things operate. You'll find maps of the layout in the handouts you have, but like the Commons the Government are on one side at the bottom of this picture, the Opposition on the other. A difference is we have a corner for the Bishops over to the left of the Government side, and of course the Lord Speaker is not in a chair but on the Woolsack.
There's quite a practical issue for people like me. In the Commons the clerks are just in front of the Speaker and can turn around to give him advice. Here it’s rather a long way, so it tends to be loud stage whispers from me, or passing notes.
Since 2010 of course, we’ve had a Coalition Government. That picture shows the Leader and the Deputy Leader – I don’t know if they’ve deliberately worn those coloured ties as it gives you a bit of help in sorting out who’s who.
Lord Strathclyde is the Conservative leader of the House. Lord McNally, who is also a Minister of State in the Ministry of Justice, is Deputy Leader and Leader of the Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrats sit over on the right of the Government. In Opposition the Liberal Democrats sat near the throne end on the Opposition side. When they first went into Coalition they moved across, but then found they didn’t have enough space because the front two benches were needed for the Bishops, so they moved after a few months to the far end.
A significant difference from the House of Commons and probably any other Parliament is that we have a significant number of what we call Crossbenchers – independent members. I don’t know if anyone can recognise any of those. That is Michael Martin, now Lord Martin of Springburn, former Speaker of the House of Commons, who in accordance with tradition has abandoned his party allegiance.
Next to him is Baroness Hayman, who was a Labour Minister during the early years of the Blair Government, but in 2006 became the first elected Lord Speaker for a five-year period, and now she has stepped down, she is on the Crossbenches.
Next to her is Lord Carswell, who is a retired Law Lord, so we only get legal expertise from those who have now retired. Finally, at this end, is Lord Laming, who recently became convenor of the Crossbenches. They are sufficiently organised group – nearly 200 of them – that they have a convenor.
There is only room for about 15 of them on the actual Crossbenches, so they occupy a large area to the side, with the exception of the front bench, which tends to be for former senior Ministers from the Labour party. Here on the right is John Reid, Lord Reid of Cardowan, the former Home Secretary. Those of you who are near might recognise Lord Bannside, formerly Ian Paisley, and his wife in the back row. A number of Ulster politicians sit on the Crossbenches, rather than join the mainstream parties. Lord Trimble, who has joined the Conservatives, is an exception.
Another significant difference from almost anywhere else is that we have an Episcopal presence – 26 archbishops and bishops are Members of the House of Lords. By a happy coincidence, the day our photographer was in, the Archbishop of Canterbury was there. He's not that regular an attendee, but he and the Archbishop of York do come quite often. A bishop always reads prayers, and in any significant debate where you might expect a church view, you'll get one. That is quite a striking special feature of the House, and it is one of the things being debated in the context of reform.
I mentioned the Lord Speaker; that is Baroness D’Souza, who was convenor of the Crossbenchers until last summer when she was elected Lord Speaker. An important difference from the House of Commons and almost anywhere else is that in the Chamber, her role is pretty limited. She will put the question at the end of the debate, but she does not call people to speak.
On the whole, the House hears who it wants to hear, and if people are fighting to speak, the Leader of the House is the person who sorts out the decision about who to hear next. It may sound chaotic – at question time perhaps it is – but most of the time if there is a set-piece debate, there will be an informal list of speakers so that everyone knows who is coming next.
Baroness D’Souza is the second Lord Speaker – I mentioned Baroness Hayman who was elected in 2006. Before that we had the Lord Chancellor on the Woolsack, which was a slightly curious constitutional arrangement. Does anyone remember who the last Lord Chancellor to preside over the House of Lords was?
It was Lord Falconer of Thoroton, and in those days, as you can see, he wore a full-bottomed wig. I still have to wear a short wig, as you’ve seen, but the relevant committee decided when the Speaker was elected that a wig was not right in this day and age. Anyone remember who followed Lord Falconer as Lord Chancellor?
I thought you might be amused to be reminded that it was the first Lord Chancellor in modern times to sit in the House of Commons, Jack Straw. He was willing to wear the gown but not the wig, looking at this picture, whereas the present Lord Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, has gone back to the wig. Sadly, he does not get the opportunity to wear it in the House of Lords, except at the beginning of a new Parliament when the Lord Chancellor sits just in front of where the Queen would sit for the State Opening, initiating proceedings.
Now we’ve been concentrating on what goes on in the Chamber but that’s perhaps misleading. It’s worth having a couple of slides to remind you that quite a lot goes on behind the scenes in Committee rooms. Nowadays, pretty much any meeting of a Committee which is public will be available with a sound feed or in some cases with a webcam at www.parliamentlive.tv. You can not only get them live but also retrospectively.
This is one of our more modern Committee rooms over in the Palace. It shows the Information Committee at work. That’s one of our domestic Committees which would normally look at library facilities, IT, the website – and here they were looking at how Parliament engages with the public which is something they are increasingly interested in. I guess the fact that I’m here today is an example of how we try to do what we can to make sure that people outside who wish to be informed can be.
The next one is our Communications Committee. You can probably recognise John Humphries and Nick Robinson and Adam Boulton being quizzed. That's one of the more traditional rooms overlooking the river. But that's probably an area where the similarity between the Houses is very strong; the sort of things you see a film of, typically in this room or a similar one, are similar in the Lords as in the Commons.
We’d like to think that in the Lords the interrogation is less John Humphries-like, shall we say. You more often get witness being interrogated in the Commons Committees than the Lords; it’s mostly fairly civilised.
Coming back to looking at reform, I mentioned that it started in the mid-90s with the Labour party, and this is the key thing that they put in their manifesto:
"As an initial, self contained reform...the right of hereditary Peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords will be ended by statute."
That was quite a clever move, making such a specific statement, because by then there was a well-understood doctrine known as the Salisbury Doctrine, that the House of Lords will not throw out a Bill for which the Government has a democratic mandate. So by putting a clear statement in their manifesto, and then being elected with a substantial majority, they were ready to go. This was phase one.
For phase two, they initially said they were going to appoint a Committee. As I said earlier, they subsequently decided to have a Royal Commission. But meanwhile, things carried on and during his 10 years as Prime Minister, Tony Blair nominated no fewer than 386 new Peers to sit in the House of Lords. That compares with almost exactly the same number in the 18 years of the Conservatives. I suppose you could say with the departure of 650 Hereditary Peers, there was some topping up to be done. Gordon Brown by contrast was rather sparing and only nominated 36, but in the just under 2 years since David Cameron took over, we’ve had 120, most of them in the first year in fact.
Now during that time, as my earlier slide with the list of inquiries showed, consideration has been given but not much has happened on what the House of Lords should look like in the future. Indeed it was in 2007 that there were votes in both Houses when the House of Commons supported a 100 per cent elected chamber and also an 80 per cent elected second chamber.
Now the nature of these elections is something that some thought has been given to. Anyone know who this gentleman is? Billy Bragg is his name. I think he’s best known as a singer/songwriter, but he also has some interesting ideas about House of Lords reform. I think they've rather lost favour now, but I just mention this as an example of how there are different ways of doing it. His scheme was for what he called a 'secondary mandate'. It didn't mean people going out separately to vote at all.
Basically you take all the votes cast in a General Election for the House of Commons, aggregate constituencies into regional groups, and appoint people on party lists by reference to the number of votes cast for that party.
So you introduce an element of more proportional representation. Small parties like the Green Party that might not get many seats, might nevertheless by this aggregation get a reasonable representation in the Upper House.
I think one of the reasons that it didn't find favour is perhaps the corroraly of what I've just said, that it might mean that people are encouraged to vote for parties that won't win in the constituency in the hope of getting them into the second chamber, and therefore might distort the elections. For whatever reason, he hasn't done as well as he might in persuading people.
Now rolling forward to 2010. An interesting thing about the present set up is that although the proposals for reform are extremely controversial, actually all three parties put stuff in their manifesto at the last election proposing reform. So here's the Labour one;
"We need fundamental reform of our politics... We will let the British people decide on whether to make Parliament more democratic and accountable in referenda on reform of the House of Commons and House of Lords."
So they were interested in House of Lords reform too;
"further democratic reform to create a fully elected Second Chamber will be achieved in stages".
The Liberal Democrats for a long time have been very keen on a democratic second chamber and they are pretty clear;
"Replace the House of Lords with a fully elected second chamber with considerably fewer members than the current House."
And finally the Conservative one with the charming manifesto title; 'Invitation to join the Government of Britain';
"We will seek to build a consensus for a mainly elected second chamber".
Well of course what we've actually got is a coalition, and what they came up with was a House of Lords reform draft Bill that was published in May last year. That was then referred to a joint committee and their report was published only a week or two ago on 23rd April, and got quite a splash. Broadly this offers 80-100 per cent elected, 300 Member House.
The Committee prefers 450, which is still a substantial reduction. There were quite a lot of votes; if you look at the record of discussions at the back of the report there were a lot of divisions, so they weren’t unanimous by any means. Perhaps the clearest single message is that this is controversial. Indeed when it was agreed that there would be a debate in the House of Lords on the subject before the end of the session, and they arranged to hold one last Monday, they then had to spill over into Tuesday because there were 70 or more members wishing to speak.
That report incidentally was from a Committee chaired by Lord Richards, a former Labour leader of the House from the early days of the Labour Government, who is there. He’s an enthusiastic reformist. Does anyone recognise anyone else in that picture? If anyone thought that Alan Sugar was too busy hiring and firing apprentices to come and take part in the House of Lords, this is proof otherwise – there’s Lord Sugar sitting immediately behind Lord Richards.
Now that’s where we are, and where we go from here is anybody's guess. The Queen's Speech will tell us whether there will be an actual Bill as opposed to a draft Bill to reform the House of Lords in the next session. People on the whole expect that there will be, although there was stuff in the media a day or two ago suggesting that it might be something less than a full Bill, because all they've promised to do is put proposals forward.
It will undoubtedly start in the House of Commons, and I'll explain a practical reason why in a moment. Media coverage of discussions in backbench Conservative meetings the other week suggested that it will be pretty controversial there. A possible reason for that is that the question of primacy is much harder to maintain if you've got two democratically elected chambers.
When I was young, we used to think MPs wouldn't want a fully elected second chamber because their lives would become more difficult. If you ever disagreed with them, it would make fighting that much harder.
We've had one or two Bills in the last rather long session – the Welfare Reform Bill was one example – where a number of Lords amendments which would have cost money were rejected by the Commons giving what's known in the trade as a 'privilege reason'.
Raising and spending public money has for centuries been regarded as the prerogative of the House of Commons as the elected House, and the Lords can offer a view but they have to yield to the Commons.
So any amendment that would cost money, the Commons can plead privilege and reject it. That was quite controversial as it was, but if you imagine an elected second chamber being told to pipe down on that account, they might well say, "well, we're entitled to our view".
You've got the Parliament Act provisions which according to this Bill will continue; that's to say that if a Bill is re-introduced in the same form in the following session in the House of Commons, it can become law without the consent of the House of Lords. If you've got that you can use it, so you could have a more combative sort of politics.
So there is a worry that, (as the saying goes be careful what you wish for) that may be the outcome, so if you follow these things, there's a very interesting debate to be had.
The practical reason why this Bill is bound to start in the Commons is that if you don't start it in the Commons, there's no way you've got the provisions of the Parliament Act to force it through. The House of Lords having decisively rejected in votes on several occasions the idea of a mainly elected chamber, plainly it would be doomed if it began in the House of Lords. We can perhaps talk more about that over questions if you want to.
I thought I'd end with just a few slides to illustrate that the House of Lords may be rooted in history but it has done a few things to modernise. You can't see it very well but I’ve chosen this picture because on the left you can see one of the television cameras. We were actually first to be broadcast on television in 1985; the Commons didn’t follow until 1989. That was quite a good period for us, because I think the TV companies were keen to show they were responsible broadcasters. They gave us quite a lot of coverage in those four years as a way of persuading the Commons that they were fit to be allowed into the Commons as well. As I’ve said, it eventually happened four years later.
Now here, I don't know if anyone can see what's different about this picture from the others I've shown you. You're right that there's a screen in the corner; that's a relatively recent innovation but we now have it all the time. These screens (you can actually see them in this room either side at each end) tell people what's going on.
We've always had them in the galleries. Incidentally I haven't mentioned but I'm sure you're all aware that you can tell which part of the building you're in by the colour scheme. Anything in the Commons is green, so the green screen there tells you what’s going on in the Commons, and the deep red screen there tells you what’s going on in the Lords.
The Members decided three or four years ago that it would be useful for them to know what's going on as well, as it helps you to see who's speaking if you don’t know them, so we've got those.
But the difference in this picture is the nature of the people here. They're a rather different group from usual. This is actually the finals of the International Schools Debating Competition of the English Speaking Union in May 2007 on a Saturday afternoon. It was the first time that people other than Members had been allowed to sit on the red benches. That’s actually me and my wife and daughter sitting in the officials box watching – quite a big new innovation to be at.
We did it again a year later. This is the UK Youth Parliament meeting in the House of Lords Chamber in 2008. We actually stole a march on the Commons there.
When Gordon Brown came to power, in the context of his Governance of Britain agenda, he announced a proposal that the UK Youth Parliament should meet in the House of Commons chamber, and they did a year or two later, but they came to ours first, so we stole a march.
Now whether that’s a model of a future reformed second chamber your guess is at least as good as mine, but I thought that was a good note to end on.
So I’ll stop there and open it up to questions.
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