House of Lords Podcast: inside Lords Hansard

In this month’s episode of the House of Lords Podcast, we meet the team behind the Official Report, known as Hansard, who ensure written proceedings are made available and accessible to the public each sitting day.

We hear about everything from the history of Hansard, why you might hear ‘can I have some ears please?’ in their office, the unusual name of where the reporters sit in the chamber and what they do if a member bursts into song.

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Find out more

• Find out more about Lords Hansard, including a link to 'The History of Hansard' by John Vice and Stephen Farrell.

Transcript

Amy G:

Hello, and welcome to the House of Lords Podcast.

Matt:

This month, we are speaking to members of the Lords Hansard team about their work on the official report of what happens in the House of Lords.

Amy G:

Hello. And as Matt said, we are speaking to the Hansard team this month. We are joined by John, the editor of debates and his colleagues, Natalie and Amy.

John:

Hi, I'm John, I'm editor of debates of the House of Lords Hansard team.

Amy:

Hi, I'm Amy. I'm a Hansard reporter and I started in February 2020.

Natalie:

Hi, I'm Natalie. I'm also a Hansard reporter and I started in 2020 as well.

Amy G:

Well, thank you all for joining us. The big question, I guess, first of all then is, what exactly is Hansard?

John:

Thanks for that interesting question. Hansard is the formal record of what's said in the House of Lords formal proceedings, the Lords can obviously have formal and informal proceedings. The formal ones are like considering legislation or questions or debates, and we record everything that's said in those discussions and all the decisions that the House takes. So if an amendment is agreed to or not agreed to. And the informal stuff we don't do. So that will be like committee meetings, or if a foreign politician comes to address the Commons or the Lords, like President Zelensky did a couple of months back. We don't report those because they're not formal proceedings. So we're a record of everything that formally happens. Everything that's formally said in the House of Lords, and it's obviously a written record. And what we do is - some academics call it, translation work. So going from spoken English to written English, they see as a kind of translation. The academic term is intralingual translation. And there is a lot of skill to go from one to the other without losing the sense of what a member is saying.

Amy:

So we are a 'substantially verbatim' report, which means we don't report every single word that's said. So we take out any repetitions or mistakes to make a speaker's meaning clearer, without changing the meaning of what they've said.

Natalie:

We also have to make sure that everybody is addressing each other correctly. So with some Lords who have extra titles, you've got 'noble and learned Lords', for instance. We make sure that they're all addressing each other correctly and that any mistakes or inconsistencies in the speech are ironed out.

Amy G:

Absolutely. And do you find that after doing it for so long, you know all that stuff off the top of your head or do you have to go through every single thing that's said afterwards to check that all of that stuff is accurate?

Amy:

I think it starts to become automatic after a point. I even find now if I see any parliamentary proceedings on the news that my Hansard brains start to switch on and I start to filter out how I would report it almost. And yeah, definitely when I'm sitting in the chamber now I'm not thinking so much about all those tiny details and they start to just come out as you type automatically.

John:

I think that's something that every reporter has, they have this, you're listening to something radio or TV or play and you've got this voice in the back of your head, just turning it into Hansard language and you can't switch it off. It's just with you for life, for good and bad.

Amy G:

Yeah. You can't enjoy any TV now, it's always ruined for you.

John:

Without turning it into Hansard, exactly.

Amy G:

And where did it come from? Do you know about the history of Hansard? I mean, why is it called Hansard?

John:

The name came from two people at the term of the 19th century. It was a combination of William Cobbett, the social reformer and a parliamentary printer who was called Thomas Curson Hansard. Just before then, the century before then, throughout the 18th century - and I found this really shocking - it was illegal to report what was said in Parliament and publishers, journalist, printers, were fined for doing it and sent to prison. They were sent to the Tower of London for reporting - for doing the job that we do. So doing exactly the same, they were sent to the Tower of London. Parliament stopped enforcing the fines, the imprisonment, at the turn of the 19th century. They didn't say it was legal to report, but they just stopped enforcing the punishments.

            And a lot of journalists moved in to try and make money, basically, out of reporting what was said in Parliament, among them was William Cobbett, who set up a parliamentary report of - he was aiming for everything that was said in Parliament. He called it Cobbett's Parliamentary Debates. And he published that for several years until he was tried for sedition in Westminster Hall, in Parliament and fined, sent to prison and went bankrupt. His Cobbett's parliamentary reports was published by Thomas Curson Hansard, the printer who then bought out Cobbett when he went bankrupt. And that's where the name came from. Hansard took Cobbett's name off the front cover, replaced it with his own, reprinted the two volumes that Cobbett had published. And that's where Hansard came from.

Amy G:

And why do we have a written record?

Natalie:

I think a written record is really important in terms of, well, people want to know what's been said in Parliament, it affects so many people. I think it's even been used in court cases where people have said 'this was the ministerial intention at the time.' And it's also really important in terms of accountability. We often get members quoting Hansard back at the minister or another peer saying, 'Well on this date, you said that and you haven't done what you said you've done.' So just having a record of everything is really important because otherwise, how would you know what decisions were being made.

Amy:

Yeah, I think from that scrutiny point of view, it's actually a lot more accessible than the recorded videos of proceedings. Because, especially with the online version, you can search by member or by word, by debate. If you need to find the debate on a specific amendment or a statutory instrument, it's really easy to find and filter it like that. Whereas you'd have to watch an entire hours-long debate to get to that detail.

John:

I think if you have political power, you should be accountable for the way that you use that power. And the way that you do that accountability is through Hansard. What is your MP, your representative saying and doing in Parliament? The way to find out is through Hansard. You can obviously watch the broadcasts, but it's really difficult to navigate them. You've got eight, 10 hours of video. How do you find the one bit you want to find? You need the words, you need to be able to look it up. And that's where Hansard is invaluable. So it gives transparency and accountability.

Amy G:

You mentioned broadcasts. Of course, Hansard came about the time before we had those recordings. Has the use of Hansard changed at all after we have these live broadcasts available to watch?

John:

I think if we, Hansard are doing our job properly, having a broadcast or not wouldn't make any difference to what we do. It makes people more aware. You're aware that what you are doing your work has a way of being checked. People can see, is this what the member said or was there some nuance, some word missing? But if we're doing our job properly, I think it doesn't change the way that we operate. And I see broadcasting and Hansard as mutually supportive rather than either or. We support each other. If you want to see, was there some nonverbal, but significant stuff going on, you'll watch the broadcast. If you're watching the broadcast and you want to read it again, you think, 'Well, that was interesting, but I didn't quite follow it.' You can go to Hansard and read it as many times as you want. So one's great for navigation and one's great for all the nonverbal but significant stuff.

Amy:

I would also say as well, that probably almost every day you hear a member quoting Hansard back at a minister or another member saying, 'On this date, you said this, and now the government or your party is saying XYZ instead. So what's changed there?' So that historical record is really, really important. And that's, yeah, that's something that hasn't changed with the live broadcast because you wouldn't be able to quote it in the same way.

Natalie:

I think it's also useful for ministers as well, because often they will say when winding up the debate, especially if it's in Grand Committee or if there's a time limit, they perhaps can't get to everybody's questions. And they'll say, 'I will look back at Hansard and I'll write to peers and give them answers to their questions.' So it's useful for them to have a written transcript of all the questions that they were asked, especially through longer debates.

Amy G:

Just on that point about nonverbal communication, I'm interested in what the process is for that, because I'm sure there would've been times where someone's made some action that is very important to what's being said, or perhaps even changes what's being said, what do you do in that situation?

Natalie:

I had something like that the other week where it was a question about stop and search and a member asked peers to raise their hands if they'd ever been stopped and searched. And I was thinking, 'how do I write this down?' Because it was so much visual action. And I've also had peers holding things up, and often you can smooth it out and make it clear what they're doing from the written report. But sometimes there are visual things happening in the chamber that are quite difficult.

Amy:

I think as well, sometimes you see members either maybe getting frustrated or agreeing with something they'll be nodding or shaking their head, and the speaker might respond to that in a way that's not that obvious. And you might have to make it clear that they're addressing someone who is making one of these gestures like, 'Oh, the noble Lord is shaking his head.' Or something like that, just to make it clear the way that they're responding to them.

Natalie:

One of my favorite things that we can use is a 'Noble Lord's 'Oh!'' and if there is, it's only deployed in certain situations, if there's laughter or if there is a general, 'Oh!', noise in the chamber, you can deploy that to make it clear to a reader what's happening.

John:

I think it's a really interesting question, how official reports deal with the nonverbal but significant stuff and, talking to colleagues in other official reports through Europe and North America, I think we've got four main strategies for dealing with them. The first is you just ignore anything that's not spoken. So you just say, 'Our assumption is that reader's interest is in the meaning of the words that they said,' that's it. So you don't refer to anything else. Another approach is to make small tweaks to the words. So if a member holds up a document, you can say the document that I am holding, even if they didn't say that. So small verbal interventions to explain what's happening.

            A third approach, which is used quite a lot in European official reports is to put in brackets a description of what's happening. So they would say '[the member held up a document]', which is a really interesting approach. And there's a difference in audiences at work there. And the fourth approach as Natalie was saying, is that you can do a kind of intervention to indicate something significant happens, but well we're not putting it in words. So saying, 'Oh!', or we also use 'interruption' in some cases. So that's, for me, that's an indication, something happened, it's not in the words, go to the broadcast and look and see what happened.

Amy G:

Absolutely. John, you are the Editor of Debates, what does that entail?

John:

It's a real privilege. I love being Editor of Debates. And I think it's one of the best titles I've ever come across for a job. It entails running the team, making sure the team are delivering our 'business goals' as they're called, which is publishing Hansard on time, which we have to do really quickly; making sure we're of the right quality; and that we operate as efficiently as possible. We publish really quickly, so within three hours of a member speaking in the chamber, it will be available online. So really quick turnaround, and to get things published that quickly, we need a lot of people who know exactly what they're doing so the whole process works really smoothly. So there's a lot of, I do a lot of the mechanics, making sure Hansard's delivering on its business goals. And obviously I work with other teams who are what we call chamber facing.

            So the legislation office, the journal office, the library, we have a lot of common areas and with members, quite often working with members it's, 'Oh, you reported me incorrectly.' Or, 'I didn't say this.' Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong. It's interesting how when you're speaking, you can forget what you said or have an impression, 'I'm sure I said that.' And then you didn't. So that's one great use for broadcasting actually is just say, 'Well, let's listen to what you said.' Click play and then we'll see what they said. And obviously we're working to really tight schedules, we do make mistakes. We're publishing a huge number, tens of thousands of words every day, the size of a newspaper in word number. And we do make mistakes. So we have a good efficient correction policy as well.

Amy G:

Amy, Natalie, what does a typical day look like for you guys as Hansard reporters?

Amy:

Yeah, so we work in a list of 16 reporters and we split the day up into five minute sections called 'turns', which is basically the section of the proceedings that you are responsible for as a reporter. So for each turn, you would go down to the chamber or the Grand Committee five minutes before your turn starts to get a sense of the debate - where it is, who's speaking. And then in your five minutes you listen and you log the proceedings. So identifying the members who are speaking. Any procedure and working out, if you need to request any notes or send a member a note to clarify something they've said.

            So we do that through the door keepers. And then we would go back up to the office once your five minutes is done, listen to the audio again, and report what's been said, edit it according to our style guide and to make sure it makes sense. And then once you've done that, you send it to the editors who will read it again, make sure it's consistent with the rest of the debate. And while they're doing that, you are back in the chamber again, working on the next turn. And we have about 45 minutes to an hour to work on each one.

Natalie:

It's like a relay race. You are constantly passing the baton of reporting to the next reporter. And when you're in the chamber, you get very good at tapping a table. Because when we hand over our turns to the next person, you're waiting for a good break in the member's speech when you see the clock hit the handover point, and then you'll indicate to the person ahead of you, that you are going to take over for them by tapping the table, and then they'll be relieved. And it's a giant relay that doesn't stop until, until the members stop speaking.

Amy G:

I wondered how do people get into Hansard reporting?

Amy:

Yeah, so I think our office has people from all sorts of walks of life. So people have worked in publishing before, in other places in government and politics, even in TV, I think a few people and yeah, I was lucky to find this job when I just graduated. So it was my first adult job, I'll call it. But yeah, I realised it was a good fit for me when I saw I had to do a test that involved checking grammar and facts and things like that. And I thought, 'Gosh, yeah, I'm going to like this.' Which is really silly, but that's part of what attracted me to it weirdly.

Natalie:

Yeah. I think the one thing that everyone has in common in the office is that we like words and we like messing around with words and making them fit. There's people who've worked in translation, which I think lends itself really well. And gosh, yeah all sorts of things. I was a copywriter. I trained as a script writer. So Hansard is reverse scriptwriting because you've got the play in front of you and you're writing it down, which is very interesting, but yeah, whole range of people. And that's really handy when you've got a question about something, because someone will always know something that you don't know. I had a member speaking Welsh the other day and luckily we've got several Welsh members of our team, so that was really handy.

John:

Talking from the other side of the interview table, as it were. I find the people who really, who we're looking for when we're recruiting, are people who love language, people who love politics and people who can work well in a team with other people. And then this might sound like a weird thing we're looking for, but it's, I think it's really important, it's being able to empathise with what other people are saying so that you can almost finish the sentence before the person themselves has finished it. So you feel the words that are coming before they come. So empathy is really important as well.

Amy:

Yeah. And you have to be really creative with language because there's people who don't speak in a manner that lends itself well to Hansard at all. And you want to be able to capture their character and not totally erase all of their background when you're writing them down, but also make it accessible and make it consistent with everyone else. So it's being able to use English language quite flexibly almost to make it understandable, but to make sure that you keep these little nuances and idiosyncrasies that people have.

Natalie:

Yeah, you'll realise what words people would use and what words people wouldn't use in a sentence.

Matt:

John, I have before me, the fantastic History of Hansard, which you co-authored and I'm sure we can put a link in the show notes for podcast listeners to read at their leisure, but I can see firstly, you've been Editor of Debates since 2012 and have been around a little bit longer than that within Parliament. I just wondered how did Hansard reporting work when you were first doing it? Because I know from having seen it firsthand, how having the internet feed of parliamentary proceedings is really helpful. So you can go back and listen to it and things like that. But like with parliamentary research, I really don't have a clue how it was done before the internet existed. So could you just fill us in a little bit about your experiences doing Hansard some decades ago, if I can put it politely.

John:

Yeah. Thank you for that, Matt. Yeah. I joined the House of Lords in 2001. And before that I worked for Commons Hansard for a decade and I've seen so much technological change in that time. When I joined Commons Hansard, I literally used an electric typewriter, which was seen as innovative, some people still used the old manual, 'whack them hard' typewriter. And I used carbon paper. So I'd set up the carbon paper, roll it into the typewriter and type away working with recordings that were made on cassette tapes. And again, that was seen as innovative. When I joined the Lords, the innovation was well, word processors and we used to have to, I remember, we used to have to queue up to get access to the one machine that was logged on to the internet to look things up and people would just stand there in line two or three of us waiting to access the internet. So huge amount of change.

Matt:

And Amy and Natalie, what's the best part of being a Hansard reporter?

Natalie:

I think the variety you can go from agriculture to defence, to fisheries, to anything really in a day because you're on this roundabout, you get little bits of everything. It's always relevant, it's always very interesting. And we also get to sit in the chamber, that's another huge privilege. You are literally a fly on the wall. You sit in the corner of the chamber and watch things that can be, things that I think people will look back on as history. You're writing the first draft of history, really, which is a huge privilege when you think about it, but you are mainly thinking about, 'I need to get my turn done' when you're doing it.

Amy:

I think another part of being in the chamber that I really enjoy is how it's almost theatrical. It has all these conventions and the way people interact in the chamber is like nowhere else. Even when you see members speaking to each other, in other parts of the palace, it's really different to how things work in the chamber. I always find that really interesting. And also just in terms of variety as well, you have such a wide range of members who all have really different experiences and opinions on things. And you feel like you get to know some of them, the way they speak, all their little idiosyncrasies they have. A lot of times the debates are just really interesting because you just have such a wide range of experience and views.

Natalie:

It is strange how you feel like you get to know members, even though they have no idea who you are, you have this... You can almost predict when somebody stands up what they're going to say, because you get to know them just through watching them for ages. And I think the other thing is, you get to work as part of a huge team. I mean, everyone helps each other out. And especially when the House sits quite late, there's a sense of camaraderie almost because we're all in it together. And it doesn't matter if your part of the debate's good. If it doesn't fit in with the next part, then it doesn't matter. So you are working as part of a big team.

Amy:

We all help each other out as well, but our team have, a really big range of backgrounds and people have different educations and previous jobs and things like that. So we're all able to find the answer to something if the original reporter can't find it, we'll work together to work it out.

Natalie:

Yeah. One of the fun things is, if in the office somebody can't hear what's been said, if maybe the microphone hasn't picked it up, or a member has mumbled or stumbled over a word, people will take their headphones off and go, 'Can I have some ears please?' And everyone will gather around their computer and listen. And it's almost competitive as to who gets to work it out.

Amy:

Who has the glory.

Natalie:

[Laughs] Yeah.

Matt:

You mentioned there about your ringside seat in the chamber, whereabouts are you sat to listen in and have Hansard always sat there?

Amy:

So we sit in the back left corner of the chamber, which is basically next to the crossbenches. But I would say there's almost a fourth wall between us and the members. So we're supposed to be completely separate from what's happening there. And like Natalie said, we're just a fly on the wall. I think John has some more information on this, but we currently sit in what's known as the 'unmarried daughters box', but we didn't always used to sit there.

Natalie:

And we're not all unmarried daughters.

Amy:

Yeah.

John:

That name dates from the time when the Lords was full of hereditary peers. And you bring along your daughter to show that she was of marriageable age, to show her off to the other, all-male members who were there. And we haven't always sat there. We moved there in the early 1980s. We used to sit behind the clerks in the middle of the chamber. So facing the woolsack with government and opposition right next to us, we were moved to make space for disabled members. That space is now taken by members who use wheelchairs. So we've moved to the rear left, as you're looking at the throne, of the chamber. And it has some odd effects working there. So some members I know by the side of their face, others, you get to recognise by the back of their head and others, you get to know their face, depends who's in government, who's in opposition. And the real challenge for us is the bishops who sit a long way away and they all wear their cassocks. And they're really difficult to identify just because there's no clothing cues for us to work from.

Matt:

We spoke about the best part of a job, and you've alluded to some of this, but what's the hardest part? Are there tricky situations where you've had to work out how to report it?

Natalie:

I mean, I love the variety, but also with the variety sometimes comes unpredictability. So you can go into work, especially at the end of a session, not really knowing when you're going to finish and yeah, at the end of last session, that there were a number of very late nights, which I think really tested the whole team, so that can be difficult. And then of course there are situations where you're just not sure how to report something. I had one, it was where we were in the Hybrid House. So it was during the pandemic. Some members were online and some were in the chamber and a member's dog started barking in the background and I just ignored it, I could hear everything, but then the next speaker said something along the lines of, 'It was lovely to hear from the noble Lord and his dog.' And I was just sat there thinking, 'What am I going to do with that?' Because if you were reading Hansard, it just wouldn't make sense because we don't report 'a noble dog: 'woof''.

Amy:

I also think because the Lords are so involved in scrutinising legislation, it means they can get into some really detailed technical debates sometimes, which are obviously really interesting. But when you are picking up a five minute segment of it, it can be something quite dense that you have to try and make sense of as quickly as you can. And knowing that even if it's a really complex subject, you still have the same amount of time to report that as you would, anything else. And yeah, especially when they're scrutinising bills, there's lots of documents to wade through, amendment papers, bill papers, explanatory notes, briefings, to try and work out exactly what's being said, what they're referring to, but when you've done a good job on something like that, it's really satisfying as well.

Matt:

John, a question I've always wanted to ask you, when you are giving titles to things in Hansard, so for example, oral questions or debates or personal statements or things unexpected, what challenges does that provide you or is there a set way of dealing with that?

John:

We obviously get the order paper each day and look through and come up with a working title. We work with two other teams to get the titles right or as functional as we can make them. One is the library. So they've got a great archive of previous titles that have been used for similar debates. And we want to have as much continuity with previous headings as possible so that people can look things up more easily. So close work with the library. And all our headings are also checked by the Table Office. So we need to get into the head of the clerk who's on Table Office duty and know what headings they like and you do get to learn the headings that they do.

            An interesting one came up when Parliament had the appalling terrorist attack in 2017. Do we table the statement on that 'terrorist attack' or not? It wasn't yet established that it was a terrorist attack, so that was difficult. And I wanted to put terrorist attack in and the clerks felt, no it's not been proved yet that that's what happened. So that was a weird, difficult, challenging example. Usually they're easier. And obviously with headings, we make great use of colons, so main subject colon and then the description afterwards. But our aim is to have them short and snappy and not have much white paper showing in the published Hansard.

Amy G:

Your team is obviously there for it all, you see it all. So I'm sure there must have been a lot of memorable moments from reporting in the chamber. Do you have a favorite that comes to mind?

Natalie:

I mean, there are moments where things have gone wrong, which is never good. So it's not necessarily a favourite, but I mean, State Opening was pretty memorable, especially this year because it wasn't the Queen. So I think there was discussion among the sub-editors about how they were going to report that because it was different than normal, but that always feels like a very special day in the palace because everyone's dressed up. We don't get to go into the chamber for that, but the atmosphere is really great.

Amy:

Yeah. I actually, on the flip side of that, I got to be in the chamber while Parliament was being prorogued this year in May. And that felt like quite a special moment as well, because that was the first time I'd seen it in person because of working from home for the past couple of years. And it was all this ceremony, lots of hat doffing and the MPs coming in with the Speaker. And you got to see all these bits of legislation that we'd spent hours and hours and hours working on last year, finally get Royal Assent. And yeah, it's this slightly crazy ceremony, but it was really interesting to watch all the theatre of that happening.

John:

A really memorable experience for me was shortly after I became a reporter in the Lords, Lady Thatcher was still attending debates and delivering debates. And I remember sitting at our reporting table and Lady Thatcher walked into the chamber. I've never seen a human being with so much charisma before, whatever you think of the politics, whether supporter or not. It was extraordinary, just the electrical energy that went around the chamber when she walked in and then stood up to deliver a speech. And that was absolutely amazing to see, just the charisma, the atmosphere she had around her was extraordinary.

Natalie:

Another thing that was quite memorable that happened recently was Lord Agnew's resignation at the despatch box because nobody was expecting it and it went around, the office was like, 'Oh my goodness, he's resigned. What's happening?' And that was surprising. So whenever things that are not expected to happen, happen.

John:

We've had a couple of examples of members singing. One was about 10 years ago. And Lord Duncan sang two or three years ago. Lord Duncan said, 'This reminds me of a song.' And then you can just on the audio, hear a member saying, 'Sing it.' So we put that in Hansard to give the context of he's being prompted. And then we put words into his mouth, I will, and then quoted the lyrics to the words that he was singing. So we used context to convey the fact that he was singing. Other official reports put in brackets 'the member sang' whatever the song was. Other official reports have also just ignored it. There's a lovely example from the New South Wales Hansard team who had a member singing and they put musical notes at the start and the end of the lyrics, just to really show that the member was singing. So there's various ways of doing it. Obviously watching it on the broadcast is ideal, but to capture it in the words is a challenge, but we can do it. There are ways to do it.

Amy G:

Amy, John, Natalie, thank you off joining us today. That was really interesting. Thank you.

Amy:

Thank you for having us.

John:

Thank you. It was a real pleasure.

Matt:

And that's it for this episode of the podcast as, like Parliament, we take a summer break. I for one will be hitting the beach with a stack of Hansards. We'll be back in the autumn of course, for a new series, looking at how Parliament's second chamber functions and speaking to members of the Lords about their work.