House of Lords Podcast: with Baroness Lane Fox of Soho

‘We heard so many examples of very, very difficult situations for children to be learning and when they were forced online at the beginning of the first lockdown. Families sharing one smartphone between multiple children, I mean, I just can't imagine how stressful that must have been for people and we know it was.’

Martha also talks about her journey to the Lords and what surprised her when she first joined, plus her own experience of the rapid shift to online living over the last 15 months.

‘I have been amazed at the rapid process of acceleration through some of the trends of the last year.’

Amy and Matt also discuss the upcoming State Opening of Parliament, its origins and how changes to the ceremony are not as unprecedented as you might think.

• Listen now
• Find out where you can subscribe to the podcast
• Find out more about the Lords COVID-19 Committee
• Find out more about the State Opening of Parliament

 

Transcript

Amy:

Welcome to the House of Lords Podcast.

Matt:

In this episode, we speak to Martha Lane Fox, Baroness Lane Fox of Soho, about what brought her into the House of Lords and the work of the COVID-19 Committee, which she chairs.

Amy:

And we also discuss changes in the Lords and the upcoming State Opening of Parliament.

Matt:

Hello, and welcome to the May episode.

Amy:

Since the last episode, the House has elected a new Lord Speaker, and Parliament prorogued ahead of the State Opening on the 11th of May.

Matt:

More about prorogation in a second but first, Amy, can you remind us about the Lord Speaker election?

Amy:

Yeah. So, Lord McFall of Alcluith was elected the fourth Lord Speaker. He took up the post on the 1st of May, and previously he held the position of the Senior Deputy Speaker. And he also served as an MP before he joined the Lords. We'll be hearing more from him in a future episode.

Matt:

Before Lord McFall gets to sit on the Woolsack as Lord Speaker, he first has to attend the State Opening of Parliament.

Amy:

So, Parliament was prorogued on the 29th of April, which signals the formal end of one parliamentary session before you move on to the next one. That word prorogued, prorogation, that's not something we tend to use in our everyday lives. Probably quite alien to a lot of people up until 2019, actually, when it got a lot of media attention. Where does that word actually come from?

Matt:

I mean, the word itself I think comes from Norman French. It's way beyond my abilities to understand exactly where it comes from. But it's certainly been in general usage in parliamentary terms for about 600 years or so. I mean, obviously famously Charles I prorogued Parliament and set an awful lot of stuff off by doing so. So, it does have quite a lot of history. And as you say, in recent times, it's been quite a controversial term as well.

Amy:

So, prorogation, as we said, is the end to a parliamentary session. And the State Opening is the start of the next one. But why do we actually have State Opening? How far does that ceremony date back, do you know?

Matt:

As you say, State Opening is required to start the parliamentary year again. So, as you say, prorogation is the term we use, which means the parliamentary session has ended. So, in order for the government to legislate and do stuff, and for Parliament itself, the Commons and the Lords to be sitting, Parliament needs to be reopened and that's performed by the Monarch. The ceremony itself probably goes back over 500 years. The modern ceremony itself started in 1852. So, that's the ceremony as we know it now, the route that the Monarch takes from Buckingham Palace, all the horses, and the coaches, and the Royal Procession. And obviously a full chamber full of parliamentarians, and diplomats, and guests. The State Opening itself is, I guess, symbolic of the evolution of power from being run by the Monarch of the time. State Opening was retained even though the power has moved away from the Monarch toward the Parliament we have today with elected MPs and peers in the Lords.

Amy:

So, this year will obviously be quite different. But in normal times, in normal circumstances, what actually happens on the day itself?

Matt:

Okay. I mean, if anyone has ever watched the ceremony on the telly, they will expect to see lots of people on the street watching the ceremony take place. Typically, the Queen would travel to Parliament in the State Coach escorted by the Household Cavalry. The Queen then, on arrival, goes to Sovereign's Entrance, goes up the steps to the Robing Room where she would dress in the Robe of State and the Imperial Crown. And then, again, if you've watched it before, you can imagine the Queen going along with the Royal Procession through the Royal Gallery into the chamber of the House. Members of the Commons are then summoned to the chamber, and that's the famous image of Black Rod having the door slammed in her face. And then MPs come and hear the Queen read out what is, in effect, the government's legislative program for the forthcoming session. And of course, let's not forget that members of the House of Lords wear ceremonial robes - ermine and the red robes - and that's the only time, apart from their introduction to the house itself, that you'll see members wearing robes in Parliament.

Amy:

And as you said before, the ceremony as we know it now, we think, dates back to around 1852. Has it changed much at all in that time, or has it remained the same?

Matt:

I think the fundamentals of it have remained the same. I wouldn't be able to say for sure exactly what the differences are over the years, but these things do evolve. I mean, obviously one thing to point out, 1959, 1963, the Queen herself wasn't there to deliver the speech. And obviously we've had years where there hasn't been a Queen’s Speech at all. Between 2010 and today, 2011, 2018, 2020, none of those years saw a Queen’s Speech. But on recent years, we have also seen examples of the Queen’s Speech, the State Opening of Parliament taking place, with reduced ceremonial. So, these things are subject to change, I guess, depending on the circumstances.

Amy:

So, this year will be a bit different for obvious reasons. Do we know exactly what will be happening this year? And has there been similar changes to that previously?

Matt:

Well, due to the COVID pandemic, there will be fewer people attending this State Opening. So, there's going to be a reduced procession. When the cameras are on the chamber, you won't see a full chamber. There's going to be a limit on the number of people that are attending there. And no non-parliamentary guests. Usually, there's diplomats sat in attendance, a full range of judges sat in the very front, but it's going to be minimum numbers this year, which makes it very different.

Matt:

Also, as well, the Queen will likely arrived by car, which is not actually unprecedented. The last two Queen’s Speeches, 2019, 2017, the Queen attended by car in certainly very different circumstances. On both those occasions State Opening was organized with perhaps a little less time than usual because of General Elections. So again, the ceremonial aspect of it was adapted. I suppose what makes this year a bit different is, that there was the opportunity to have the full ceremonial, but obviously pandemic rules means that you can't have the number of people there. So, as I say, when you tune in, expect to see a lot fewer people, which would make it pretty unprecedented.

Amy:

So, you mentioned just there quite a well-known part of State Opening where Black Rod will go to the House of Commons and have the door slammed in her face. What's going on there? What what's that all about?

Matt:

Yeah. It's a quite an interesting thing to watch, isn't it? I mean, international viewers must be baffled by that. I think it's something...

Amy:

It does seem quite rude, doesn't it?

Matt:

I think it's something everyone seems to enjoy. Black Rod has the door slammed in her face, as you say, and that's to symbolize, in effect, the power and supremacy of the House of Commons relative to the Monarch. It's basically a Monarch commanding they come to the House of Lords to hear the speech. And it's just a symbolic act to show that the House of Commons isn't being told what to do, the Commons is coming by its own free will. And as I say, it's an ancient thing. Really, it's been going on for centuries. And again, it's a longstanding ritual of the defiance of the House of Commons.

Amy:

Before prorogation, the COVID-19 Committee released its first full report titled Beyond Digital: Planning for a Hybrid World. We spoke to Martha Lane Fox, the Chair of the committee, about what they found. Here's what she had to say.

Baroness Lane Fox:

I'm Martha Lane Fox. I'm the Chair of the House of Lords COVID-19 Select Committee. I also have worked for a long time in the technology sector, and thought about some of the long-term implications of the issues that we're thinking about in the committee.

Amy:

Martha, thanks for joining us on the podcast. As you mentioned, you Chair the Lords COVID-19 Committee. What's the focus of the committee been so far?

Baroness Lane Fox:

Well, we were established, it's hard to believe, but not even quite a year ago and we were asked to look at the long-term implications of COVID on the economic and social wellbeing of the UK. Now, obviously that was quite hard back in July, June, whenever it was we started our first meetings because we were still so much in the middle of the pandemic, it was unclear whether or not we would be looking at freedom and different kinds of life again by Christmas or whether it was going to be longer. And obviously, we're still kind of arguably in the middle of it and that's a year later, nearly a year later. So we decided to do an exercise, asking people out in the country, what they thought the term implications would be. And we got thousands of submissions of evidence. People sent us poems, they sent us drawings, they sent us thoughts about what they believed were going to be the changes that we'd see.

Baroness Lane Fox:

And perhaps there weren't incredible new ideas because perhaps this time has not really been much that people have thought will change things dramatically, but we were very pleased and excited to hear from people from such a wide range of different communities in such a profound way. And although we didn't come up with any particular surprises in the conclusions, I think it was really valuable to have opened up Parliament to that kind of process and surprise, surprise, the things that people worried about were the rampant inequalities that they'd seen through the pandemic and were going to continue. They were worried about care. They were worried about looking after children and older people. They were worried about what technology was doing to us and all of the new relationship we had with the online world. They were worried about the environment, green spaces and some other things as well.

Baroness Lane Fox:

But we chose to start on the first inquiry after that, by looking at this relationship with the online world. And that's what we did from kind of September to what we published a couple of weeks ago. It was a detailed inquiry because we looked at all the aspects of wellbeing as they are generally laid out by experts in the sector and that's physical health, mental health. It's the impact on the quality of your work. It's your social interactions and it's your income and how much money you have and how you generate money through work. So we kind of break down our inquiry into those different areas.

Amy:

And the committee has just finished looking into the impact of, as you say, a much faster shift to digital in our lives. You touched on some of them there, but what are the real implications that you can see of that rapid change?

Baroness Lane Fox:

Well, as I say, I have worked kind of in the technology industry, sort of on the edges of it or using what I learned from it in other areas, my whole entire working life and I have been amazed at the rapid process of acceleration through some of the trends of the last year. If you told me that the House of Lords would be voting on their smartphones in the January of 2020, I'd have thought you were smoking crack, but actually, guess what? Within about a year, a month, the House was up and running and we were doing those incredibly effective, different processes.

Baroness Lane Fox:

So I think what we saw in the pandemic was a whole bunch of different things, but fundamentally, the trends that were sort of happening anyway were just sped up and crucially some of the inertia that you'd seen in certain areas or part of the personal motivation, sometimes organizational motivation had to be broken through because people had no choice, but now to try and use the online world. So that was one huge trend, but in tandem with that, which is really the focus of the most bulk of the report was the enormous inequalities that were also exposed through this acceleration. Partly clearly people who had no access to technology, didn't know how to use it, but also people who had a very poor experience of services that were being offered.

Amy:

So is digital inclusion one of the bigger challenges that we face post pandemic and what else do you think the government should be doing?

Baroness Lane Fox:

I think digital inclusion is a kind of catch-all phrase that will be used in the report and others use it as well, but it needs to be broken down. So digital inclusion can be looked at from many different angles. Firstly, you've got people who've never used the internet, never had access to it, can't afford it, who are completely outside of the world that we're communicating in now and how most of us, I think really have now become to operate in. And to address those people's needs will be a very specific set of things that might be needed, access to infrastructure at a good cost. We talk in the report about anybody who's on any kind of income related benefits being able to get access to cheap and affordable internet as well. So that's one aspect of it, but then also there's the skills and the understanding and the actual ability to use it and that's required different things around training and helping people with the provision of those kinds of services.

Baroness Lane Fox:

So that's another bunch of recommendations that we make, but then there's also digital inclusion that you could sort of look at from a slightly broader perspective. So rather than just the very vulnerable communities that have never used the internet, there are then a huge tranche of people who have an internet connection, but don't have a good fast one or you have one smartphone that the families are sharing for all the children to do their schoolwork. And we heard so many examples of very, very difficult situations for children to be learning and when they were forced online at the beginning of the first lockdown. Families sharing one smartphone between multiple children, I mean, I just can't imagine how stressful that must have been for people and we know it was. So there's a whole bunch of issues around that sort of people who do have some kind of access, but it's just not good enough and not able to deal with what they're being asked to do within this last year.

Baroness Lane Fox:

And then there's a kind of slightly more nuanced layer on top of that, which is there's a digital skills and understanding of the people that are providing the services that we're all enjoying. So just as much as you have a really patchy level of understanding, sometimes amongst members of the public, amongst citizens, so too do you in schools, in hospitals. Some GP surgeries provided fantastic ability to do appointments online and everybody felt very up to speed with how to use these systems. Some schools had an amazing transition on to providing home schooling, others did not, and partly that's sometimes bad organizations, but more often in my opinion, and that of the committee, was to do with a lack of good quality infrastructure in schools or a lack of training for the teachers who have been asked to do things in a dramatically different way. So that is also another form of digital inclusion.

Amy:

And as well as those sort of negative impacts, are there many benefits actually to the shift to digital that we could be taking advantage of more? I mean, for instance, I'm thinking could this be quite a positive thing for climate change and for the environment, for example?

Baroness Lane Fox:

Absolutely right. And that was something that we were really keen to see and some of the positives in our work. Of course, we mustn't ever underestimate the profoundly stressful time that this has been for many, many millions of people added to by often very complicated relationships with technology or no technology at all and that really was front and center in everything we were seeing, but you're absolutely right to say that it's not all negative. Arguably, the shift to digital has allowed much more flexibility in how people work, people to move location. Maybe people before had thought that they've had to be in a city, have to live in a certain environment, but now given more freedom and choice about where they can live and how they work and that's entirely enabled by technology. Similarly, actually you could see that, well, some groups and communities really needed the face-to-face connections and were desperate without them. Other communities had benefits from being able to gather together online. We spoke to some disabled community groups and had other pieces of evidence from other witnesses who said that, actually, they found that they were able to take part in whatever they were taking part in, and it was in a slightly more equitable way that in the real built environment, because the technology was a kind of leveler. So, we can bring the best of those things in how we design for the future, and something that came out very strongly from so many different people that we talked to and experts that we talked to is how important it is to involve users in the design of services, particularly anything where government has a role, because it will be voices of disabled people or people with special needs of any kind that will help us to work out what the best service is in this new blended hybrid world.

Amy

And one of the things, the report highlights is a shift to a hybrid on and offline life. What do you think a good hybrid on and offline life might look like?

Baroness Lane Fox:

We were really keen to get away from this notion of kind of digital, and that this is a report about digital, because that kind of clearly sounds very much as though we're talking about another time quite a long time ago, and you could sort of think about the digital world in this little box. It's here. It's not optional. We are in the world we're living in, which is sometimes offline, sometimes online, and I've got children of four years old and they won't see a difference between going online and living their life. It's already increasingly mixed and blurred. So, we were just really keen to encourage the government to think about the world, not as a series of binary choices about digital technologies, but actually in how you use them effectively together and how you decide what's most effective, face-to-face, a combination of face-to-face and digital, or pure digital, and to really try and work along that spectrum, not just assume that everything should be face-to-face and not just assume that everything should be purely delivered online. There is going to be a spectrum of different ways of working across different services.

Baroness Lane Fox:

So, I think a good hybrid life is a complex question to answer because it will be different for different communities of people. For me, with all the privileges that I have, I love having the flexibility of being able to work from home a bit more, being able to not have to do so much business travel, being able to have that kind of remote working embedded more deeply in my life, just as I'm very happy to see doctors online, as I have to far too often unfortunately, use services, get shopping and so on. Other people, that won't be the case, that they don't have that luxury of having space to work at home. They don't have that luxury of a clement employer that isn't demanding back to back Zoom calls and giving them no breaks. There's a lot of issues here that we need to unpick to help people have the most successful time in this new blended world.

Baroness Lane Fox:

And we talk quite a lot in the report about the kinds of rights that we think people should have, whether it's rights in your employment setting or rights in relation to government services or rights in relation to access to the technology itself. So, I think the fundamental thing here is that we believe that government needs to rethink how it thinks about its digital and technology strategy, because that already feels defunct. People need to be put at the heart of the strategy who are the most vulnerable, and for whom some of this is extremely stressful and complicated, and we need to really rethink the way that we're structuring our society at a much more profound level than we believe the government is doing at the moment.

Matt:

Martha, on the podcast we like to ask our guests about their experiences as members of the House. And I know that so far the committee has had to meet entirely virtually. How has that been as an experience for you chairing the committee online?

Baroness Lane Fox:

Careful what you wish for, eh? I spent so long in my life encouraging organizations to transform digitally and to think about the internet and I kind of, for nearly what feels like practically, but not quite 30 years, 25 years been trying to champion what this brave new world looks like. And so, in some ways it's thrilling to be able to do these things and to be able to talk to such a vast array of different people. One of the things we did early on in our work, not in this inquiry, in the one before, is we had loads of those drop-in sessions, where we encouraged groups of citizens to come and talk to us in a way that I don't think they would have come into Parliament.

Baroness Lane Fox:

It was very informal. We had people from lots of different types of groups. We had people from the Roma community. We had very heavily disabled people come to talk to us. We had single parents who would have never had the capacity to come into Parliament. And that was really fantastic because I definitely had my eyes opened and had that access to people in a way that would have been much harder previously. So some enormous benefits, but having said that, in the end, a committee is a collaborative project and it's been hard to not have ever met my colleagues who have worked so hard on these difficult issues. And also, these are complex subjects, right? We've got very, very inspiring people on our committee, all of whom have strong views, all of whom have very strong ideas about what the long-term implications of COVID-19 are. And I wish we could have had a few more face-to-face robust debates because you do lose something in that kind of just riffing about what you think the issues are only online.

Baroness Lane Fox:

And I really looked forward to the day when we can all meet together because it's a funny thing to get to know people just through the screen, and I didn't know very many of them well before.

Matt:

Could you tell us what's next for the committee?

Baroness Lane Fox:

Absolutely. We're currently looking at the question of families and parents and how that's been affected by the pandemic and at the long-term impact on parents and families. We're doing a shorter inquiry and we're going to be finishing that in a couple of weeks. This is such an important topic, and it came up again and again in our first work, looking at people's views from wide around the country. We've heard so many stories of families where they've just had so little contact with the outside world that children have really struggled. We've had families where babies have been born who literally have only had one person cuddle them in that period of time. What might the long-term implications be on that?

Baroness Lane Fox:

And then, you have the other end of the spectrum of the complex situations if parents can't get work or one parent has to work, one can't work, all those situations. So, that's what we're currently looking at. And then, we're going to be moving on to doing an inquiry about the future of towns and cities. So, one of the challenges of our committee is that you've got so many different directions that we could go in. There are so many aspects of the world that are going to have been affected about this last year, 18 months, and I'm picking the ones that we can add something to, which isn't replicative of other committees, which has been one of the things we've been really careful to try and do.

Matt:

Can I return us to your own experiences, again here?

Martha:

Yes.

Matt:

You're well-known for being a leader in digital policy and practice, I think earlier you mentioned being in or on the edges of that sector your entire working life, but also as well, you're a campaigner on the environment and inequality. So, can you tell us how that fits in? How does a member of the Lords fit in with all of that?

Baroness Lane Fox:

Well, my life has ended up in a very strange place considering if you'd asked me even when I was leaving my business I set up, lastminute.com, I don't think I'd have written ever on a piece of paper that this might be where I'd end up, but life takes funny twists and turns. So I started my career doing an internet business, lastminute.com. That was really one of the first companies to show that the internet wasn't going to blow up and to encourage people to use their credit cards on the internet. That really was an incredible experience at age 25 and kind of had the experience in eight, nine years that you might have over the whole career.

But it was also a bit like being in a very famous pop band that had one hit. Because you then get tagged with that one hit. And you actually don't know anything because you've had this one very strange experience. So it was a strange setup for the rest of my life.

Baroness Lane Fox:

And I then had a very, very serious car accident. Members might have seen me walking around with my two sticks in the House. And I had spent two years in hospital and completely rebuild my life. And because of that, I had to rethink my working life because certain things were not going to be able to be part of my life anymore. And a certain way of working was going to have to change. So that's why I ended up in a slightly portfolio lifestyle of a 75-year-old when I was only 35.

Baroness Lane Fox:

But actually it was phenomenal. And one of the most amazing opportunities I was given was by Gordon Brown when he asked me to be digital champion for the UK, looking at exactly these issues around digital inequalities and how to help more people use the internet. And then I was lucky enough to be kept on by David Cameron. And did a lot of work on digital government and helped create Government Digital Service and gov.uk, the website that now we use as the front end to government.

Baroness Lane Fox:

And all of that was such an amazing experience. It really shifted me from the commercial digital world to the institutional public service digital world, which is the one I very much enjoy being in. And I started to think, "How can I contribute to that more?" And that was what led me to apply into the House of Lords. Because as you know, some crossbenchers apply to be there. So I filled in an application form thinking, "There's no chance. I'm 38. They're going to say, 'Go away. Come back again when you've actually learned something.'" But actually I had a very tough interview and then got in. So I was delighted and wanted to try and use some of my experiences of technology to bring to the legislative process.

Matt:

You joined the House as a crossbencher, so independent of a political party, in 2013. You mentioned earlier, you were surprised. If someone had told you in early 2020 that the House would be voting remotely. But when you joined in 2013, did anything surprise you when you first became a member of the House?

Baroness Lane Fox:

Oh, no, nothing at all. Yes, quite a lot of things surprised me. I mean, I think I was surprised that everything from some of the fashion choices that I was making, which at that time I was entirely dressed head to toe in Marks & Spencer, because I was on the board of Marks & Spencer and I felt very loyal to the brand. But apparently that was a bit too racy for some of my colleagues. That was quite surprising.

Baroness Lane Fox:

Through to quite a lot of people when they heard I was going to be a member, started asking me if I knew how the WiFi system worked and would I restart their Blackberries and that kind of stuff. And I really am useless at IT. I am not a technology person. I am a digital native and interested in the digital world. And I think that's if you're not in it, why would you know that there's quite a big difference between that and IT. So I've constantly disappointed people with my ability to help sort out their IT problems. Luckily, we now have a highly functioning Parliamentary Digital Service to do that much better than I would ever be able to do it. But that was completely surprising.

Baroness Lane Fox:

But I think more seriously, and less personally perhaps, I think what surprised me, although I hoped it to be true, was just the incredible level of commitment from the majority of people in the House of Lords. Now I know that the House gets somewhat of a complex rap in the outside world. But the people who are good are very, very good indeed. And it's a pleasure to be amongst them and to learn from them.

Baroness Lane Fox:

I'll just give you one example. I share an office with the immense Molly Meacher, who I tease that I don't know if she's 85 or 105 or 25 because she's got so much energy it's impossible to tell. And she's always working on intensely complicated issues, not glamour projects at all, things that are at the hard end of subjects. And I respect her so much. She never slows down. There's no one else like Molly, but there are not many people who have the same kind of work ethic and public service ethic as her. And I just think that it's a shame that some members of the House don't also live up to the high standards that Molly would definitely be one of the shining lights of.

Matt:

We like to round off our interviews with members by asking, do you have any favorite moments from your time so far as a member?

Baroness Lane Fox:

I think probably a couple. I mean making my maiden speech was a moment, but not as exciting as securing my first debate. I was nervous. It was on the day of the 25th anniversary of the worldwide web. And I think it was the first time that there'd been a debate in the chamber to that degree about the internet, but more widely even about technology. And we had a lot of speakers. I did do quite a lot of fun rabble rousing to encourage the list. But there were about 35 speakers, I think, in the end. And it was really exciting to feel as though this was a group of people that had all thought about the internet and were bringing it to the chamber that perhaps has not had so many voices on this issue before. So that was a real highlight.

Baroness Lane Fox:

And then for me, this recent experience of chairing the committee has felt extremely privileged. It's not been entirely easy, a combination of the subject matter, being entirely digital, my first time chairing a select committee. So I've had to learn a lot according to the highly iterative, that's a polite way of using it in the technology world, appraisal system I gave myself. I don't think I did a very good job at the beginning. But I've really enjoyed it. And I think that the committee is doing some very valuable work and I've learned a lot from my colleagues. So it does feel like a real privilege to have the opportunity to Chair that committee.

Matt:

Martha, Baroness Lane Fox, thank you very much for joining us today.

Baroness Lane Fox:

Of course. It was a pleasure.

Matt:

And that's it for this episode of the podcast.

Amy:

We'll be back next month with more from the House of Lords in a new session of Parliament. Until then, don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.