• The Cabinet Manual, published by the Cabinet Office, 13 December 2010

• ‘Cabinet Manual’, Written Ministerial Statement by Sir Keir Starmer MP, 2 June 2026

• Revision of the Cabinet Manual, 6th Report of Session 2019-21, House of Lords Constitution Committee, 8 July 2021

• ‘Revision of the Cabinet Manual: House of Lords Constitution Committee report’, House of Lords Library, 13 December 2022

• ‘The urgent need to update the Cabinet Manual’, Lisa James, UCL Constitution Unit, 27 June 2025

• Cabinet Secretary’s Objectives 2026-27, 7 April 2026

• The United Kingdom constitution – a mapping exercise, David Torrance, updated 10 May 2026

• Government response to Humble Address motion, 11 March 2026

• Update on the Government response to the Humble Address motion, 1 June 2026

• House of Commons Corporate Business Plan 2026-27

• House of Commons Workforce Data

Please note, this transcript is automatically generated. There may consequently be minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript copy below, please first check against the audio version above.

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

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

Mark D’Arcy: And I’m Mark D’Arcy. And coming up in this week’s episode:

Ruth Fox: The Government swamps Parliament with the Mandelson papers, but how much have we really learned?

Mark D’Arcy: It’s supposed to be the Highway Code for the Constitution, but it hasn’t been updated for 15 years. So what is the significance of the decision, finally, to revise the Cabinet Manual?

Ruth Fox: And could Parliament’s drive to cut costs by 10% undermine its efforts to engage more with the public?

Mark D’Arcy: But first, Ruth, as you said, Parliament has been swamped by [00:01:00] the massive document dump, the latest instalment of the Mandelson papers. All those WhatsApp messages between members of the Cabinet, all those vetting documents and civil service memos have been dumped in the laps of MPs who are struggling to digest the content. And my colleagues in His Majesty’s press are having great fun with all those WhatsApp printouts of who was saying what about who at the highest levels of government, what Peter really thought of Wes, what Darren was saying about Jonathan, et cetera, et cetera. All that information is being slowly digested and perhaps some pearls will eventually come out of it. But so far it all seems to have been all fanfare and no actual event.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I think that’s fair comment. I’d simply note that all those individual MPs you mentioned were all male, which is another aspect that comes out of this, I think.

Mark D’Arcy: Bit of the boys club.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, exactly. Which was in fact a point noted by Jess Phillips in the debate on the Mandelson papers that took place in the House of Commons [00:02:00] yesterday. So we’re recording today, Thursday 4 June. So there was a debate yesterday in the Commons. I mean, the Government claimed this week, Darren Jones and Nick Thomas-Symonds, who spoke in the debate, they claimed that this was an unprecedented piece of Government transparency. And at one level you can kind of accept that if you just take this on sort of volume, number of pages that have been published as a result of the humble address, you know, you’re talking sort of 1500 pages upwards. Plus what was published back in, was it February, March time. So this is the second tranche. There’s apparently a third tranche to come, which is all the material that has been retained because, at the request of the police, because of the police inquiries into Peter Mandelson. And I think we might come on to that, you know, when does that appear? Because I think that that’s going to be a relevant question for parliamentarians.

Mark D’Arcy: But measuring the significance of a document dump by the gross tonnage of information put out is a bit like saying the best MP is the one who ask the most questions, however trivial the questions might actually be.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And I don’t know whether you’ve had much time to look at the [00:03:00] sort of the individual documents, but frankly it’s quite hard actually. Because once you get into it, you know, a couple hundred pages in, it is page after page after page of redactions. And a lot of pages are, well one is just headed notepaper, literally headed notepaper with a kind of “Dear so and so... Yours sincerely”.

Mark D’Arcy: And a big blot of black between the two.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, exactly. Well, I don’t think they even blacked it out. I think it was just white. It was just as if they hadn’t printed the document. There are emails where you got, you know, if you’re in a conversation on email with a number of people and you get this email trail and everybody’s submitting that email trail to the Cabinet Office because it’s deemed to be in the scope of the humble address. And that’s all then published. So you get repetition because you’re seeing the email trails from different people at different points. You’ve got emails where you know what the email subject is, you know what the date is, you know who it was sent by, who it was sent to, because the names are identified, [00:04:00] but then the actual content of the email is redacted or individual parts of it are redacted, such that the text that is still revealed is meaningless. You can’t make anything of it. So it is incredibly difficult to read through some of this and, you know, ploughing through all these hundreds of pages, but the position at the end of it is really, yes, they’ve been transparent. We know what communications have been made by whom and when, but we can’t really say that we’ve learned anything.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah, I mean, it is always amusing to get a little bit of a window into the inner workings of government and see a little bit of what’s going to and fro, the back and forth between ministers and other senior figures inside Downing Street is always something that any journalist would be very keen to go through. But at the end of it all, as you say, there’s a lot of stuff that’s essentially reduced to meaninglessness by the redactions and a lot of the other stuff you get is really fairly trivial stuff. The big one so far in terms of political [00:05:00] significance to observe is actually very little to do with Peter Mandelson. That’s the Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden’s observation that Labour ministers were constantly looking for taxes so they could pay more benefits, which I think is going to be right up there with Liam Byrne’s “I’m sorry there is no money” note that he left to a successor in the Treasury after the 2010 general election. Oops. And that’s a remark that I’m sure Pat McFadden’s colleagues will be wincing at. But on the other hand, fair enough. It seems to be a fairly accurate description of what’s going on.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But in, in the sense that’s revealing also of questions about the methodology here of the humble address because you’ve got all these pages. Fine. They’ve determined what’s in scope. They’ve published them, but we don’t know what we haven’t got because so many.

Mark D’Arcy: These are the unknown unknowns.

Ruth Fox: Yes. We don’t know which ministers haven’t got anything that’s been published because they didn’t communicate with Mandelson or they did communicate with Mandelson, but they’ve, in inverted commas, lost their [00:06:00] communication device, so they’ve got WhatsApp messages turned off or they’ve had their phone stolen, or for some other reason, their communications are not available. So, I mean, Jess Phillips made the point in the debate that people like her who’ve not had communications with Peter Mandelson, and therefore there’s nothing in the publication, are essentially deemed in exactly the same category as ministers who have communicated with Peter Mandelson, but oops, their messages are not available. That’s one thing. Very noticeable, that there’s virtually nothing from the Prime Minister in this at all.

Mark D’Arcy: He’s the man who wasn’t there. You know, it is quite extraordinary. And if you compare that to previous governments where you would always have known as a minister in the Coalition what Dave and George and Nick thought should be happening. You’d always have known in Margaret Thatcher’s governments what Mrs T would’ve wanted. You always have known in Tony Blair’s governments what either Tony or Gordon wanted. Yeah. And they may not have been the same thing, but all the same, you know, there were [00:07:00] guiding intelligences at the core of those governments that don’t seem to be entirely present this time. And that’s the, for me, the most important revelation of this is what’s missing.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. If you remember when we spoke to Sir Jeremy Wright a couple of weeks ago, as he’s the deputy chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, he’d expressed concerns about the nature of the redactions the Government was seeking, and that obviously they’ve seen some of the other redactions that are not relevant that the Intelligence and Security Committee is not involved in making. But if the Government was wanting to redact other material in the same document, they’re aware of those other redactions. His argument was the Government was seeking redactions beyond the terms of the humble address, and they should have come back to Parliament to seek permission for those. But nonetheless, they’ve been redacted as the Government wants. So again, we don’t know what’s there and what we don’t know.

Mark D’Arcy: We don’t know what we don’t know. It’s a classic problem, the Government, I suppose.

Ruth Fox: Exactly. And it just feels like a big document dump. But ultimately, if we [00:08:00] go back to what was the purpose of this exercise, the problem was the Prime Minister’s judgement in relation to Peter Mandelson’s appointment. And we have learnt virtually nothing more about that despite this 1500+ pages. The other thing that surprises me is where are the messages from ministers expressing concern about the appointment? Did no minister raise a concern in writing to the Prime Minister, to the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, to their Secretary of State, to the Foreign Secretary? It’s pretty clear that quite a number of MPs and ministers had reservations about this appointment, but there’s no evidence in writing that they expressed them.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah. That’s again one of the extraordinary things here. And there’s a document detailing the vetting of Peter Mandelson with a space for comments by the Prime Minister at the bottom. And there is nothing in that space. And people said, well, where’s the comments from the Prime Minister? And the answer came, there were none.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D’Arcy: Which is again, very interesting, [00:09:00] and possibly a bit revealing about Keir Starmer’s style of government.

Ruth Fox: On that, I mean, in my former life as a political historian with a PhD in history, I spent quite extensive periods in the National Archives or online researching National Archives papers and looking at prime ministerial papers, Cabinet Office papers, for a time I worked for the National Archives. I’ve seen documents from Number 10 and from the Treasury and other places. And you think back to previous prime ministers, Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan, Harold Wilson, the idea that they would not have been scribbling copious notes on most of the papers they received. I mean, Margaret Thatcher’s papers are covered in green ink. You knew what they thought. They would be requests for information, they would be requests for clarifications. There would be requests for meetings to follow up. And what you hear is from this Number 10, that this is not unusual, that no comment [00:10:00] from the Prime Minister, that that is actually more the norm.

Mark D’Arcy: But one of the other things that came out of the debate, and perhaps it’s quite interesting for the future of this, is concerns about the way these humble address processes work. This isn’t obviously the first time that a dump of government documents has been elicited by this parliamentary device of a humble address to the sovereign calling for the release of the documents. That people are now starting to remark and there’s a speech by Fleur Anderson, former Labour minister, in the debate, which said that this was, maybe the focus was too wide, maybe what was needed was a process that, as you were kind of hinting in what you said just now, was a bit more focussed on stuff that was directly germane to the matter that Parliament was concerned about, rather than every jot and tittle that could possibly come within the ambit of it. The trouble with this is I think that once you say, oh, let’s have a more focussed process, a lot of people start saying “Cover-up! Cover-up!” And it immediately becomes a way of saying that the Government is trying to hide [00:11:00] something because it just wants to give you documents that it deems to be relevant. And you can see why people argue that, but it all becomes a bit like the old device demanding a full inquiry under the terms of the [1992] Tribunals and Inquiries Act, and anything less than that is a clear sign that the Government’s trying to hide something, which is a trope that went on for a very long time, and maybe this is it. Now you have to have humble address and you have to have all the documents, otherwise it’s a cover-up.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But again, going to the methodology of this though, that raises an interesting question about what the role of ministers is, because from both the document itself and from the ministerial speeches yesterday, it’s clear that ministers have not been involved in deciding the scope of documentation involved in analysing.

Mark D’Arcy: It’s hard to imagine the hue and cry if they were.

Ruth Fox: I’ll come to that. And also, you know, what should or should not be redacted. So they’ve been, at one remove from it, allegedly. But clearly, if you read The Spectator today, there are suggestions that certain [00:12:00] messages from Darren Jones, for example, as the minister who’s been responding to questions about this humble address in the House of Commons for months now, that some of his messages do not appear. And the question is, why not? Well, I think perhaps he had disappearing messages and The Spectator have got them via another route. But therefore, from the Cabinet Office’s perspective, they may not have had access to them, or perhaps they did have access to them and they interpreted that actually they didn’t want to dump their minister in it. Who knows? They’ll have to answer for that, no doubt, in the days ahead. But from a methodology perspective, the problem then is when the minister is at the despatch box accounting for this process, they can’t really answer anything. So when MPs got up and asked why was X document not included, why was this redaction done, the ministers can’t really respond because they’ve not been involved in the process. And they would be saying things like, I’m sure the officials have heard what you’ve said.

Mark D’Arcy: I suppose if the answer is, I don’t know, you’ll have to ask the civil servants, then at some point, maybe one of the parliamentary [00:13:00] select committees interested in this is going to ask the civil servants, and the person in the Cabinet Office who’s been in charge of the vetting of the document dump, and deciding what to release and what to redact and so forth, is actually going to have to account for how they did that in front of Simon Hoare and his merry men, and indeed women, on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, PACAC for short.

Ruth Fox: Well, this is the irony of course, because Simon Hoare as chair of that committee, a Conservative MP, remember, he has been involved in this process. Papers have been sent to him to look at, to assure him on behalf of Parliament that the papers that have been retained for the police, that’s fine to do. So it’s a bit messy that certain MPs on the Opposition back benches are seeing things and are involved in a process that ministers are one remove from. And yet ministers are at the despatch box accounting for it. So I just think the whole process feels quite messy to me. But going to your point about Fleur Anderson’s proposals, I mean she essentially called for a review by the Procedure Committee [00:14:00] and/or PACAC, the Public [Administration] and Constitutional Affairs Committee. And she made I think three good arguments about why the humble address process needs to be changed. She said it’s a useful tool, but this one has been drafted so widely, it’s become a catch-all. It’s not a focussed request for information, which is why many of us are finding the process very frustrating. And you could sense that in the debate yesterday very clearly. She said, first there’s a question about scope and limits. The motions for humble address should set out the subject, the time period, and the type of documents being sought much more rigorously than this humble address did. And I think if you remember Jeremy Wright was saying basically this was being drafted between the Chief Whip and the Opposition, basically on the back of a fag packet behind the Speaker’s chair.

Mark D’Arcy: In real time during the debate.

Ruth Fox: And then that comes to the second point. She says there should be a proportionality check. When they voted on this humble address, no consideration was given to the financial implications of it. Now, again, this is extraordinary. What we’re [00:15:00] basically saying is we’ve got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of redacted documents. It’s added very, very little to our understanding of the essential question that this was about, which is the judgement of the Prime Minister to appoint somebody whose background and vetting was in question because of his relationship with Epstein and his relationship with other possibly foreign actors through his business interests. We’ve learned almost nothing further about that and yet...

Mark D’Arcy: And it’s cost a bleeding fortune.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Cabinet Office, it was suggested £1million at least, and presumably rising. The Foreign Office, apparently a similar sum. That doesn’t include all the other sort of costs. For example, the Intelligence and Security Committee, when you look at the number of redactions, I mean, they must have spent hours and hours and hours poring over these things. So there’s all the costs there. So you’re looking at £2million+, which, when you think about good use of public money, really?

Mark D’Arcy: There’s certainly questions to be asked about it, and I [00:16:00] do think it is something that the Procedure Committee and other committees of Parliament could usefully look at, just so that when Parliament wants to get to the bottom of something, it’s not swamped in endless detritus. However chewy and entertaining some of those bits of detritus might be to people like myself who cover politics for a living.

Ruth Fox: But I think this then goes to both Opposition MPs and backbench Government MPs have got to be a little bit more responsible about the use of this. Quite a number of Conservative backbenchers clearly think that this has gone too far, are uncomfortable with it. Jeremy Wright said so on our podcast a couple of weeks ago, that he doesn’t think that humble addresses are a good thing.

Mark D’Arcy: Well, I just remember that there’s, in Tony Blair’s memoirs, there’s this great cri de coeur about the effect, as he sees it, of freedom of information, which is that people are no longer allowed to think aloud within government and ponder the unthinkable because then, the hue and cry starts, and next thing you know, you’re pursued out of office by a pitchfork-wielding [00:17:00] mob. So I do think that there is an issue there that the whole humble address process takes even further. It’s not now just the official papers that you saw as a minister. It’s what you might have said on some WhatsApp group somewhere that comes to haunt you as well. And so that as the scope of this widens and the digital footprints that people leave just become more and more extensive, the amount of information about what you were doing and thinking becomes ever greater, and the chances of you being up-ended by it ever greater as well.

Ruth Fox: Conversely, possibly not, because of course if you can have disappearing messages then actually you’re losing the record of what’s been discussed and what’s been agreed. I mean, certainly I’ve heard from MPs’ staff that one of the problems they’ve got is that MPs make arrangements for meetings and sort some things on WhatsApp, the messages disappear and nobody notes what’s been agreed.

Mark D’Arcy: But you are forced into that territory.

Ruth Fox: Well, that’s the point.

Mark D’Arcy: ...by all this aren’t you, that you are forced to make sure that your messages self delete after some period, or you are forced to have [00:18:00] critical conversations that are unminuted, in unofficial spaces. And that means that the business of government decision-making is partly driven underground by the effect of there being too much scrutiny and too little ability to think aloud without the consequences coming to haunt you.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. One thing that did amuse me in the papers was, Foreign Office officials, this would be around January 2025 when they were preparing the pre-appointment letter for Peter Mandelson, and there were an awful lot, a huge number of officials involved in these email exchanges, and they clearly got a passage in the letter that referred to two things the DSR and Nolan principles. And one official said to another, there’ll be some terms in here in the letter eg, “DSR”, “Nolan principles”, which won’t be familiar to Lord Mandelson. So “DSR” I assume is, data subject request, which he might not have been familiar with, but [00:19:00] “Nolan principles”, he really ought to have been.

Mark D’Arcy: You’d have thunk.

Ruth Fox: You’d have thunk.

Mark D’Arcy: And while Westminster’s been following this scandal with great enthusiasm, the world of Hollyrood and the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government had been transfixed by another scandal, a completely different one: the extraordinary tale of Peter Murrell, the chief executive of the Scottish National Party, as was, and husband of Nicola Sturgeon, as was, and the tale of his embezzlement from SNP funds, hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on all kinds of exotic luxury goods, lovingly enumerated as the evidence came out in court about exactly where the money for the SNP’s independence campaign had gone. And there’ve been calls in Westminster for a Westminster investigation into the background of this to - as I think the former Labour First Minister of Scotland, Jack McConnell put it - ensure probity in the way political parties are run. And I’m afraid there’s a heretical part of me that thinks that maybe Jack McConnell, seeing all Labour’s dirty laundry being washed in public, thinks that maybe the SNP’s dirty [00:20:00] laundry should be exposed to the same level of scrutiny as well.

Ruth Fox: Although when you think, I was thinking about Wendy Alexander’s resignation as Labour leader in Scotland, and there have been others, not perhaps unwarranted, but for far far less than this scandal. I mean, the enormity of this scandal, the suggestions that, was the court case delayed beyond the Scottish Parliament elections, you know, to get to the other side. I mean, you and I have commented that it’s quite incredible really that given the nature and scale of this scandal, the SNP has sailed through the elections and are back in government again. But can you really see Westminster investigating the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish parties in that way?

Mark D’Arcy: Well, you can’t imagine an SNP-led Scottish government and an SNP-dominated Scottish Parliament taking desperately kindly to a Westminster select committee or even several of them coming up to Edinburgh to investigate the goings on within the Scottish Parliament. I think hackles would rise. So on that side [00:21:00] of it, it would be politically an extremely contentious move. But there are very real points here about the running of political parties and just the pure murkiness of the finances of quite a lot of British political parties, naming no particular sets of foreign donations to particular political leaders, for example. There are questions that an awful lot of parties have had to ask and answer in the past that have gone unasked and unanswered. And that is something that really needs to be cleaned up.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But I think the problem in Scotland, I mean it’s a very very small sort of political community. The problem will be, can we really see the Scottish Parliament relevant committee investigating the Scottish Government and the SNP? And this week we’re going to see a consequence of those parliamentary election results flowing through into the way the Parliament operates and the domination of the SNP. We are hearing that the Parliamentary Bureau in the Scottish Parliament - which is the sort of like the business committee, it decides business week to week, but it also has a role in the start of the [00:22:00] Parliament sorting out things like allocation of select committee chairs, conveners, as they’re called in the Scottish Parliament to the various parties, and any party that’s got more than five members in the Parliament has a seat in that bureau, and it’s also chaired by the Presiding Officer. So it’s a balanced political operation - but we are hearing that the bureau has proposed a motion to the Parliament, which will allocate convener and deputy convener posts for some plum key committees, notably the Finance, the Criminal Justice Committee I think, the Public Service Reform Committee, the SNP will have both posts on those committees and also some plum roles on some of the others. Now, this comes about because the SNP is so dominant in the Parliament, you know, it’s got 30 more seats, I think, than, sorry, no, 40 more seats than any other party in the Parliament. It’s got 57. The next highest is Labour and Reform each with 17. So I think what’s happened is because of that dominance, they’ve got first dibs in the bureau on which committees they want, and [00:23:00] they’ve gone for those particular committees. But it’ll be interesting to see whether MSPs decide to accept that when the motion is put to the whole of the Parliament, because it does feel a little bit uncomfortable that one party would have the chair, effectively the chair and the deputy chair, of some of the committees.

Mark D’Arcy: And before we go, Ruth, I just wanted to remark on something very unusual that happened in the world of Westminster this week, which is to say there was a politically significant exchange at Prime Minister’s Questions. Thank you. I don’t wanna be unduly sarcastic about it, but most PMQs pass in a week with a ritual exchange of brickbats inside baseball-style Westminster point scoring. But I do think watching this week’s PMQs, that Keir Starmer’s exchange with Nigel Farage over the awful Henry Nowak murder case, and the response to it by the police and Nigel Farage’s call for cold rage, is going to [00:24:00] influence an awful lot of voters, not least the voters in the Makerfield by-election. So there’s a lot of very live political significance in that exchange, and you can imagine all sides of that argument taking clips of that, comparatively shortening that two minute exchange and deploying them on their social media campaigning.This is a moment for once in PMQs that could really really matter for the future of our politics, because Makerfield after all is probably the most significant by-election for a century plus.

Ruth Fox: I guess it depends on how many people have seen it. There’s various communications. There’s not just PMQs, but there’s also the social media videos that the leaders of the parties have been putting out. I don’t know. I think you possibly have more faith in the idea that this will have an impact than I do. I think back to the days when Stephen Lawrence, and we thought that that kind of incident, terrible murder, would have an impact. And did it change as much as it should have done?

Mark D’Arcy: Perhaps not, but, in this case, I’m talking [00:25:00] less about whether it leads to deep institutional change, and more whether it has a real impact on the mood, the political mood in the country. I think that Keir Starmer did a very very good response to Nigel Farage, the Reform leader got up and said that there was two-tier policing in this country, and that he’d seen documents about how the police were supposed to handle incidents involving ethnic minorities that clearly suggested that they’d had to treat people in different categories in different ways, and so the rules were not the same for everybody any more. And Keir Starmer’s response was, no, there isn’t two-tier policing and Nigel Farage’s insistence on raising this issue in the way he’s raised it, in the teeth of the wishes of the dead man’s family, showed who he was. And that was a very powerful response. Now I think Nigel Farage will probably be quite pleased that he was barracked as he asked his question and won’t be too dismayed at the answer Keir Starmer gave him. But Keir Starmer will in turn feel that [00:26:00] he has given an effective answer and has perhaps shown his troops that he as well as possibly Andy Burnham is capable of taking on the Farage Menace. So there’s a lot of politics in this, and it does play into the Makerfield by-election, which is a very Brexity white working class seat where this is apparently the big issue being pushed on the doorsteps. And it could have quite an impact on how that election goes. I don’t know how this will land with the good voters of Makerfield. Will they take the side of Nigel Farage? Will they take the side of Sir Keir Starmer on this? I’ve simply no idea, but it seems to me that just for once, PMQs is actually going to matter to the outside world rather than just the SW1 postcode.

Ruth Fox: And I think one thing that we have seen is that both the main party leaders in Parliament at least have not adopted exactly the same position but have taken on Nigel Farage from their own perspectives and very strongly and very calmly. I think both Keir Starmer at PMQs, but also Kemi Badenoch in her videos and social media [00:27:00] output has been very clear, very strong, and linking it back to her own past record and past history on these issues. So Nigel Farage hasn’t had a clear run this time, I think it’s fair to say, and we’ll see what impact that has.

Mark D’Arcy: In fairness to Nigel Farage, you know, any individual MP - and he’s basically, for the purposes of Prime Minister’s Question Time an individual MP - he doesn’t get a comeback. Keir Starmer can say what he says and move on, and Nigel Farage doesn’t get a chance to get up and answer what’s been said. So he didn’t get a chance to respond to that, but all the same. This was qualitatively a different attack from Keir Starmer. Normally the attack is, here’s some quote he said about the NHS, which shows that he’s not safe with it, and he said something like that during the course of PMQs, but what’s normally a much more normal form of political rough and tumble was, on this occasion, much more precise and directed and very much aimed at Nigel Farage’s conduct during this incident. And it was very interesting to see the [00:28:00] Labour MPs barracking him demanding that he condemn the violence that took place in Southampton outside the police station, and no idea how it will land with voters, but it was for once a very significant moment.

Ruth Fox: Mark, we will find out what the good people of Makerfield decide in two weeks’ time, exactly two weeks time, in fact, as we are recording. If Andy Burnham is not elected, then it could be the Labour Party may be in some degree of chaos about what happens next. If he is elected, he’s back to Westminster. And then the question is, is he going to be coronated as the new leader? And if so, how does that happen? Or will there be a contest? And if there’s a contest, will the Prime Minister take part or not? And if there is a contest, will government grind to a halt? Will the sort of rules that normally apply to a general election period, purdah, or I think they call it now the period of pre-election sensitivity, apply. And if so, does that mean no big [00:29:00] decisions can be made? And civil servants will be relying on a document called the Cabinet Manual, which has not been updated for 15 years, but the Government’s announced this week that it will update it for the first time. So I think we should come back after the break and talk about it, Mark.

Mark D’Arcy: The inner meeting of the Cabinet Manual. Join us in a couple of minutes.

And we are back. And Ruth, the Cabinet Manual is to be updated. Not exactly a headline to dominate the front pages, but actually, in the world of Westminster and Whitehall, a pretty significant moment. The Cabinet Manual was conceived as a highway code for the Constitution, a kind of user’s guide to the rules, the conventions, the expectations of how government should be conducted, and that’s government with relation to law making, with relation to actually forming governments after a general election, to dealing with the sovereign, to working with the constraints of the rule of law and relationships of the civil servants and many other key issues that confront [00:30:00] ministers every single day. So Ruth, first of all, let’s do a quick potted history of the Cabinet Manual. When did this document come into being?

Ruth Fox: Gordon Brown, when he was Prime Minister, announced, I think it was February 2010, that he’d asked the then Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell, or GOD as he was known, to lead the work to, as Gordon put it, consolidate the existing unwritten piecemeal conventions that govern much of the way central government operates under our existing Constitution into a single written document. To be clear, this was not trying to produce a written constitution, though there were some fears at the time, but it was to set out the internal rules and procedures which the Government operates. And I think it’s important to stress this is the Government, the executive’s view of our unwritten constitution. So it’s not Parliament’s view, it’s not the judiciary’s view, it’s not the monarch’s view. They may all be consulted in various forms, but it is essentially the Cabinet Office, the [00:31:00] Government’s way of thinking about how the Constitution operates and the issues that they obviously have to deal with.

Mark D’Arcy: A kind of user’s guide to the British Constitution, if you like. And one of the things about it is that it is not a statute, it’s not been passed through Parliament or rubber-stamped by MPs and peers in any way at all. And it’s probably not something that most of the time you could take to the court and say, this minister didn’t obey the strictures of the Cabinet Manual and therefore this decision’s invalid, my lord.

Ruth Fox: No, no, exactly. Going back to the period when this was first drafted, in 2010, the Government actually published one chapter alone on elections and government formation before the general election, because there were obvious concerns that there was going to be a hung parliament, and they wanted the procedures and the history of this issue out there as a document for the purposes of greater public understanding both of politicians and journalists, but also the wider electorate. So they published that chapter and then it was only [00:32:00] late in 2010, I think the December of 2010, that the Coalition government then published the entirety of the manual for consultation. There was a consultation that took place and then in 2011 they published the final version. And that is the version that still exists today. When you think about what’s happened between 2011...

Mark D’Arcy: An awful lot of water under Westminster Bridge since then.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So an awful lot has changed and there’ve been calls for it to be updated numerous times. Now, in the interests of transparency, I was one of the people that was consulted back in 2009, 2010, on the chapter on Parliament in the Cabinet Manual. There were many others involved. Then again, in about 2018, 2019, I was approached by the Cabinet Office to ask if, again, if I’d be a reviewer of the updated version of the chapter on Parliament. But that chapter never appeared. It was never circulated to me. And I know other people were asked and some saw it, some didn’t.

Mark D’Arcy: Well, I suppose little events like [00:33:00] Brexit and the pandemic probably got in the way of that. And it all went into a dusty filing cabinet at the back of the Cabinet Office for some years. Only to emerge now.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So there was clearly some work going on behind the scenes at that time. But again, we are six, seven years on. And again, a lot has changed. So Dame Antonia Romeo, when she took over as Cabinet Secretary earlier this year, she, if you remember, published a document about her priorities and objectives as Cabinet Secretary. And one of them was to get an update on the Cabinet Manual. The Constitution Committee of the House of Lords did a sort of an update inquiry in 2021, actually chaired by my boss, Baroness Taylor of Bolton. Then they pushed for it to be updated. So there’ve been numerous points at which Parliament has said, you really need to update this. It is way out of date, it’s moribund.

Mark D’Arcy: And when we are talking about way out of date, the kind of things we are talking about here is this is a document that predates Brexit. So there’s now an entirely different relationship with the European Union. This is a [00:34:00] document in the middle of its gestation if you like, you’ve got the formation of the first peacetime coalition government we’ve had for donkeys years since then. There’ve also been interesting developments on things like war powers. If you remember the vote on whether or not Britain would join in the bombing of Syria at one point, and the Commons refused to support that. And so you’ve got a de facto war powers convention beginning to emerge out of that incident. Much increase in devolution both to the nations and also to English cities. So the whole raft of changes to the constitutional setup that are unaddressed. Amongst other things, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act has been and gone since this Cabinet Manual was published. So you’ve, had a whole load of very significant changes. And if you look at the Cabinet Manual, it still talks about the strictures of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act that aren’t there any more in its chapter on government formation and so on. So there’s a whole load of questions that do need to be addressed, just so civil servants know what they think the constitutional conventions are.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. When if you [00:35:00] think about - and Brexit alone - you’ve got the limits on the prerogative powers as a result of the two Supreme Court cases. The implications for devolution and intergovernmental relations, you’ve got things like the Windsor framework affecting the relationship between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. You’ve got, as you said, English devolution in the whole array of devolved questions that arise in relation to local government. Arguably, you even ought to be including updates that have happened more recently, for example, that we’ve talked about on recent podcasts, arising out of the abolition of the hereditaries and the fact that there’s now legislation that sets how many paid ministers in the House of Lords there must be, and things like that. And it’s important that the Cabinet Manual was intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive. There are things that are in it that are open to interpretation. It sets out precedents, it sets out some of the history of these issues. It provides, if you like, a root map to legislation that you ought to be looking at, guides, [00:36:00] codes that are relevant to the issues that it describes. So there’s an awful lot of updating and of cross-referencing. And the documents that it ought to be linking to will all have to be reviewed and looked at. So it’s a big task, but I think one of the documents they could usefully look at is the House of Commons Library briefing by David Torrance on the Constitution, because that is a magnificent document. David very kindly came to our Hansard Society meeting last year to talk to us about it, and I’m sure that would help. And they could possibly use our podcast episode crib notes.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah, absolutely, we, are always delighted to be a service in these things. But one thing to say about this is that there is no kind of statutory force behind this document, an incoming government could essentially just decide to toss the Cabinet Manual out the window.

Ruth Fox: Yes, arguably you can say de facto, that’s what’s happened because it’s so out of date that it’s irrelevant in parts, clearly not in whole, but in parts. And that was the critique of the House of Lords in 2021, that this is now [00:37:00] effectively moribund, different cabinet secretaries have taken a different level of interest in it. The recent Cabinet Secretary Chris Wormald basically referred to it as a sort of historical reference document, which was never the intention. He clearly had no interest in it. Now, fair enough. He had perhaps other problems to deal with. And it’s interesting what, if any, role should Parliament have in this because, as I said, it is the Government, the executive view of things, and is it about what the Government does, should it reflect how Government works, or should it reflect how Government ought to work? Because that’s also a question.

Mark D’Arcy: I sometimes think it’s a bit more of the latter than it would like to admit. But you do wonder, I mean there are real problems about trying to give some kind of parliamentary imprint to this document and say, this is MPs’ idea of how government should work, or MPs and Lords’ idea of how government should work. Because once you’ve done that, if an incoming government wants to do things differently, and it might, then [00:38:00] what? Do they have to have a formal vote to defenestrate the Cabinet Manual? I don’t know quite how it would work. Also, you could start interpreting it as a way for an outgoing Parliament to try and bind its successor by imposing a kind of cage of rules around any incoming premier.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. The written statement from the Prime Minister this week makes clear that they will consult both houses, in particular the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, PACAC. They will consult the Constitution Committee in the House of Lords. So they’ll see drafts, they may take evidence as they’ve done in the past, and then they’ll be able to feed in the responses to the Cabinet Office, whoever’s leading on this. They will send the drafts out to academics and people like myself for comments on particular chapters. And then they’ll have to compile the results. But yes, Parliament, I think the committees of Parliament last time were pretty clear that they were very wary of anything that would smack of this being seen as Parliament giving it sort of the [00:39:00] imprimatur of an officially accepted parliamentary view of how government works and very much, well this is your document and we’ll see it and we’ll comment, and if there are errors in it, factual errors, and let’s just say when I saw the first draft of the version back in 2009-10 there were quite a few, those have got to be corrected and dealt with. But the interpretation is the Government’s, and from Parliament’s perspective, politically, if a minister or Government or Prime Minister departs from it, well, that’s their choice. They’re entitled to do that and there may be a political price to pay.

Mark D’Arcy: But a lot of the strictures in it are really quite weak. A minister might like to consider having pre-legislative scrutiny of some future bill if they think it’s appropriate - that’s not exactly a one of the Ten Commandments. It doesn’t make anybody do anything. It simply suggests that it might be good practice to have pre-legislative scrutiny of legislation and then post-legislative scrutiny to see how it’s panning out [00:40:00] a bit later on. And ok, fair enough, that probably is good practice. What you don’t want is for it to be an absolute requirement because the parliamentary timetable may not allow for that and it may cause massive difficulty for ministers if they’re required to crash through some sort of five minute pre-legislative scrutiny exercise before they can bring in a bill.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. You also don’t want the Government in effect being able to say too much or interpret what Parliament’s own processes and procedures and conventions are. Because you know that’s a matter for Parliament. And if you were enabling the Government, the Cabinet Office, to determine that, that would not be advantageous, I would suggest.

Mark D’Arcy: Well, let, me put this to you then, Ruth. We talked about the updating, and obviously it doesn’t necessarily cover some recent developments in the constitutional sphere that it might do, but are there any great ills out there that an update of the Cabinet Manual could tackle that are untackled at the moment? Are there dragons to slay?

Ruth Fox: Well, I [00:41:00] think clearly looking ahead, and I suspect this is in Dame Antonia Romeo’s mind, there must be a concern that the outcome of the next general election will be uncertain that - with the breakdown of the traditional two party system and ending up in a sort of five, six, seven party system - coalition formation, or perhaps more likely minority government, some kind of pact, some kind of deal being done, might take time, might take more time than before. So I think that they will want to have clarity on post-election government formation so that as far as it’s possible to say, everyone knows what the broad rules of the road are, and provide that guidance well in advance so that the MPs themselves, ministers, party leaders, their advisers, the media, and we the wider public, know broadly what to expect.

Mark D’Arcy: Because we’ve had two instances of this in relatively recent history. There [00:42:00] was the 2010 hung parliament, which generated quite a long period of uncertainty as both Labour and the Conservatives were in talks with the Liberal Democrats to see if they could get them into government with them and form some sort of viable governing combination. And there was this long period where Gordon Brown, as the Prime Minister of the party that had undeniably lost the election, remained as Prime Minister in Downing Street and was much criticised, the squatter in Downing Street, if you remember all that. But actually, in other European countries this would have been completely the norm to have several weeks of uncertainty while the government was put together in a situation where no one had an overall majority. We’ve just seen in Denmark, it’s been a period of weeks and weeks before the government has finally emerged, for example. So clarifying the rules of the road there in what may be a much messier situation. And if you remember back in 2017, Theresa May’s snap election went disastrously wrong and she actually lost her very narrow majority that she’d inherited from David Cameron. And there was a little while, while people were negotiating to try and make sure [00:43:00] that she could actually remain in government, and deals were done with the Democratic Unionists. And if you remember, the then Chief Whip, Gavin Williamson, was sent to fly over to Northern Ireland to have talks with them. So even in that much narrower situation, it took a little while to get everything nailed down. And certainly you can imagine something much much messier after the next general election where you’re trying to put together a governing combination which might involve two, three, four parties. And the shuttle diplomacy involved in that could be very entertaining indeed.

Ruth Fox: I think other areas where there’s a sort of a problem to explain, and whether or not you can set it out sufficiently clearly enough in a way that everybody agrees with or whether there’s a consensus, will be around, for example, the devolution issues. I mean, the whole sort of devolution implications post Brexit, the intergovernmental interparliamentary relations questions about whether or not Westminster legislates on behalf of the devolved nations, whether the devolved nations are legislating, the whole impact of the Internal Market Act and so on, [00:44:00] hugely complicated. So I look forward to seeing how they try to explain it in succinct terms.

Mark D’Arcy: Good luck with that, I think.

Ruth Fox: The whole question, Mark, about this review, it’s extraordinary really when you think about it that it’s taken 15, 16 years to get to this point of having a review given everything that’s taken place. And I went back and read the 2021 Lords committee inquiry reports, and I was very struck at, they’d had the current and former cabinet secretaries in for evidence sessions and there was a sort of, what’s the process for reviewing this? And they couldn’t really pin it down. It was sort of, well, this is a matter for the Prime Minister. Okay, but does the Cabinet Secretary sort of prompt the Prime Minister to do it? And on what grounds would the Cabinet Secretary prompt them?

Mark D’Arcy: And on what grounds would the Prime Minister say yes or no?

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I mean, it just felt at times, you’re going round in circles and I thought, is it how the British Government, the British state operates these days? Is it really beyond the wit and wisdom of somebody to just say, this ought to be [00:45:00] revised every five years? Say at the start of a Parliament. So you start at the end of the previous parliament, you’ve got an updated version for the new parliament, there’s a standard consultation process and just get on with it. You go round in circles.

Mark D’Arcy: If you look at the foreword that David Cameron wrote and the preface that Gus O’Donnell wrote to the Cabinet Manual, it does clearly envisage a kind of painting the Forth Bridge exercise in which the document is constantly renewed. But it comes back to the tumultuous political events that followed on. Because the British State has basically been in a state of constant crisis, at least since the Scottish independence referendum, through Brexit and the tumult that followed that, and then straight into COVID.

Ruth Fox: That’s one of the things we haven’t updated. We haven’t mentioned referendums. Yeah, we’ve had quite a few since.

Mark D’Arcy: Well, absolutely referendums. We’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention. But yeah, again, looking at the constitutional status of referendum verdicts might be quite an interesting exercise, but it would be a [00:46:00] brave civil servant who would take that on, I think. But leaving that aside, basically the constant crisis the British state has found itself in almost ever since the publication of this document is one reason why it’s just been gathering dust at the back of the Cabinet Office for quite a while.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I agree with that. I think that is undoubtedly the reason, in which case, I think that parts of the process this time should be setting out in the Cabinet Manual, and perhaps an appendix at the back, what is the plan for review, and just agree what the review process is. Because I didn’t mention this earlier when we were talking about the genesis of this manual back in 2009-10, but it’s drawn its inspiration actually from New Zealand where they’ve had a Cabinet Manual since 1979 and they’re on something like, they’ve reviewed it I think six times since 1979. So they have a process and they just go through that process. It’s just sort of part of the normal warp and weft of government now, and we ought to have the same. So put the renewal terms, the review terms into the manual so that that’s just agreed and [00:47:00] go forward on that basis.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah. And once something is part of the established routine, the civil servants will doggedly get on with doing it, because that’s what they do.

Ruth Fox: Well Mark, I think we’ve updated the Cabinet Manual. We’ll wait and see what more happens with that. They’ll publish a draft in due course and perhaps we can get somebody in from the Cabinet Office to talk to us about it.

Mark D’Arcy: What a lovely idea.

Ruth Fox: Should we take a quick break and come back and talk about cost savings in Parliament and what that might mean for its activities?

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah. It’s a familiar subject for plenty of people working in plenty of organisations, but now it’s hitting Parliament.

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

Mark D’Arcy: We are back. And Ruth, I read with some concern a little while ago that my old colleagues in the BBC were facing massive cost cutting exercises and 10% of the funding of BBC News was going to have to be cut, and that would probably mean 10% of the posts and so on and so forth. But the same thing is now happening in Parliament. There is a massive cost-saving exercise being [00:48:00] undertaken into the machinery of Parliament. And the consequences of that could be rather important.

Ruth Fox: It could be, yeah. We have mentioned on the podcast before that Parliament is having to make 10% of savings. So the official title for this is the Savings and Improvement programme. S&I. Yes. So I think we know what “Savings” mean. There’s question marks about what “Improvement” amounts to, so we will see. But yes, I mean in the corporate sort of annual reports that the House of Commons produces each year, the latest one says that this is an initiative that will rationalise many strands of our work and ensure we deliver value for money for the taxpayer, while periods of change can be unsettling we anticipate that by the end of the three year programme the House administration will be more agile and efficient.

Mark D’Arcy: Oh my god. Sorry. This is bringing back post-traumatic memories for me of BBC life because this kind of thing used to happen every few years in the Beeb, and you’d be told about the wonderful efficient new world you’d emerge [00:49:00] blinking into at the end of the process. And it’s always awful for the people who are in the middle of it.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And I think that’s probably true at the moment for staff in the House of Commons particularly, and I think also the House of Lords, I’m hearing a lot of this is obviously a bit closed off because they’re not in public documents available in the parliamentary website. The House of Commons and the House of Lords Commissions will be involved in this. You’ve got the House Administration Committee in the Commons, you’ve got the Services Committee in the Lords, but this kind of information is not put out because it concerns people’s jobs, it concerns internal reorganisation and so on. But I’m hearing that one of the approaches is obviously the inevitable salami slicing that you get in headcount across teams. So salami slicing of staff in particular areas. One that would concern me in particular will be select committees. I’m hearing that there’s going to be a move to email-only enquiries to Parliament, so that you wouldn’t, as a member of the public, you wouldn’t be able to ring up Parliament on the phone and put your [00:50:00] question to them, you’d have to do it all by email. And I think this sort of presages a bigger question, is the saving going to be made and is the improvement going to be brought about by basically a transition to digital?

Mark D’Arcy: One of the problems with digital is that there’s a large segment of the population who don’t handle it very well. So is Parliament going to be, by going digital, closing off accessibility perhaps to older voters who might want to consult it, who are just not comfortable with going online and submitting forms and doing things that way? Does that somehow make their local MP kind of the gatekeeper of access to Parliament if they have to go to the MP instead? Is that MP going to be more or less sympathetic to whatever issue it is that perhaps an older person who’s not very digital-wise wants to make to Parliament?

Ruth Fox: That’s one of the areas where we are hearing that what’s known as the outreach programme, which is part of the participation team in the House of Commons, which comes, if you look at the House of Commons organogram, you’ve got business chamber and [00:51:00] participation team directorate. And within that you’ve got this outreach team, which are a group I think of about 14 staff who do not work at Westminster. They operate in the regions and nations in the uk. So you have one in Scotland, one in Wales, one in Northern Ireland, and then one in each of the regions of England. They do what they say on the tin, outreach, physically in person with school groups, schools, stakeholders, civil society organisations in the community. So they’ll go out and run workshops, they’ll engage with stakeholders, and it’s supposed to be a two-way thing. They provide information and advice and how to engage with Parliament, those workshops, to people in the community. But they’re also picking up a lot of information about those groups and how they might be interested in, for example, feeding in to a select committee inquiry or whatever it may be.

They’ve been going I think about 20 years and certainly we used to do as an organisation, at the Society, an awful lot more work on public engagement than we do now. But [00:52:00] then having an in the community, outside Westminster, outreach team was one of the things that we advocated for. I would argue that there ought to be more of them, that 14 is actually far too few to have the kind of impact you would want, that one officer to cover an entire region, dozens and dozens of constituencies, there’s only so far you can go in in-depth engagement with community groups and so on, to be that trusted figure in the community that is the liaison with Parliament, that actually more would be better.

There’s a cost of that clearly. But we are hearing that the plan is to abolish them altogether and move to an entirely digital programme of outreach that would primarily be focussed on schools. So there’s two implications for that. A move entirely to digital, which raises all the questions you pose about what do you do about older people? What do you do about hard to reach groups? What do you do about those who just don’t have the digital facilities? Or if they do have them, they don’t want to use them in that way? Is [00:53:00] that necessarily the best, trusted route? A lot of the research and evidence around the world suggests that’s not the best way to do engagement. And secondly, a shift away from the idea of engaging with post-18 citizens, adults in community groups, doing far less of that and really focussing on school-age education. Now, those may be perfectly legitimate decisions to take strategically when you’re having to prioritise in circumstances of limited budgets. But I think the question is how has that been determined? What’s the evidence base that’s been used, and to what extent has that been internally discussed and decided upon? Those are big questions.

Mark D’Arcy: Or is it just we’ve got to save money, going digital is cheaper, that’s it?

Ruth Fox: Yes. and I think that’s the big question that will need to be answered. Now I understand there’s a consultation process. Obviously we’ve no knowledge of how that’s going to operate or the timings.

Mark D’Arcy: And of course this [00:54:00] is a three-year cuts programme and it goes much wider than just Parliament’s engagement efforts as well. And there has been concern, I think, about a rising headcount in certain parts of Parliament as well, you know, because of events, dear boy, events, over the last few years, the committees have taken on more staff, there’s been more staff taken on here, more staff taken on there. And I suppose maybe a pruning exercise now looks like a logical thing for the Administration Committee to do. But where will that hit?

Ruth Fox: Well, that’s the question. The House of Commons has published a workforce profile of the Commons and Joint departments over a 10 year period, looking at the numbers, full-time equivalents, from 2015 to 2025. It’s buried quite deep in the website. You’ve got to go quite a way to find it. But that’s interesting because actually select committees and the libraries, the research and information services with which we engage probably more than any other areas of Parliament, they’ve had increases in headcount, but they’re not huge. I mean 5%, 6% for each. [00:55:00] The big increases, which you’d say are kind of understandable, what you’d expect, the select committee teams have increased significantly 57%, 58% increase there. Parliament’s digital service, 114% increase over the 10 year period, again kind of what you’d expect given the direction of travel. Parliamentary security, this is a ridiculous figure, 9456% increase, clearly you’ve got to take that with a long spoon. I don’t quite know how they’ve restructured things. We know security is massively increased as an issue in Parliament, but they’ve also reorganised the way that they do it and that it may relate to contracts that have been outsourced that are now insourced and so on, but that is a very very special case, I don’t think you should take much regard of that. But the other interesting one, the office of the executive and Speaker’s office has increased by 407%. Now, again, how they count those things and what’s included may differ over the course of the 10 years, but still that’s a pretty big increase in numbers of staffing and around the Speaker’s office [00:56:00] of 73.

Mark D’Arcy: Well taking that one first of all, I think that since the demise of Speaker Michael Martin, who basically was forced out of office in an avalanche of bad publicity over his handling of the expenses scandal, I think Speakers have wanted to have more staff dealing with their press issues, more advisers than perhaps Speakers have traditionally needed in the past. I remember when John Bercow became Speaker, he took on a guy called Tim Hames, who was a Times columnist and constitutional expert of sorts, to advise him in a way that I think previous Speakers hadn’t felt necessary. He eventually had a press officer and there’ve been press officers serving subsequent Speakers as well in a way that didn’t happen beforehand. They perhaps had some part-time adviser, but I don’t think that there was the full-time press office in the same way. But there is more press interest in the operations and activities of the Speaker now, so definitely maybe it’s a justifiable move.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, quite. The other area of course that’s grown is Independent Complaints and Grievance and the [00:57:00] office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. Again, not huge numbers, but clear growth in headcount, 50% plus in terms of the Parliamentary Commissioner’s office, the reality is we are paying for and having to provide more staff to deal with the fact that MPs’ behaviour is more under the microscope than ever, and they continue to seem to have problems with it, and the fact we have an Independent Complaints and Grievance office because past behaviour of MPs and staff has not been up to scratch. So the cost to bad behaviour, if you like. The other one, you talk about advisers, the other one that I do find amusing is that of course we’ve had an increase in the number of parliamentary lawyers, post Brexit and so on, they’ve needed an awful lot more legal support to deal with the issues that they’ve been scrutinising. So unsurprisingly the Office of Speaker’s Counsel headcount has gone up, and linked to the outputs of select committees and so on.

Mark D’Arcy: But if you are starting to prune all that, you wonder where the economies can be made relatively painlessly. Is [00:58:00] it, for an example, a good idea to cut the number of press officers serving select committees when select committees are now increasingly an important part of parliamentary activity and almost the front line of parliamentary engagement with the public a lot of the time and a really big select committee inquiry into a really big issue that’s got a lot of public concern around it is something that needs proper publicity and proper engagement with the media to make sure people can see what’s happening.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, interestingly, one thing that, what the select committees are doing now is a weekly newsletter, which they put out on a Monday lunchtime. It’s got a lot of the information that we have in our Parliament Matters bulletin, which we put out on a Sunday morning at 9am.

Mark D’Arcy: You read it there first folks.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So they’ve got that. And one of the things that’s been happening, of course, I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it, Mark, is that the select committee social media seems to be all being compressed into one account. So individual committees are losing their Twitter and Bluesky handles, and you’ve basically got one select committee account. And [00:59:00] I have to say, as a user who kind of engages and sometimes tries to amplify the social media of things like the Procedure Committee or the Public Administration Committee, or some of the Lord’s Constitution Committee, that’s not terribly helpful.

Mark D’Arcy: It is a very unwieldy blunt instrument for publicising the activities of Parliament. And sometimes people are interested in a specific committee and don’t necessarily want to know about the activities of all committees. So if you’re particularly interested in parliamentary procedure, you’re not necessarily going to want to know what the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee is doing. Important though it may doubtless be. So losing that focus seems to be a pity. And presumably that’s because it takes time of officials to manage individual social media accounts. And if there are fewer officials, then there’s going to be less time available for that purpose. But all the same, it seems to me a strange place to make a saving. Maybe someone from within the bowels of Parliament will send us an email to explain what’s going on and give us their rationalisations. I look forward to that.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. One of the things I have been rooting around in the bowels of the website, [01:00:00] so to speak, going through all the various reports and the minutes and the agendas of the various sort of administrative committees of the House. In the end, when you’re doing a savings programme like this, it comes down to trade offs. It comes down to priorities. Difficult decisions will have to be made. And if you’ve got to make 10% savings, then undoubtedly some people’s jobs are going to be affected. I don’t see how that’s avoidable. But in the context of priorities, one of the things I found quite interesting was that there was a proposal - I put it no further than that at this stage, it’s a proposal, it hasn’t been decided as far as I can tell - a proposal that was discussed by the House of Lords Services Committee a few weeks ago to spend £1.8million on what’s called the Woolsack Accessibility Project and Associated Works. And ooh, I thought, there’s a problem with the Woolsack in the House of Lords.

Mark D’Arcy: That’s a lot of money too.

Ruth Fox: That’s a lot of money for that very big woolsack in the middle of the Lord’s Chamber. But no, it’s not the Woolsack in the House of Lords Chamber. It’s [01:01:00] basically the Woolsack bar, which probably back in your day, you knew better as the Sports and Social.

Mark D’Arcy: Oh yes, the Sports and Social is a little bar which can be reached from a set of stairs on Central Lobby, which takes you down into a little connected suite of cramped basement rooms with a billiard table and a bar in it - in my day had a billiard table anyway, and lots of television monitors all over the place. It is typically on a weekday night very very busy and very very sweaty, and actually potentially really rather unpleasant.

Ruth Fox: There’s a reason I’ve never been near it.

Mark D’Arcy: I don’t suppose the spending’s on aircon, but you never know.

Ruth Fox: Well, interestingly, the proposal is for half a million, just under half a million, £449,000 for ventilation works.

Mark D’Arcy: Ah, well that may be part of it.

Ruth Fox: So that explains it. We are joking, but there’s sort of related issue here. If you’ve got all this money to spend and you’ve got all these other competing demands, are you going to spend £1.8million on essentially improving accessibility to a [01:02:00] bar, retrofitting the bar and the toilets to meet accessibility standards, half a million pounds nearly for ventilation works? Or are you going to spend it on public engagement and outreach? Or are you going to spend it on select committee work? Those are incredibly difficult choices and trade-offs, but there should at least be some discussion and debate about it. And at the moment, I’m not seeing much evidence of that because of course, it’s all behind private walls and private discussions.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah. So in committees on the kind of administrative side of Parliament that are very seldom seen by outsiders, you might say.

Ruth Fox: And inevitably decisions will be made, there may be very good reasons for those decisions, but decisions will be made, some people will be upset. MPs and Lords will find out after the fact, and then all hell will break loose, because they won’t like the decisions that have been made. And they’ll be questioning who made this decision on what basis, what’s governance, the governance of this organisation is chaos.

Mark D’Arcy: Remember the furore about the security fence that was put up outside the House of Lords? And never hear the last of that one.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and the door [01:03:00] access to the House of Lords. Yes, so I can see that coming. Well Mark, I think that’s probably all we’ve got time for this week. We’ve run round quite a few issues. Listeners, we will see you next week, but can I just ask you, if you’re enjoying the podcast, my usual appeal to rate, review the podcast, particularly if you’re using Apple, to forward it on to your family and friends, and help us grow the audience, it really helps us. See you next week. Bye Mark.

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