 Fy fyddwch i ddim yn ymdw i, rydyn ni'n gweld i'r Robert fel gael i chi, Fel'ch ddorfodau! I willy fyddwch i gael, ac yn gweithio ei wneud i'ch gwybod hynny. resistantu doedd yn y ddweud i chi deithas iawn am gystafondol angenedol fel gyfrifol yng Nghymru, cysylltyd i ni ddechrau'r byw ymddangos cyfyrdd yng Nghymru, hynny oedd i'n gwneud i'n gweithio eu byddwch chi. ma'r bod yn ysgolio at cooperation install being introduced great length by the Chair of the Meeting who just went on and on and on, and after about 20 minutes and several final clinical is he said I, it is indeed, I now have the singular pleasure, as I may think it, to ask Mr George Bernard Shaw, to give us his address and Shaw is suppose to have stood up and said, ac mae'n gweithio'r ddaeth yma. Mae'r iawn i'r ffordd yma efo'r bydd. Felly, mae'n cael ei fod yn cael ei ddechrau o'ch ddechrau efo'r ddechrau. Mae'r ddechrau efo'r ddiddorol, oedd y rhai ddiacredig y gallu gwirioneddau yn meddwl o'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell yma, efallai mae'n cael ei ddwechwyr. Mae'n cael ei ddwechwyr o'r wathiau, is an improvement on a talking head stuck behind a lectern, so be warned. It is a great pleasure to be taking part in this open lecture series. It's a marvellous part of our Outreach Services programme, and I'm delighted that it gives additional opportunities to engage with Parliament, and you'll find from what I say later on that I'm absolutely passionate about getting people to engage with Parliament and to understand not only what happens here, but also the value of what happens here. Can I start with a word or two about my own perspective? This year I've been in the House of Commons for 40 years, and I well remember getting the letter from Sir Thomas George Barnett Cox telling me that I had been appointed a clerk in July 1972, and the letter and Barnett Cox always used to speak in this rather sort of doleful way, and he was actually appointed in 1930, and he'd been appointed as a junior clerk by the clerk of the House who himself had been appointed under Gladstone's last administration. So you'll see there is a certain amount of historical continuity in this place at least. And Barnett's letter said, I think it would be as well if you were to start bright and early on the morning of the 3rd of July. Come to the central lobby at 11.15 am, and I thought, great, this is just the job for me, but I very rapidly realised that actually working here involves some very long days and some very unpredictable tasks and challenges. Barnett incidentally had two private secretaries, one was called Miss Fox and the other one was called Miss Pitt. I think he quite deliberately selected them for that purpose. Now I'm the 49th clerk of the House of Commons since 1363. The first clerk was another Robert, Robert de Melton, and originally we were called clerks because we were clerks in holy orders, clerks were priests because priests could read and write, and the generality of members in the medieval times could not, and if the height of your social ambition was getting biffed off your horse with a lance, then really you didn't need to spend too much time learning to read and write. And I have two main parts of my job. One is as clerk of the House, and this is a job that I think almost all of my predecessors would recognise quite readily, and it includes being the principal constitutional adviser to the House and adviser to the House on all its procedure, business, parliamentary privilege, and so on. And it is for that reason that my job for, as it were, pay and rations purposes is linked not with a Whitehall permanent secretary, but with a law justice of appeal. And the other half of my job is as chief executive of the House of Commons service, and the House of Commons service is about 2,000 people, a head count, about 1,750 full-time equivalents, and it is, that also involves my being responsible for the budget for the House of Commons, which in the next financial year will be £220 million. Now, a lot of that, of course, is attributable to running a modern parliament, and sometimes it doesn't look modern, but it is, as I hope to demonstrate to you, in a grade 1 listed building, mostly in a grade 1 listed building, in the middle of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and of course the state of the palace is something that is now getting a certain amount of public coverage. And it's also something where previous generations of stewards of the building have, I think, rather fallen down on their responsibilities. So we can certainly explore that a bit further in questions if you would like to. That £220 million next year, we are in the middle of a very challenging savings programme. I've got to save 17% of the House of Commons' budget over a four-year period. And it's an intellectual and managerial challenge doing that, while at the same time not prejudicing the support of the core functions that members carry out. And those 2,000 people in the House Service, I should emphasise, we are not civil servants. We're servants of the legislature and not of the executive. And the House Service, and I'm incredibly proud of the House Service, and I'll say it spans the most fantastic range of expertise and skill. As part of our organisation, I have people who are experts in re-guilding Pugin woodwork. I have award-winning international award-winning chefs in the catering and retail service. I have people who are fantastic researchers doing things like unpacking the unemployment statistics to work out what they really mean. And I've got expert scrutineers supporting the operations of select committees. So there's a huge variety of what we do and a huge variety of support services required to keep Parliament, and particularly in this case, the House of Commons going. And it is a superb experience, actually, working with a lot of really talented people who are passionate about the institution. And I think this is a very good moment for me to say how very keen I am that the House Service should become more diverse and more inclusive. Now, this is not just in terms of gender, disability, ethnicity, and the other protected characteristics. It goes much wider because I want us as a House Service to be attractive and accessible to people perhaps who've never thought of working in Parliament. So if you have a thought about working in Parliament, follow it up, do. I really do encourage you to do that. Now, the House Service, and I've already said that we are not civil servants, we're also rigorously impartial. And a lot of people in the public service, of course, would say, well, we're impartial as well. But for us, serving both sides or all sides of the House of Commons in what may be very, very contentious circumstances, that impartiality is absolutely part of our daily cred. Now, of course, if you are just to take that example, if you are gilding Pugin Woodwork, re-gilding Pugin Woodwork, or if you are preparing one of the one and a half million meals that we serve every financial year to the almost the population of a small town who find themselves here, members, staff, staff of the House, and all of those whose business brings them to Westminster, if you're doing those things, then being politically impartial is not a major part of your daily concern. But certainly, if you're unpacking the unemployment statistics or you are criticising the way in which, let's say, a particular government department has used statistics in answering queries in our research division of the library, or if you are serving a select committee dealing, members of all parties dealing with a very contentious issue, or if, and this is an example I'll sort of work through for you, you're in the table office of the House where members go to get instant first line, as it were, of procedural advice, then that rigorous impartiality is really important. And I'll give you an example. Members may come into the table office and say, right, we want to do this, we want to, let's say, pull an ambush on the government tomorrow night, and you sit down with them and you think through what the plan of campaign is, and you make some technical suggestions, and perhaps you do this rather than that, and that might be more effective, and off they go, chalkling at this marvellous plan that you've helped them cook up. And then five minutes later, let's say a government whip comes in, and she or he says, we've just had this ghastly thought. What would happen if? And then you suddenly find yourself sitting down with the other side actually trying to sabotage the plan that you were cooking up a few minutes before. And if you wonder why, in these circumstances, we're not all raving schizophrenics, the answer is that we are in some ways, I think, a little bit like barristers. We're doing the best for our clients, although in those circumstances we have rather a rapid turnover of clients. Now coming back to my roles, I'm corporate officer of the house, and that means that the house's property and leases and so on are all held in my name. I share ownership of our part of the estate with Her Majesty the Queen, and it's very agreeable to be, at least in theory, a part owner of such an desirable block of real estate in SW1. But I can tell you that the downside is that as corporate officer if things go wrong and people fall downstairs and get injured, I'm the guy who gets sued. So please can I entreat you? As you leave this room to take extreme care, because I don't want my weekend spoiled by the possibility that you may be blaming us for having fallen down the stairs. As accounting officer, and there's an accounting officer in every government department, the idea is that you have an individual who is personally accountable for the propriety and regularity of the spending of public money. I'm the accounting officer for that House of Commons estimate of 220 odd million. I'm also, and this is something that, and thank you Naomi for making the point about fire alarms, I'm also in statute the responsible person for fire safety and that's something that I take very seriously because as you will know, we have, I won't say recent history, but Caroline Shenton's excellent book The Day Parliament Burned Down has reminded us rather recently about the fire in 1834, which destroyed most of the old group, not the palace, but the huddle of buildings around Westminster Hall and the chambers of the two houses. So let me move on now to some of the more visible functions that we undertake, and here am I wearing more or less what I wear at the table of the house every day. I wear a wig and silk gown as well. And that is a hangover from a very ancient function of the clerks, which was to record what the house actually decided. We don't record what people say, that's done by Hansard up in the gallery above us and a remarkable operation that is, but it is the legal record of the decisions that the house takes. And also I read out, or one of my colleagues at the table reads out things that are required to be read out in the house and at the start of the business, or most days, the speaker or whoever's in the chair will say the clerk will now proceed to read the orders of the day. Now there was a member, a Labour member a few years ago who said that you knew you'd been in the house too long when you realised that the words the clerk will now proceed to read the orders of the day could be sung to the words of John Brown's body for the chorus, point of order Mr Speaker. So that is sometimes these formulations we take them rather for granted. But also when you look at us and when you look on the television you see the table and at question time, the three of us with wigs on sitting in front of the speaker, you may wonder what we're doing. And sometimes people say to me, well you know you're just trying to work out who's going to win the 230 at Sandown or something like that. But actually it can be very, very busy indeed because you're not only advising the chair and unforeseen things, points of order may come up, you've got half an ear to whether there's perhaps a member is getting into an area which is subjudice, something to be decided by the courts and we have a, as it were, a non-aggression pact with the courts so that we don't deal with things which are being decided by a court and in the same way a court cannot take account of what is said in proceedings in Parliament. But also advising the whips on both sides about the handling of the business so that any member can come to us at the table and ask a question and many of them do. Not all about Parliament. I mean I frequently asked about the source of a quotation or we had something the other day was what was the land area of Mexico. Now that's not something that I think we all have at our disposal instantly but I do have the advantage of having an iPad at the table so I was actually able to look it up quite quickly. And very often I feel that our job is, it sounds an odd thing to say but it's a bit like being an airline pilot and when you're sitting at the table and you've got some not very contentious business like manufacturing industry in the West Midlands I mean there is some contention about that perhaps but the house can be quite calm and that's a bit like being at 35,000 feet with the automatic pilot on and a cup of coffee in your hand. But if the house let's say is doing Lord's Amendments to a big bill and there are 700 Lord's Amendments and you've got motions to agree and motions to disagree and amendments in lieu and amendments to Lord's Amendments and amendments to words restored to the bill then you may be the only person in the room who really knows what's meant to happen next and that is rather like anyone who remembers the old Hong Kong airport where you came down in the rain between the tenement buildings and washing lines getting higher and higher as you sang lower and lower towards the airfield and you feel that you're really earning your money then and we do try of course to be a little bit more helpful than one of my learned predecessors Sir Dennis Lamarchant in Victorian times where the speaker of the day could see that there was disaster approaching and he leaned forward and he said, Sir Dennis, Sir Dennis what do I do? and the clerk of the house got up his wig on his head like that, gathered his books shrugged his gown around his shoulders and went and stood beside the chair and the speaker obviously thought, right this is it, you know I got the get out of jail card and Sir Dennis Lamarchant said I advise you sir to be extremely cautious and then disappeared behind the chair so as I say we try to be a lot more helpful than that and what I thought I'd do now is to explore some of the things that make the House of Commons the way it is and the first thing that I draw your attention to is just the building itself this fantastic gothic wedding cake fantasy on the banks of the Thames now of course when Barry designed it he designed a Victorian Parliament and it was all the things that you expected in mid Victorian times and so for example if a member wanted to look something up well he did exactly what he would do in his town house or his country house perhaps and it would be a he, it would always be a he and he'd go and do that research himself if he wanted to write a letter he might keep a copy and a letter book but basically he'd just write a letter in long hand in the library so we needed the debating chambers at each end and we needed the dining rooms and food and drink has always been important to parliamentary life but nevertheless not much more was required and now running a modern parliament with that and I gave you a bit of a clue to the huge range of what goes on here and I'll talk a bit more later on about the different types of activity we are doing all sorts of things to try and make the very best of the space we've got now when you're on the principal floor of the House of Commons and you're perhaps looking, you're going through the chambers or you're looking in the central lobby it all seems wonderfully spacious and calm but go down and go up you find it's absolutely a rabbit warren of rooms that we're trying to make the best of and trying to make the most of the space resources that we have now of course Paul Cullis House is where we are now is a fantastic addition to the parliamentary estate and particularly the committee rooms on this floor have made a huge difference to us and to the space and accessibility to select committee proceedings but it does underline something which is a very interesting piece of applied psychology in a way because if you can just imagine a select committee sitting in one of the committee rooms over in the palace and there they are with leather chairs and old oil paintings on the wall and linen fold panelling and all the rest then whatever is going on in the committee it seems somehow a bit sort of old fashioned and a bit funny daddy now you take exactly the same committee and the same members and the same witnesses and you put them in one of the committee rooms over here with the light coloured birch furniture and the high energy tapestries and hangings on the walls and the feel is totally different and it's quite an interesting sort of human emotion in a way because we do judge things so much by externals and one of the things I would advise you about I think is when you're looking at parliamentary proceedings don't get led astray by just the surroundings it's much more important to have a real idea and a real feel for what is going on I think another theme inevitably is going to be the old and the new I mean you can't work in a building or a group of buildings which in one form or another has been here for a thousand years without constantly feeling that history is at your elbow now I actually like our formal address and a certain amount of ceremony because I think it gives a dignified firm framework to the rough and tumble of politics that goes on in between and constantly the old lives with the new as Clark of the House if a bill goes from the House of Commons to the House of Lords I write on it in Norman French can you credit it but nevertheless that's what we've been doing for hundreds of years so we're not stopping doing it now because it's not really an important thing to need to be abolished I write Swabee au Seigneur let it be sent to the House of Lords and then I or one of my colleagues takes the bill actually physically walks down in a certain amount of dignified state from the House of Commons through the central lobby into the House of Lords where we meet one of our House of Lords counterparts we bow hand the bill over and then come back but at the same time the text of that bill is on the shared drive between the two public bill offices using some of the most advanced text handling software in the world so again the old lives with the new and there are some really I think they're quite charming survivals and again they don't matter that much they don't get in our way but when a member presents a ten minute rule bill for example she or he will bow at the bar bow halfway up the chamber and bow at the table and that middle bow is there because in the old chamber of the House of Commons there was a great chandelier halfway down the chamber where members bowed when they did exactly the same thing now that building was destroyed in 1834 but when we built a new chamber they just carried on doing it it was a sort of visual tradition as people very often do and the other thing is when people bow when members bow when they come into the House a lot of people think they're bowing to the speaker and the speaker's chair they're not that's another amazing survival because what they originally did was they bowed to the altar in St Stephen's Chapel where the House first sat in 1547 so that is again an extraordinary survival but I quite like that it makes the place they're very interesting survival they don't do anyone any harm and I rather like that and in a piece of shameless advertising may I refer you to a talk on this theme that I gave at the Houses of Parliament, TEDx and if you Google the talk you'll get it and you'll do wonders for my hit rate so may I encourage you to do that and I hope you'll find that amusing and entertaining I've often asked about the changes that I've seen in 40 years in this place and I think there are really two and they're closely related one is just the increase in member staff when I came here I think there were 20 or 25 members researchers in total we now have 1,760 I think is the latest not all here in Westminster but also in constituencies and that increase has been part of a shift I think really quite a tectonic shift from members having their principle or only focus at Westminster and the sort of demands that they now face from their constituents the sort of expectations that constituents have quite rightly of members of parliament and of course in order to deliver those services to their constituents members do need that sort of support that is provided by their staff and one of the things that I have been doing and I've got the members of my Board of Management to do and they're under firm instructions is to visit constituencies, see members see the other half of what members do because if we do that then I think we're in a much better position to help them do the other half of their job here at Westminster but that pull of the constituency is incredibly powerful and a member can quite easily be working unless with some pretty good time management a member could easily be doing 24-7 every week of the year people often say to me members of parliament have little experience of real life and I think my response to that would be well you should see constituency surgeries you should see the victims of domestic violence the people whose lives have been made unbearable by the neighbours from hell the homeless, the hopeless an MP is often the only way someone who doesn't know how to access justice or can't afford justice can actually get equity from society and I think that's one of the reasons why the overall approval rating of members of parliament as a group in the answer to society audit of political engagement each year is down in the low 20s which perhaps I should remark is roughly what it is for journalists but also if you ask the question about the approval rating for your MP regardless of party your MP in your constituency the approval rating shoots up into the 50s or 60s because people are aware of what their member of parliament does for them and the word of mouth about how Mrs Senso or Mr Such and Such helped somebody I know or have spoken up for us in some problem that's affected the community or the neighbourhood or the constituency more widely now I have to say the huge expectations that a constituency has of its MP are a relatively new concept and there is a story told I think it's probably set a good few years before I came here but nevertheless of two members sitting in the T-room, one very depressed and the other one tried to chair him up and the chair up her says what's the trouble old man why are you depressed and the first one says well I've got to go to the constituency tomorrow and the chair up her says well it's not a problem is it I mean you'll be back here on Thursday once soon no you don't understand I'll have to go there next year as well now that is now given the huge part of a member's life that the constituency and the welfare of constituents occupies that is now very very far in the past I think a little longer ago you could take rather more risks and this is a very favourite one of mine Anthony Henley who was member for Southampton in the early 18th century it was outraged that his constituents had written to him about a particular excise bill coming before Parliament and he wrote back to them gentlemen I received yours surprised by your insolence in troubling me you know what I very well know that I bought you and I know what perhaps you think I don't know that you are now selling yourself to somebody else and I know what you do not know that I am buying another borough may God's curse light upon you all may your houses be as open and common to all excise officers as your wives and daughters were to me when I stood for your scoundrel corporation have a nice day I don't think you get very far treating your constituency like that these days something that I think is really important for you to keep in mind is that a lot of people see Parliament and see the House of Commons as an organisation and yes it is, it has an organisational framework and in a sense the part of the of the institution that I am responsible for the organisation, the way we spend money the way we try to achieve value for money for the taxpayer and manage the services properly and professionally but Parliament and the House of Commons is absolutely no exception to this they are not organisations they are organisms and I think that distinction is a very important one and as any biologist will tell you those organisations are unpredictable they are reactive they are cussid and that is absolutely the way that the House is and it is nowhere more obvious I think than in the chamber of the House because the unpredictabilities of the chamber are huge now I see this very vividly every Wednesday I see it every day to a certain degree but every Wednesday with Prime Minister's questions I am about 12 feet I suppose from the protagonists at Prime Minister's questions on a Wednesday and I think that the chamber more generally I think it's more relevant and more topical than it has been for years now part of that I think is about coalition politics the huge change that we had in some of the assumptions and some of the dispositions between the 2005 Parliament and the 2010 Parliament I think the greater huge number of urgent questions being granted is a factor because people know that something that is in the media that morning will actually be aired on the floor of the House like it's not later on in the day and I think that is a great influence on relevance on PMQs I think I'd say everybody says that they're so noisy, it's all zoo noises but again look beyond that there you've got an occasion where the chief executive of the country is being questioned in public without very much notice of the questions he's going to be asked for half an hour every week that we sit and I think that is something which is pretty important and pretty valuable as well and one of the things too that contributes to this sort of organic business of the Chamber is how small it is because we've actually got seats only for two thirds of the members of the House it's always said that there are 427 seats I think in the Chamber well I don't really buy that because members are different sizes and it's got to be a sort of an average or a finger in the wind estimate but nevertheless that two thirds is important because if you have 100 members in the Chamber now that's a relatively small proportion of the House as a whole but 100 members make it feel vibrant and it's not like the European Parliament if you have one sixth of the membership sitting in the hemicycle in Brussels or in Strasbourg the place would seem like a morg so that is really quite important and when we rebuilt the Chamber and there was a real possibility that we might have had a hemicycle Chamber like a continental Parliament the select committee recommended against that and the House came down very heavily on the side of renewing what we had before Churchill said in the debate that what we wanted was a Chamber which was an instrument of free and easy conversational debate and members are so close to each other that that is what it is and it does contribute greatly I think to the vibrancy of what happens it also helps the wit and repartee I mean I should love to have been there when Lord Sandridge said to John Wilkes you will die either on the gallows or of the pox and Wilkes returned he said that rather depends on whether I embrace your lordship's principles or your lordship's mistress and I think a lot of the fun is very often actually not picked up by Hansard because it's so quick fire that there isn't a chance to turn the microphone on to the particular member who's interjected one thing I do remember very very well was Tony Banks the late great Tony Banks Labour member for Stratford in East London and he the house was dealing with a private bill not a private members bill but a private bill to build a light transit railway in a south coast constituency and the member who was moving the second reading of the bill very very large conservative member acres of pinstriped suiting and he there been a lot of fuss in the constituency about this bill and he was extremely cross about that and he said I personally have been targeted and quick as a flash Banks shouts out from the other side blimey that was oddly precision bombing and it's that sort of thing and you find it day after day actually which meant it's one of the things that makes the chamber very vibrant an entertaining place to be so where is Parliament now 2009 let me just face this absolutely straight head on 2009 was a dreadful year for Parliament and for those who like me spent a lot of our working lives trying to get Parliament better understood trying to get it more valued and the seeds of course of the expenses disaster was sown decades ago when the government of the day bottled giving members a pay rise and the thing was done by expenses rather than by pay but even while the daily hammer blows were falling in terms of media revelations and the rest the House of Commons was still doing things which are real value to society to the citizen to the taxpayer we have 40 select committees on a consensual basis criticising the government's policies calling ministers to account members were still doing their constituency work in the way that I've described and 2010 was a royal sea change we had 227 new members they knew what they were getting into they had a determination to do things differently and there is in this Parliament a completely different feel I think the attendance in the chamber the topicality and relevance that I mentioned a moment ago things that have changed like electing the chairs of select committees and the members of select committees the things that have changed recently in terms of improvements in the way that we scrutinise legislation select committees I think have found a new confidence and a new feel a new legitimacy because of that election and I think that this is something that we do really really well because people actually like to see members working across the political divide seeking consensus now consensus doesn't have to be anodyne so you can have some very tough consensual reports but the other thing that select committees do which I think is hugely important and something that is really important for you thinking about how to engage with Parliament is that they provide access to the political process because debates take place obviously they are debates between members of Parliament but select committees give the people outside Parliament who know about a subject who have got a particular point of view they give them access to the political process and there were more rebellions in the first two years of the 2010 Parliament than in the four previous parliaments put together now that partly reflects the strains of coalition politics perhaps but I see it as extremely healthy I don't think politics is ever likely to be consensual but we've come a little way from this let me give you a little quotation you are now exhaling upon the constitution of your country all that long hoarded venom and all those distempered humours that have for years accumulated in your petty heart and have tainted the current of your mortified life that's splendid stuff isn't it that's disraeli to Lord John Russell instantly now the House of Commons as I say is more active across a wider range of activities and functions than it ever has been before we sit about 150 days a year last year last financial year it was 143 an extraordinary amount of chamber time compared with most every other parliament in the world the last financial year the average daily sitting was just short of 8 hours in our parallel chamber in Westminster Hall that sat on 97 days and the average sitting was about 4 hours and the two together produced about 20,000 pages of Hansard which increasingly I may say as were the lot of our documents were making available electronically and successively reducing the amount of paper we use in an average year there are about 30 government bills about 100 private members bills in the last financial year our select committees had 1,270 meetings and our departmental select committees produced very nearly 200 reports our European scrutiny committee analysed 1,300 EU documents there were 50,000 written answers to parliamentary questions and our library researchers dealt with 30,000 research inquiries from members the parliamentary website had 67 million hits we welcomed 115,000 visitors to the chamber galleries and another nearly 200,000 people toward the building and at the same time this is something I'm really keen on we continue to reduce our carbon footprint and to recycle evermore waste one of the things that I've always tried to do and now do as energetically as I can as Clark of the House is to make the case for what I might call the virtuous triad slagging off parliaments is a national sport all around the world and I don't expect that it will ever stop in respect of our parliament and indeed there is a cobit writing in his dictionary of the English language in 1824 talks about numbers of multitude such as den of thieves court of kings bench house of commons there's always going to be that sort of default setting but it seems to me that if you can get people to understand the institution it is then a natural human reaction for them to value it if you understand something prepared and ready to value it and if you value something then you are more prepared you are readyer to take ownership of it and I would say that parliaments actually aren't for parliamentarians parliaments belong to the citizen and the taxpayer and if we can pull off that virtuous triad understand value then we will have done something really worthwhile thank you very much