The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices.

We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take longer to work through. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish blog posts on long running issues where deeper changes would improve how Parliament works.

Previously we’ve written about how it should be easier for MPs to vote, how giving MPs more power over the timetable helps them keep promises to voters, stand-in (or locum) MPs, citizens assemblies’ to set standards, and fixing the public ombudsman.

This week our pitch is Parliament should learn more from the devolved Parliaments on simplifying terms and procedure – with the goal of the how Parliament works being more easily understood by both the public and MPs.

Strangers and personalities

Parliament has a jargon problem, and that makes it hard for the public and MPs themselves to understand how Parliament works.

All workplaces make their own words and culture, but democratic institutions should also aim to be welcoming and accessible to the public as a whole. In Hannah White’s book Held in Contempt, she points out that it was only in 2004 that Parliament adopted the term ‘members of the public’ (e.g. ‘us’, the people they represent) to replace the previous ‘strangers’.

The guide to Parliamentary procedure (“Erskine May”) was finally opened up to free and public access in 2019, but its actual content remains written in archaic English and some sections are misleading without an understanding of the period in which it was written. For example, the rule on MPs not using each other’s names is explained as avoiding “personality”, which is an old term for “personal insult” rather than a belief that MPs should talk robotically.

The problem isn’t just a historical legacy. In 2012, MPs renamed Parliament’s famous clock tower the ‘Elizabeth Tower’. This has led to changes in how the building and its history are described on the Parliament website, reflecting the new 150 year history of ‘Elizabeth Tower and Big Ben’. The exception is the part of Parliament with the keenest eye on clear communication with the public: the gift shop. This beacon of clarity continues to describe the tower, primarily and correctly, as Big Ben.

From this, we suggest a ‘Big Ben’ rule: the publicly accessible and understood term should be the official term. Parliamentary trivia is for the tour guides, and no one should need to know it to understand how Parliament works.

The UK’s newer Parliaments use different ways of working. MSPs in Scotland and MSs in Wales address each other by name, talk about stages of legislation (rather than ‘readings’), and instead of accumulated jargon (Hansard, Erskine May), use terms like ‘The Record’ and ‘Parliamentary rules and guidance’.

This is not just about being legible to the outside world, but about clearer working within Parliament. MPs having a lack of clarity over complicated procedures makes it harder for them to do their job. Amendments to legislation are often presented as impenetrable lists of text being deleted and modified in other legislation, rather than a clear “track changes” that makes it clear to MPs what the effect of the change is (the US House of Representatives has made progress on an approach to this). Making how Parliament works clearer makes it a more effective institution.

What can mySociety and TheyWorkForYou do?

While the best approach is to fix problems at the source, TheyWorkForYou has some capacity to adopt this approach in the language it uses itself. For instance, because this is a change already provided by the Hansard data, the convention of not referring to MPs by name is already broken in TheyWorkForYou. We could introduce more annotations that undo ways MPs are required to make themselves unclear.

Additionally, we can provide extra analysis and search over documents like the Parliamentary rules and guidance to make it a more understandable guide to the public and MPs.

If you’d like to support us in trying to fix problems from the outside, we can always do more with more funding – one-off or standing donations are appreciated.

Image: Huy Phan on Unsplash.