Parliament for Researchers: how to work with select committees at UK Parliament

so welcome to all of you joining us this afternoon for parliament for researchers how to work with select committees my name is naomi i am part of the knowledge exchange unit here at the uk parliament the role of the knowledge exchange unit is to support and strengthen the exchange of information and expertise between parliament and the research community we do that in a number of different ways we run training as you know around how to work with parliament as a researcher we have plenty of online resources on those topics as well we promote opportunities for researchers to work with parliament whether through our twitter feed or through other networks that we have we run some academic fellowships and really importantly we are a point of contact for anyone from the research community who would like to work with parliament uh joining us today i'm really pleased to say that we've got david slater who is clerk of the liaison select committee in the house of commons who's going to be sharing his expertise and experience around how you as a researcher can work with select committees this is what we'll be going through with you this afternoon i'm just going to give you a very quick rehash of parliament government and then i'm going to pass you over to our expert david slater who's going to take you through what our select committees bid on how they work some tips on getting involved and also talk you through how to give good good evidence to select committees and will leave you with uh where to find more resources and where to get more support i hope that sounds what like what you signed up for just to start with then i just wanted to reiterate this parliament and government split to you before we get started onto select committees and that is because select committees are really one of the main ways that parliament scrutinizes the work of government and that's why i thought it was really important for everyone to have that distinction in their head at the start of this session so what is parliament we'll just remind ourselves parliament is the house of commons rmps the house of lords peers and the monarch as well the role of parliament is to hold government to account to make and pass laws to enable the government to raise and spend money and what is government it's of course not the same as parliament it's different it's in a different place it's in whitehall rather than in westminster and government is just some mps some members of the house of lords who've been chosen by the prime minister to be ministers to run government departments to run public services and they are accountable back to parliament so now i've refreshed your minds on what parliament and government are i'm really pleased to introduce you to david david as i said is clerk of the liaison committee in the house of commons at the moment and i'm going to hand over to him to take us through what select committees are and some information on how you as a researcher get involved david thank you so much for joining us today and it's over to you thanks very much naomi and hello everybody so what are select committees so select committees are cross party committees of back bench mps or peers so backbench means that they aren't from the government and they aren't uh in the they don't lead for the main opposition party either with they conduct inquiries and they produce reports on a range of subject matters so they might be the conduct of government it might be financial matters it might be a policy area it might be a matter of public controversy at the particular time and their purpose is to hold government to account to scrutinize government to see if government policies are working and to make recommendations on what government might do better the main way they operate is to invite written and oral evidence from witnesses and we'll talk more about what we mean by evidence in a little while and as researchers the main way that you will probably interact with select committees is by submitting evidence the other main way that researchers often interact with committees is as specialist advisors so committees have their own staff but sometimes they employ external experts as specialists in a particular field so house of commons select committees so the house of commons committee system is primarily made up of committees shadowing each government department so there is a treasury select committee an environment food and rural affairs select committee digital culture media and sports select committee and so on for every government department and their role is to scrutinize the expenditure so the money the policy and the way those departments are run there are also some cross-cutting committees such as the environmental audit committee that looks at environmental policy and sustainable development across the whole of government or the public accounts committee that looks at the value for money of government expenditure again across the whole of government the members of house of commons select committees are as i say back bench mps the chair of those committees since 2010 have been elected by the house of commons as a whole on a cross-party basis the members of those committees are elected internally by their political parties and the overall balance of the committees reflects the balance of the parties in the house so you would expect a government majority and a representation from the second and third opposition parties and committees are staffed by a small team of staff they're led by a clerk and they also have policy specialists and administrative staff in the house of lords the select committee system is much more cross-cutting so their major committees cut across different policy areas looking across departmental boundaries so the science and technology committee the economic affairs committee communications and digital committee european union committee and so forth the lords are also set up ad hoc committees that exist for a finite period of time so most committees last between from one election to another ad hoc committees look at a particular issue and then that's the end of their work so they have committees on for example coving 19 democracy and digital technologies and sometimes you'll get ad-hoc committees set up between both houses of parliament to look at draft legislation draft bills draft laws again as in the commons the members are backbench peers the chairs and the lords are not elected by the house as a whole but they have a very similar staffing structure to the commons so the key thing for you as researchers if you want to interact with with select committees how do they go about doing their work why might you want to get involved so why might you want to get involved well if a select committee is looking at a policy area that relates to your research you might want to influence the committee's findings you may have findings that will help them reach good policy recommendations so this is an outline of how most committees conduct their inquiries and i think it's important to say at the outset that the time scale that this process can take can vary very wildly this entire process can take place in a couple of weeks if it's a high profile issue of immediate public concern or it can take place across months or even some cases years if it's an issue which requires much deeper study over time but the broad process is the committee chooses its enquiries um and it has complete rain to choose whatever inquiry it wants within its remit and it announces a call for evidence and this is basically a series of questions to the outside world inviting views on issues that the committee feels are particularly important to their inquiry so for example an inquiry into online regulation of online companies might ask questions about how do we prevent harmful speech online it might ask questions about how do we increase access to online facilities for people who have poor access to broadband for example there's usually there's a deadline to respond to that in response to that call for evidence people will sit submit written evidence and we'll talk more about that in a bit then the committee will generally move on to take all the legends that's hearings and if you've come across select committees before that's probably what you think of you think of the prime minister appearing before the committee i work for the liaison committee or mike ashley appearing before the business business committee or the chancellor before the treasury committee that's probably the first thing you think of hearings with members asking questions in a q a format of what we call witnesses committees sometimes undertake visits at the moment obviously that's somewhat impractical but they may also undertake visits to see uh areas that are relevant to what they're looking at and sometimes they'll commission relevant research once they've taken all the evidence they want they'll talk about their conclusions they will often draft and agree and publish a report setting out recommendations to government or they may decide to continue the issue through correspondence or decide to take the work forward in another way if they've published a report the government has two months in which they are obliged to respond to that report and respond to the recommendations made in it that may not be the end of the process the committee might apply for a debate in whichever house of parliament they are in on their report they might decide to do follow-up correspondence they might decide to do follow-up reports but that overall is the broad outline of an inquiry and for you as researchers the key place is to get involved primarily the written evidence stage potentially leading to the oral evidence stage but so how might you know what committees are up to so all committees have a twitter account and they will announce the inquiries they're working on if they are looking for specialist advisors if they're calling for written evidence if they're holding evidence sessions they will announce those things through their twitter account they will also announce them through email alerts on the parliamentary website and later on in the session we'll be talking about how to find relevant committees on uh on the website i've mentioned submitting evidence i'll go back to that again in shortly after the first round of questions and i've mentioned applying to be a specialist advisor so specialist advisors are they're not full-time roles so they are flexible roles designed to be done around other commitments and for the most part specialist advisors tend to be academics or sometimes practitioners or sometimes retired civil servants in a field and another option is to offer to host a visit for a committee if you're working in an area where actually seeing the research being done up close is really valuable so what's in it for you and what's in it for them so what does academic research and researchers output provide committees well expertise is clearly the first uh the first aspect you know we know researchers have a depth of knowledge into the issues that committees are looking at that you know is difficult to find elsewhere outside academic institutions the second is objectivity so one of the really valuable things for good academic evidence is taking a step back from the various interest groups that might be involved in an inquiry and saying what is the actual factual evidence here on this particular subject so committees you know as you can imagine many people have interests in the output of select committee inquiries and that's perfectly sensible but good academic evidence is focused on that objective what is the evidence and where does that lead us which leads us on to the final point recommendations committee inquiries aren't just about looking at the evidence they're about making recommendations to government about making things better and so committees look in their evidence for what are the priorities for change so what's in it for you as researchers well impact with both the capital and lower case i this is an opportunity to bring your research into the sphere of public policy and potentially make a difference it's an opportunity to get your research published in a different way than through the normal academic publishing routes there's potential the potential to increase the profile of your institution and your own work academics i've worked never submitted evidence to inquiries i've worked on the past have lead slots on the today programme on the day's reports have been published for example and finally parliamentary privilege so committee inquiries may be on very contentious matters and to ensure that members and committees can carry out their work without interference public evidence that is published by committees attract protection under parliamentary privilege um from legal intimidation or legal consequences yeah and that brings me to the end of my first section so uh sarah if you've got any questions great to be with you all today um fantastic presentation really insightful for us thank you david i've got a few questions that have come in already and the first one which um we'd like to put to you whether reports or recommendations have to be agreed unanimously and could you talk a bit about the decision-making process around that yeah very happy too thank you sarah so the select committees wherever possible work by consensus their impact and their reputation works on the fact that they are cross-party committees and they attempt wherever possible to reach consensus on their recommendations where that is not possible there is a formal decision-making process in the committee whereby a member of the committee can propose text to be considered other members can propose amendments and the committee can if necessary vote to decide what the final outcome is and if you look at a select committee report if you go to the back you will find a page called formal minutes and if there has been any of that formal voting that will appear there however it is rare as i say most committees work by consensus and for the most part in most committees to vote divisions as we call them formal votes are extremely rare indeed great thanks david that's really helpful so um a closely related question this is really as a generalization what proportion of evidence and recommendations that are presented by select committees to the government get a truly engaged response by the government so does that really does the government actually pay attention to select committee outputs or do they simply ignore those outputs and carry on as they would anyway that's a complex question um that we you could probably devote an entire seminar to i think the answer is the answer is twofold the first is is that a government what the government says in its formal response is not always a reflection of what the government actually does in response to a recommendation within too much the government may or may not feel it can accept or reject a recommendation so it may decide to give a holding response and you may see further down the line that something that committee recommended actually ends up being implemented by the government even though if you looked at the formal response you might think oh the government didn't take that very seriously and for that reason it's a really hard question to answer what proportion have been implemented and what proportion haven't been implemented so i think that's the first thing and i think the second thing is it depends and there's no simple one-size-fits-all answer i would say that select committees have become much more influential over the last or certainly since over the last decade than previously and i would say that in the last five years i've seen many more select committee recommendations being taken up than i did in my first 10 years in the house i joined in 2006. fantastic uh thanks very much david this is a short question but i think everyone will really appreciate the answer because it's something that we definitely get asked a lot which is could you possibly explain to us what an earth parliamentary privilege means please uh yep so uh parliamentary privilege is the protection offered to mps and peers to protect free speech in parliament i could go on uh but the basic principle is that mps and peers and the evidence published by committees is protected from legal consequences in order to allow members of parliament to represent their constituents freely and fairly and without threats of reprisal great thanks very much david and we've got time for just a few more i think these two are really closely related first question is are there ways to increase the likelihood that someone from your organization will get called to provide oral evidence and and could you explain a bit more about who decides who is invited to to give oral evidence yeah so i'll answer the first one the second one first uh so the process of who decides who gets given all evidence so the committee staff will analyze written evidence received it will they will analyze the relevant players in the subject area some of whom may not have submitted evidence they will generally make recommendations to the committee chair and to the committee ultimately it's the committee's decision as to who they want to hear from in answer to the first i think the easiest way is to admit really good written evidence which we'll come on to in a moment clearly having a profile in a field helps but it isn't the only determinant great thanks so much for that uh david um and then i think we'll we'll take this as the final question for now um if an academic submits evidence and a select committee decides to include it in its report is there a feedback mechanism will that academic be alerted to the fact that their their evidence has been used how can they find out about how their research has been used yeah so the committee when it agrees and publishes report will send that report out under embargo so it will go out before it's been published and it will go out to the media but it will also go to anybody who submitted evidence to that inquiry and whose evidence was used so if you've submitted evidence you will see that report before it's published to the wider world so that you can be ready to deal field media inquiries to um to be ready for that release basically um it is if you've been heavily involved in inquiry there's often quite a dialogue going on between you and the committee staff and i think one of the key messages i'd like to get across is if you're interested in submitting to an inquiry but not quite sure do ring up committee staff and sort of say this is my area of field of research is this what the committee is interested in um and on that note i'm going to move on to the next section of my presentation there we go so what is evidence uh of what is good evidence and also i'm going to address that question of how do you get called to give evidence in a little bit more depth so what do we mean by evidence well written evidence is simply a written submission in response to a call for evidence from a committee and oral evidence is simply a spoken contribution at a formal committee hearing now committees do informal events as well they do round tables they do public engagement events and so forth but for us evidence is something spoken at a formal hearing in front of a committee evidence is published online unless you request otherwise and the committee agrees and it's important to note that once you submit something to the committee it is for the committee to decide what to do with it and it must be original so it needs to be a document produced for the committee itself it can't simply be a journal article from somewhere else now if you have something like that and you want to draw the committee's attention to it by all means you can reference it hyperlink it in your submission or you can simply send it to the committee staff and say you might be interested to know about this article that i wrote so what is good reference written evidence i said earlier one of the the single best way to get called to give oral evidence to some good written evidence so what is good written evidence uh concise and relevant i think are the two key points here so the biggest select committee inquiry attract hundreds of submissions and keeping to the word limit of 3 000 words or less but not feeling that you need to hit that word limit if you don't need to it's really important the more power the more punchy the points are the more concise the points are the more impact they're going to have on the people at the other end who are reading and analyzing the results do include a summary of the key points at the start use the terms of reference to focus what you're saying on what the committee's asked for and what the committee is interested in and as i say if you're at all unsure feel free to talk to the committee staff to get a better sense on what they actually are looking for the committee is actually looking for don't feel you need to respond to every single question your expertise may be in one particular area related to the inquiry don't feel you need to speak out on others at the same time don't feel compelled to only comment on the very specific issue that you research for example you may have broader insights that go beyond your specialist research that are relevant to the rest of it so don't feel constrained but at the same time don't feel obliged to comment on everything make recommendations so i covered this earlier uh committees aren't just looking for the evidence on where the issues are they're also looking for potential recommendations to make for government um don't just call for real research we under you know committees do make recommendations for more research but fundamentally they aren't funding bodies they're making recommendations to government on policy and they're interested in what the research is primarily interested in what the research says now of course that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be honest about the limitations of that research write for an interested non-expert so avoiding acronyms avoiding jargon um you are writing fundamentally for people who know a bit about the policy area who are interested in the policy area but will not have the level of specialist knowledge or are unlikely to have the level of specialist knowledge that you do and the final one is remember that you're writing for a political environment and that some of the terminology used may have meanings in a political context that you may wish to try and avoid try to make it you want it to appear objective so what is good or relevance just to add about in terms of how to getting called for all evidence i think the other thing i would say is following the policy debate and being engaged with the policy debate in other ways so i won't talk you know there are things like all parliament party parliamentary groups things like that if you're involved on multiple levels and you have a profile amongst mps and peers and they know your name that is also something that helps when they're thinking about who to choose to call what's good oral evidence being concise and relevant again uh sticking to the question you've been asked and not feeling you have to answer every single question are two quite good pieces of advice be engaging so mps particularly mps um are interested in hearing how this affects real people their constituents you know people who are influenced by government policy so talking in terms of real concrete effects on real people or real things rather than talking the abstract is really powerful when talking to a committee highlighting your calls for action highlighting them in the court in the context of the evidence and prioritizing them committees may not be able to recommend absolutely everything so what's the most important showing respect for members of the committee of course and feel free to follow up in writing there's no problem saying that's a technical really difficult question to answer now i'll need to get back to you or i need to check that or i need to consult my colleague who's a whose area of expertise this is so those are the key tips for good oral evidence and written evidence and any another round of questions yeah that's great thanks so much for that david again that was really really helpful and great to have those clear tips and pointers in how um how it's helpful for academics to to shape and communicate their findings i've had some more questions the first one is are members of the committee expected to read written responses in full or are they presented with a summary by the committee staff so the answer is both they have them all in full and they will have summary and briefing from the committee staff and it's a personal decision on or which they choose to do great thank you next question which i think is a point of clarification i think it's when we were you were talking about um original publication so you said the submission needs to be original so in terms of original evidence submission do you mean the written words or the findings they say for example i've published the results of my research in an academic journal if i rewrite my findings in a way the select committee would understand and reference my published journal article would that still be considered original yes it absolutely would yes to be clear original in this mean context means something that is written specifically for the committee and the vast majority of academic evidence is precisely that it's it's research findings that have been published elsewhere uh written in a way that's accessible for a policy uh audience fantastic thank you we've now we've also had another question where the select committees open up forms of engagement to other uh public audiences so not just academics but to select committees work with different members of society as well yes very much so so the uh select committees work with a wide range of interested people and parties so as you would expect um interest groups and lobby groups um you know if you think about cbi tuc whatever field you work in submits um select committee evidence on a regular basis ngos public engagement direct engagement with the public is something that select committees have done much more over the last 10 years and particularly the last five years so that may involve online forums where members of the public or members of a particular group can participate it may involve focus groups it may involve online surveys but that is something as i say that committees have been doing much much more of in recent years fantastic thank you and that's great to hear and we'll take this as the final question uh before moving on and so the final question is how much of the science behind the recommendations are the committees interested in seeing so our participant says this is very important for us or is there an implicit trust in us to produce the evidence for them i think that's a very good question i think it will depend on the subject matter and i think it will depend on the nature of the inquiry and i think it depends on the committee as part of the analysis process committee staff will look at the credibility of sources um i think the key thing is that committees are interested in the policy outcomes and i think the extent to which they're interested in the science behind those outcomes will depend on how closely the two are linked so if you look on the science and technology committee inquiries into covid at the moment they are very very interested in the science behind the different approaches to managing kofi because that is so integral to what is being discussed so i think that's a broad brush answer but i think the answer is it depends david thank you so much for sharing all your expertise with us dealing with all those fantastic questions thank you so much what i wanted to leave you with after having had a look at those committees is a reassurance that we've thrown a lot of information at you uh we know that it can be a bit daunting to try and get involved with parliament but as well as hopefully giving you a bit of information about how committees work and encouraged you that committees would really like to hear from you there is also plenty of other support for you here at parliament we have a lot of online resources some how-to guides on our web hub for researchers so that's parliament.uk forward slash research hyphen impact on there on the how to guide page particularly you will find a guide to giving written evidence to both house of commons and house of lords select committees so you can go and revisit that look into it in a bit more detail as well as some more some broader information about how to engage with different parts of parliament if you are on twitter do follow us we are at uk pal underscore research we put on there every single call for evidence from any select committee at parliament that we can find so it's a good one-stop shop to have a look at what's going on but don't forget you've always got that link to all the current open calls for evidence page so if you're not on twitter or you don't regularly check it you can just check in on that page occasionally you can also sign up for email alerts from the parliament website and you've also got a dedicated knowledge exchange unit here that's myself it's sarah who you've met who's been keeping an eye on and asking your questions and our colleague laura as well that email address keu parliament dot uk that is us behind that email address feel free to sending any questions or any queries that you have we're really grateful to you joining us this afternoon and i hope that you found it useful

2021-02-16 18:35

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