That the Grand Committee do consider the Report of the Information Committee on Are the Lords Listening? Creating Connections between People and Parliament (First Report, Session 2008–09, HL Paper 138).

My Lords, I will talk this afternoon particularly about the work that has gone on and which continues to go on since we published our report in July last year, Are the Lords Listening? Creating Connections between People and Parliament. I am delighted to see that there are so many speakers here this afternoon who also wish to take part in this debate.

When we published our report in July, it was in a sense an icebreaker. It put momentum into a process that had already started, and since then the momentum has gathered speed. Led by the Information Service in the Lords but involving a huge number of staff from both Houses, far more is being put into engaging and interacting with the public.

Last week, I spent some time on the internet reading the latest webpage of www.parliament.uk. I spent two riveting hours enthralled by the variety of speeches, special events and Select Committees at Westminster. I joined Anthony Steen from the other place and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, in the Second Reading of their Anti-Slavery Day Bill, the purpose of which is to raise awareness of human slavery today. I followed a picture of the noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock, a Minister, about to give evidence to the Lords Committee on 4 March on piracy off the coast of Somalia. I looked at the noble Lord, Lord Darzi of Denham, his head nodding vigorously as he introduced the First Reading of the Health Bill. I followed what some Lords of the Blog have recently been saying about the issues raised by legislation. The stages of a Bill as it passes through the Commons and the Lords were made clear and easy to understand. I have to say that I found on the website for the very first time the e-mail address of my own Member of Parliament. I therefore strongly recommend that anyone—teenager, adult or elderly—who wishes to understand more about the workings of the Lords and the Commons fastens on to www.parliament.uk. I am sure they will relish the amount that they can learn.

Guiding and encouraging those who are not normally interested in politics to become interested in our workings at Westminster is critical for us, especially when, as we all know, the reputation of Parliament is at a dismally low point. Our report had 49 suggestions and recommendations for the Lords on which the administration is now working. I shall give a few examples. The idea of parallel debates online for young people and the broader public to complement our Thursday debate in the Chamber is moving forward, and I very much hope that it will be trialled later this year.

A growing number of Peers is discussing current issues with the public via Lords of the Blog. I blogged two days ago about our meeting this afternoon and I received a number of comments, most of them polite. Sounding out the broader public on issues raised by legislation has been trialled informally—particularly by two Lords of the Blog with regard to home education. This aroused considerable interest and controversy. The fact that Lords of the Blog links directly to Peers is clearly valued by participants.

Useful preliminary work is going ahead to link up the Parliamentary Information and Communications Technology service—briefly known as PICT—with government departments to streamline information about Bills going through Parliament. PICT has developed a way of extracting the text of Bills from the editing software used by the government team which drafts the Bill. However, a great deal more needs to be done in this field and I would like to see much more action from the Cabinet Office to match the good work being put in by PICT.

In all of this we are collectively trying to explain and demystify Parliament’s work and thus make for a more engaging, more interesting Parliament, which is more understandable to the public. The search is going ahead in the Education Service for a new website to provide an animated overview of Parliament’s history and development for young people, building on the success of the “MP for a Week” game. The Education Service is delivering valuable teaching materials online, as well as continuing to host visits for some 40,000 students a year.

On outreach and the archives, the Connecting with Communities project was very successful in Norwich with the Norfolk Record Office. The great majority of those involved—84 per cent—said that the activities made them want to find out more about Parliament. A tie-up with Birmingham is being planned.

However, all this work is essentially being done by the Administration Committee. I now address what we, the Members of the House of Lords, are doing to bridge the gap between us and the outside world. I am sure we all agree that we have been given a splendid lead by the Lord Speaker. The outreach programme in which she and other Peers visit schools to talk about the House of Lords is highly successful. The number of visits is growing; there are likely to be more than 100 this financial year. However, she cannot do it alone. Clearly, we have to try to interest more of our colleagues in taking up a metaphorical mace and getting involved in breaking down the barrier of lack of knowledge about the work of our House. I hope very much that after the election, when we will certainly have a large host of new Peers coming from many different backgrounds, a number of these may be interested in joining the team to demystify this Upper House of ours. It needs a commitment above all of time and a belief that the task is worthwhile. In my judgment it certainly is.

The media will continue to give an unbalanced view of us, concentrating on ermine, the State Opening, mice in the bar, squirrels and our expenses, but the serious side of our story is well worth pursuing. I remember that after the debate for young people, which was hosted in July of last year in the Lords Chamber, a youth worker commented that this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience which the young people would never forget. A similar event in the Chamber is planned for this autumn. This will build on the pupil parliaments that the Education Service runs.

I will finish with a final thought. Some three years ago, when I succeeded my noble friend Lord Baker as chairman of the committee, I was surprised at how structurally separate the management and Peers were. The administrators had their meetings to decide on new activities, on the budget and on various activities to watch over finance, and to promote and hire members of staff. We, the Peers, occasionally asked to meet some of the senior officers, and were told the decisions that they had made. It would be very sensible if our Information Committee was changed in composition—I think that my mobile phone is ringing: I am deeply sorry, I will turn it off. At least it shows that I am reasonably modern—so that it included not only the Clerk of the Parliaments, but also a number of senior management administrators. We would meet together more frequently for a frank and full discussion of our ambitions, our achievements, our finances and our future targets.

Last October, I spent one afternoon with senior managers on their awayday. This opened my eyes. It was very useful for me to be able to put over the objectives of our recently published report. In turn, senior managers were able to learn what members of the committee were aiming for. This nurtured the enthusiasm from senior management that we have seen in recent months. Formal divorce between senior management and a Peers’ committee should end. Our Information Committee would come forward with more and better ideas, and ways of fulfilling those ideas, if senior managers were committee members. I realise that this is an unusual, perhaps even revolutionary, suggestion. However, it should be thought about seriously after the election, and I am sure that it would enable the Upper House to carry through many more of the recommendations of last year’s report.

I will end by thanking three members of the senior management who have helped me so much in the last few years: Liz Hallam Smith, the Director of Information Services and Librarian; Joan Miller, Director of PICT; and Richard McLean, the Clerk of our committee, who was seconded to PICT in October, and without whom this report would never have been written. Our proposals have much further to go. The better people understand how Parliament works, the more positive they feel about us.

My Lords, I would like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Renton, for introducing the debate in way that he did. He covered a lot of ground. I will pick up on one of the last things that he said, which was that we undoubtedly have “much further to go”. For me, today’s debate is just another staging post on what has been—and I anticipate will continue to be—a long journey. I have been very lucky to sit on the Information Committee under two wonderful chairs, the noble Lords, Lord Baker and Lord Renton, who have succeeded not just in moving along the agenda, but in transforming the atmosphere in which this debate has continued over the past five years. The atmosphere is constructive and positive: it is an atmosphere of hope. When I started on the committee, in 2003-04, the situation was rather different. I will focus on a small group of recommendations in the report, in part because they are relatively simple.

Paragraph 132 recommends that the House of Lords administration should invite officials to look at the possibility of people getting electronic alerts to update them on Bills or issues of interest about what is going on in Parliament. This is the norm in many people’s lives. It can be done on Twitter, on your mobile telephone, your computer or almost any other similar device. It is normal practice for people in work to be alerted to what is going on in the rest of the world that is of particular interest to them. There is no technological reason why this should not be done, and while obviously some costs are involved, it is almost the best way of ensuring that people are constantly reminded that things which impact on them are taking place in this House. It is therefore very much in the interests of the House to do this because it is possible to forget that a lot of constructive work goes on here that relates directly to people’s daily lives. Not to take the opportunity to remind them of that is self-defeating.

The second area in which I feel that we are somewhat self-defeating is set out in paragraphs 139 to 141, which refer to greater access to the House of Lords for factual filming, and a recommendation that we revise the leaflet setting out the regulations that govern filming. Most importantly, many noble Lords will have had the miserable experience of being interviewed in the so-called Interview Room. We should be able to come up with a room for interviews that in some way, shape or form is illustrative of the dignity of this House, perhaps by way of a backdrop. As all noble Lords know, the impression given is that you are being interviewed in a cupboard. I cannot think that it helps the House and its reputation to be seen in such a way by the rest of the world. If I walk across the road to the BBC, I sit in an even more uncomfortable place, but at least there is a diorama behind me which gives viewers the impression that we are actually somewhere in Westminster. It cannot be beyond the wit of man to conceive of something similar and thus dignify the way in which we communicate with the rest of the world.

The last recommendation I want to focus on is a review of parliamentary language. I touched on this a week or so ago in a debate introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth. I illustrated my remarks by recounting something that happened quite recently to the noble Lord, Lord Stone of Blackheath, and me. After a really excellent debate in the House on the outcomes of the Copenhagen change climate conference, in which more than 30 speakers took part, we made it our business to ensure that the Hansard report of the debate was sent to schools that were interested. What came back was fascinating. Pupils loved the debate and thought the points made were interesting, but the same question was put to us both: why on earth did we “move for Papers”, and what does that mean, and why at the end of something in which a lot of convictions were expressed did we “withdraw the Motion”?

I have since asked any number of people—indeed, just about everyone I meet—what the process is and what it means. I have yet to receive an answer of any sort. No one knows why we “move for Papers” and no one knows why, having done so, we “withdraw the Motion”. If we do not know, and our job is presumably to excite and enthuse people in the outside world, then surely enough is enough. It would not need a great deal of thought or time to put this right, and I would be perfectly happy to work with anyone on drafting a new and rather more explicable form of words.

There are two other things that I want to pray in aid. Last week a very good Hansard Society report entitled Parliament 2020: Visioning the Future of Parliament was published. On page iii a table sets out the issues that came out of focus groups looking at what would be of overwhelming interest to first-time voters. It is fascinating to note that MPs, Peers and first-time voters all agree that greater use of new technologies is crucial, which is good news. But further down the list we discover that while “understandable language” is felt by MPs and Peers to be somewhat important, it is felt by first-time voters to be crucial. What is really dreadful is that transparency and accountability are felt by MPs and Peers not to be of any importance, and of no importance by parliamentary officials, yet these same things are felt to be utterly crucial by first-time voters. We cannot afford the luxury of that sort of gap in understanding between first-time voters and Peers and officials. It is we who are wrong, not they.

This is the most important lesson I should like to get across this afternoon. For us to believe that somehow first-time voters are wrong in thinking that transparency and accountability are important and for us to content ourselves that those things are not particularly important is clearly wrong and sends out a bad message. Why are we sending out that message? There are two reasons. First, the process of interactivity is entirely normal to the lives of first-time voters although it is very new to many of us. Perhaps I may illustrate that fact in these semi-formal surroundings. How many people here are wearing a watch? Hands up everyone who is wearing a watch. Just about everyone, and yet very few first-time voters ever wear a watch. In fact, they think that the wearing of a watch is almost inexplicable: why would anyone bother to carry a single purpose device? Young people do not wear watches. Until we are prepared to have the flexibility of mind to understand their view of the world, we will continue to struggle. That is possibly a silly example of the generational difference between us and the people we are attempting to interest in what we do. This Hansard Society report is important and well worth studying.

Recently I came across a terrific article in Business Week—it is dated 2 July 2009, but I have only just found it—entitled:

“The old solutions have become the new problems”.

One marvellous line leapt out at me:

“Letting go is a Catch-22. You don’t want to let go until you have something new to cling to, but you can’t discover the new thing until you let go”.

I suggest that one of the great inhibitors to change within the parliamentary process is our terror of letting go and losing control. Until we overcome that terror, we will never find out how transformative good and well communicated democracy could be. In that sense, we are doing ourselves an enormous disservice. Only 41 per cent of first-time voters are showing any interest in registering to vote. That would normally translate into about a 30 per cent turnout among young people at the coming election. That is not democracy, it is a mockery of democracy. Unless we are prepared to turn that 30 per cent into 70 per cent, we are all failing in our duty.

Five years ago, I had the privilege of chairing a committee on which the noble Lords, Lord Tyler and Lord Renton, sat. We made a number of recommendations, the last of which is quite interesting. We stated:

“We want to see a Parliament which is an accessible and readily understood institution, which people know how to approach, and when and where to make their voice heard, a Parliament which relates its work to the concerns of those in the outside world. This is the challenge”.

It was the challenge five years ago, and it remains the challenge today, but time is moving on and we cannot afford another five years and another period of delay.

My Lords, I think that I will speak for 10 seconds for each of the years that I have been in your Lordships’ House and try to explain the difficulties that I find myself in today. I have never had a vote; I have always been disfranchised, and I have spent much of my life being misunderstood. When I came here, they said, “We need to get young people interested. Will you go out and speak?” I was not very good at speaking; I had made a few sales presentations, but that was about all. The great and the good, whom I called “Sir” because I did not know that you should not, would say, “We would like you to go off somewhere and speak”.

When I arrived, sometimes in a dinner jacket, I would look at the menu and it usually had Snopake on it. I realised fairly quickly that I was replacing someone much more important, so I became known as the Snopake speaker. When they could find no one else, I would go to speak. You were asked to speak about the House of Lords, but I was told that you did not communicate with the outside world; that was represented by the House of Commons. As some of your Lordships may remember, we did not have more than 10 sheets of writing paper a month, we had ink pens and we certainly did not have any stamps. Every time you received a communication from the outside world, you were meant to put it in an internal envelope and send it to the appropriate Member of Parliament with a note to ask him to deal with one of his constituents.

For a long time, I did not think that the Lords should communicate with the outside world until suddenly, in 1985, when televised debates started, we found that people wanted to communicate. How many of your Lordships have that terrible problem of having to explain to people what you do, why you are here, how undemocratic you might be—all of the logical criticisms—without the support?

Suddenly, when the Lords decided that it would start to communicate with the outside world, things changed, particularly when we had e-mail. I was perfectly happy getting one or two e-mails a day, rather than 120 if I ever speak on something. I did not realise that modern electronic communication could put you in touch with a whole range of people. I did not realise how that could be dangerous when the letters—I call them marmalade letters—were from those who sit down on a Sunday and write to every Peer in alphabetical order.

When I sat on the Information Committee, I realised that I had been right about some things. I have found this House a greater source of information than any in all my time as an economic research man. If you go to the Library, you find everything you could possibly want. If you cannot, you go to a higher authority. When you ring up Archives to ask them something, they speak at a slightly higher level; they do not look down on you, but I realise that their intellectual capability is far in excess of mine.

I wanted to make certain suggestions under the subject of outreach. I was elected, of course. The House has changed the rules now. Instead of calling us all excepted hereditary Peers, we are now acknowledged as elected hereditary Peers, whether the election was a genuine election or we were elected under an Act. If you morally feel that you have been elected, you feel that you ought to represent someone. I asked: who do we represent? Anyone we want to. I decided that I would represent the 19 million people who did not vote at the last election.

I thought that the House of Lords should represent someone, and I suggested—I have eight drafts, because I know that it is sometimes not good to make suggestions overtly, you drip feed their Lordships and gradually something starts to well up—that we should seek to represent all the elected people in the United Kingdom. We should, as was the case before in our relationship with the House of Commons, serve on committees together and get to know people, so that we might say that we represent the elected Members of Parliament. Then I went further and asked: what about the elected councillors? There are 20,000 of them. Perhaps they might have a relationship with suitable people in the House of Lords—those dealing with particular Bills or particular areas.

I then looked at where your Lordships were around the country and found to my amazement that there were 604 more of your Lordships than Members of the House of Commons. Determining where they were had nothing to do with where their homes were; I looked at such things as who were Deputy Lieutenants—as I have pointed out before, I thought that they were D Litts to begin with. A Deputy Lieutenant obviously knows something about his county. I have a chart here showing where they are.

I then thought that we might also represent parish councillors or parishes, so I had a word with the bishops in the Lords—they keep changing—and realised that the current bishops in general have a flock of about 30 million in the country. There are about 80,000 parish councillors. Knowing that every bishop is related to a parish and appoints every vicar, could we not find a relationship there? We might consider putting forward the idea that we are prepared to represent people from different parts of the country, different regions, according to our knowledge, rather than it being assumed that you have knowledge of a particular subject. Recently, the Marine Bill dealt with almost all of the United Kingdom. If we had had closer relationships with all the parish councillors at that time, there would have been a tremendous input.

Now I come to what information we disseminate and how we do it. There is a strange rule in the House that anyone who works for the House is not really able to advise you. They can comment, they can provide information, but they cannot direct you. In general, the dissemination and promotion of information is not to promote the House. The success has been the remarkable amount of information to which the Lord Chairman referred, which has become one of the best sources as the links are created.

Perhaps the next stage that we should consider is: who do we represent, or can we represent anyone? Because I speak on the Commonwealth, I have had representations from Commonwealth nations which would also like a voice in the House of Lords. I have looked at the question of the overseas territories. I wondered whether we should seek to have direct relations with individuals or bodies, or should we just let them come to us? As the concept is outreach, I feel that we have a long way to go, but a great opportunity.

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Renton, spoke about the ambassador scheme. I have been an ambassador since the scheme started. Last Friday, I went to the Marist School near Ascot and spoke to 115 senior pupils. It is a private girls’ school with a very high academic standard. I followed my usual routine of spending 15 or 20 minutes explaining the work of the House of Lords, using overheads, and then taking questions relating to Parliament and politics. As usual, they came thick and fast, and when the teacher brought the questions to an end, I asked if I might ask a question. My question was: how many of the pupils had visited our website, seen our blog or our videos on YouTube, or visited all the interesting things on www.parliament.com that the noble Lord, Lord Renton, spoke about? One hand went up—and this was in a middle-class school where every pupil had access to the web at home and at school.

Afterwards, over coffee, I raised this with the head teacher. He assured me that as a result of my visit, over the next couple of days most pupils would access some of our web material, and he would try to include it in their lesson plan. I recount this because it shows that just being on the web is not enough: ambassadors are needed, too. This point is made in your Lordships’ report. As well as going to schools, we go to adult events. I have spoken at major regional conferences of the Women's Institute and Rotary International. Our outreach is not limited to schools. The report also mentions shadows. A number of us have had shadows from schools after the exams are over. In a way, they, too, become ambassadors. The shadows report back to the school assembly and also write a diary. This, too, has stimulated interest in Parliament.

Perhaps I may use this occasion to join other noble Lords in congratulating the Lord Speaker on her outreach initiative. Not only is the timing of your Lordships’ report helpful in dealing with the expenses scandal, but so is the timing of the ambassador scheme. The report points out that the expenses scandal has affected the relationship between Parliament and the public. The Hansard Society audit of political engagement reports a reduction in the public’s satisfaction with Parliament and with the political class—but, thankfully, little change in the level of trust. This is largely because the level of trust was already pretty low.

In response to this, there have been many proposals to raise the level of public satisfaction with, and trust in, Parliament. Being more open and accessible is seen as crucial. The Government have agreed to play a role in this. The Hansard Society report reveals that the public's views are complex. However, by informing the public better and by encouraging more public participation in legislation, the level of satisfaction should rise. We are learning also that this poor relationship has effects elsewhere. The Financial Times suggests that it makes investors more cautious about investing in this country. So it is important, as the noble Lord, Lord Renton, said, that we get on with rebuilding satisfaction with our political institutions, and firmly establish public trust.

It seems to me that there are three strands to our proposals. First, we should communicate directly with the public via the web, rather than through an intermediary, namely the media. Secondly, we should make what we say and do much more open and available. Thirdly, we should provide a resource for citizens, commentators and researchers to find out how decisions were reached and actions taken. None of this is easy. We have made a start with direct communication by webcasting and being on social networks, and indeed we are broadcasting at the moment. New and different skills and attitudes are required to communicate directly with the public on the web. It is we who have to do the blogs. To make our mark on the web, we also have to be interconnected so that what we do is automatically picked up by searchers or browsers. We will also have to work with sophisticated databases which classify and distribute our data. As others have pointed out, unless the issues and choices are explained, making what we do and say more open and available will lose much of its impact. Again, it is something that will require new skills and attitudes.

The report deals well with the practical and process problems related to providing a proper resource, and acting on the committee’s proposals will get us some way along the road. But I do not think that they will get us to our destination; that will require another major change, and that change is us. The noble Lord, Lord Renton, has spoken about this. In the debate held last June, he said that,

“the Lords are listening and aim to make their work better”.—[Official Report, 16/6/09; col. 1020.]

To do that, we have to become more professional and improve our performance. There is nothing novel about this kind of cultural change, and it happens in every organisation. How do other organisations change their culture and get people to improve their performance?

In companies, line managers appraise their staff and the audit committee appraises the directors. Universities have external academics appraise their performance. Some public services use a combination of both, and sometimes a regulator gets involved. In order to win support and trust, some sort of appraisal is part of the governance of most organisations. Who appraises us? Apart from the Front Bench, no one does. We do not even have to get re-elected, and the Front Bench appraisal is rather more political than personal. Most Members of this House perceive themselves as being here to serve the public. As lawmakers, we are constantly appraising public servants to try to make the public service work better. Why not apply this to ourselves? It would certainly reflect the experience of most of the people with whom we are trying to communicate.

In my opinion, unless we tackle this, all our hard work in winning back the satisfaction and trust of the public will take us only part of the way. Recent history is littered with organisations that moved with the times and prospered by cultural change. Those that did not do so have faded away. What I am suggesting may seem impossible and outrageous to some, but to others it is quite normal. What we say, how we vote, and how often we come to the House are all matters of public record. Indeed, we have already taken an important first step through an appraisal of our expenses. Nor am I the first to suggest this. In an earlier debate, my noble friend Lord Puttnam suggested confirmation hearings for Ministers, which are a form of appraisal. Today, he explained how we must keep in touch with young people.

We could have some kind of self-appraisal that looks at what we plan to do in the House, the new skills we need, the old skills that need polishing up, appraising the things that each one of us needs to do or not to do in order to communicate directly with the public, how to make what we do more open and available, and how we can help to create a public resource for our work. We would then become a lot more professional as parliamentarians, and this would enable us to complete the journey to win the satisfaction and trust of the public whom we seek to serve and which is the purpose of your Lordships’ report.

This report makes many sensible proposals to change the process of our information service. Changes in process are much more successful when people change too. Perhaps that should be the topic of the committee’s next report.

My Lords, I start by offering my deepest apologies for a possible future breach of a rule of procedure for which I have the utmost respect, but I do so because I so much want to speak in this debate. I am booked to speak at a school on the other side of London and I ought to leave by 6.30 pm at the latest. I hope that the Committee will forgive me. I know that that is the wrong thing to do, but, as I say, I do so because I so much want to speak in this debate and go to the school. I hope that it will not happen, but if it does, I hope that noble Lords will allow me that liberty on this one occasion.

I join in this debate in part because I am a blogger on the Lords of the Blog website and a participant in the Lord Speaker’s outreach programme to schools, but also because I have benefited greatly from the many websites which allow a parliamentarian—at home or in the Palace of Westminster—to keep abreast of documents, debates, developments and drafting that affect the passage of legislation in the House of Lords.

I say in relation to the two reports that are being debated today that the information provided on, for example, the Lords Whips’ site, the parliamentary calendar, and the Cross-Benchers’ site are essential and well presented tools which have improved with time. I find the ability to trace the passage of a Bill online and read its provisions and the Explanatory Notes and associated debates quite outstandingly well organised as a site. I wish that parliamentlive.tv was more widely known as it, too, is a remarkable tool.

I have also benefited from an intern, and am grateful to the LSE for its scheme, and the website, workforanmp.com, that enables young people to apply for these posts. I regard internships as an essential part of outreach and social mobility, as long as they are paid and advertised and therefore not available solely to friends’ children who can afford to work for free. This relates to the current review of Peers’ expenses, but this is not the place for that discussion.

I am also grateful to the excellent organisation of visits to schools by Ms Page in the Lord Speaker’s Office, and have learnt a great deal from the teenagers to whom I have spoken. They tend to have fewer misconceptions than the press, but in general schoolchildren still regard us as born to a life of privilege, and, sadly, tarred by the same brush as MPs in relation to expenses.

I am flattered to see that 14 people are tracing my every word on the website theyworkforyou.com, which enables members of the public to pull up all the speeches of a Peer or MP and e-mail them. I should point out that I now receive so many letters and e-mails from members of the public if I speak on a controversial topic that I am unable to deal with them personally. That is a shame. This, too, relates to the review of our expenses, for the solution has to be a secretarial pool. To encourage members of the public to communicate with us, but not to provide the means whereby one can send an individual response is counterproductive. The office of the Convenor of the Cross Benches is most helpful in obtaining press attention for relevant speeches by Members.

As a former governor of the BBC, I am well aware of the difficulties inherent in communication, even when one has the levers of every possible means of mass communication in one’s hands. I note three areas, therefore, where improvement in our communication might take place. The first is in the ability of the public to follow what happens in the Chamber, specifically in relation to Questions. Members of the public have said on my blog that if one of them is watching or listening to Oral Questions in the Chamber, the text of the Question is not immediately available—it is not read out by the questioner. Instead of the rather time-wasting formula of “My Lords, I beg leave to put the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper”, the time could be better used by the questioner actually putting the Question, so that the watcher or listener knows what it is without reference to Hansard or the daily Order Paper.

Secondly, in my view the screens in the Chamber and around the House could be better used. When an amendment is being debated, its wording could be on screen as well as the number and the names of those moving it. While I understand that it would be difficult to insert all amendments into the original Bill’s clauses, so that one could see readily what difference they would make if accepted, it must be possible for a single amendment to be shown on screen inserted into the clause under discussion. It must also be possible to show the wording of Questions, and other issues being debated, on the little red screens.

Certainly it would be appreciated if every effort could be made by the communications officers of Parliament to convince the media that Members do more than vote. So often, the work of Members of your Lordships’ House is measured only by the frequency of voting, and we are ranked accordingly. The public need to know that much work—for some, the majority—is in committee, answering letters, asking questions, making speeches and so on. This is not readily measurable except on theyworkforyou.com.

My final point concerns the use of the web for communicating with the public. I have greatly enjoyed blogging on lordsoftheblog.net. However, some of the responses are intemperate, or come from the same people over and over again, or from a lobbying group. Therefore, I am not sure what constitutes successful communication. There have been more than 300,000 visits to the site and more than 9,000 comments. Daily visitors range from a few hundred to a few thousand. The commentators often appear to believe that Peers are members of a party other than the one to which they belong. There are quite a few unjustified comments about religion, knowledge and wealth. Those comments can be edited by the bloggers, but in an age of digital communication, the response of the public should be left largely unedited for all to see.

Whether minds are changed is open to doubt. It is arguable that an article or a letter by a Peer in the press may have more influence, even if it seems more remote than a blog dialogue. Also, the value of public participation in all-party parliamentary groups in this House is clear. We must therefore continue along the useful path that has been drawn for us all by the Information Committee.

My Lords, I am very pleased to be taking part in the debate. I will concentrate on education and outreach, on language and on the ceremonial aspects of Parliament.

I turn first to education and outreach. Like others here, I have taken part in the ambassador scheme, Peers in Schools, which is part of the outreach work. I found my experience both interesting and satisfying. The response from the schools that I have visited, which have been situated in my home county of Lincolnshire and in north Essex where I now live, has been very positive. In some instances, the visit has resulted in the school bringing pupils to look around the House of Lords. This I welcome greatly, because this place is part of every person's heritage. To this end, I look forward to the opening of the parliamentary education centre.

I also fully support the travel subsidy that has been introduced to assist pupils from state schools, and from schools outside the south-east of the country, to visit us. Outreach to young people is vital if we want to expand knowledge about the House of Lords, how it works and how our work affects the lives of our citizens, including young people and their families and friends. Encouraging teachers and the relevant curriculum bodies to include good coverage of the House of Lords in the curriculum should pay dividends, which is why the recommendation in paragraph 20 of the report is so important. It is also vital that the outreach and engagement programme, which owes a tremendous amount, as we have already heard, to the great support of the Lord Speaker, remains a key priority and must be built on in the future.

As well as visiting schools, I am in touch with a number of women’s institutes, again as part of our outreach activities. Earlier this year, I visited my home town of Market Rasen in the Lincolnshire Wolds to speak to the West Wolds women’s institute. To my amazement and pleasure, more than 100 people came to the meeting on a very frosty and slippery morning. They asked very pertinent and excellent questions after my talk, and I am delighted to say that 40 members are due to visit the House in June. Another group of 20 members of the women’s institute will attend Parliament next week. I tell noble Lords this because I believe that people who come into this place and look around are amazed but also begin to understand a great deal more about the House of Lords than they did before they visited it. Very positive outcomes are spinning off from the outreach programme, which can only be helpful to our work in reaching out to citizens.

We have heard a little about language this afternoon, and the report’s recommendations are both practical and possible. The language that we use in the Lords has been in use for centuries. After an initial steep learning curve, we get used to it, but I am sure that it can be a barrier to understanding and can prove intimidating for those who come across it for the first time. Indeed, we have heard of instances of that this afternoon. Therefore, explaining parliamentary terms in the glossary on the parliamentary website would be a great step towards helping people to understanding them.

I am also sure that a debate in the Chamber on the language and terminology of the House would prove very enlightening, and I hope that this proposal will not be forgotten. However, I do not want speeches in the House to be summaries or précis, which some of our witnesses from the various bodies that deal with the news seem to indicate are necessary if the average viewer is to understand and engage with the Lords. My noble friend Lord Puttnam put his finger on the dilemma of press coverage of the Lords when he said that,

“we are caught in a Catch-22 situation, in that news is driven by what interests people and what interests people is what is in the news”.

This is another area on which to work further, and the proposal for a review of the parliamentary language that is used in the Lords to enable people outside the House to understand our work better could be a good starting point.

Finally, the issue of the ceremonial aspects of Parliament is different from that of language. I do not accept that our ceremonies are of necessity a barrier to understanding how we work. Again, an explanation on the website could be most helpful. Whenever I have visited schools or women’s institutes, I have found an appreciative interest in our ceremonies. Ceremonies are part of our heritage, and I for one would be sad to see them watered down or substantially changed. Dr Meg Russell, reader in British and comparative politics at University College London’s Constitution Unit, pointed out to us that it was difficult to find a picture alongside a story on the Lords that did not show us in our ermine. That is not our fault—the media appear to have slipped into this mode of portraying us—but I do not accept that this is a barrier to understanding us. A debate on this matter may prove helpful, but there is no doubt that these issues are complicated and very contentious, and, in the larger world of how we communicate better, our ceremonies should be way down our agenda for reform. I joined the committee later than did many others, but I very much enjoyed taking part in the work on this report and I am enjoying today’s debate. This work should continue, because the more connection there is between the people of this country and Parliament the better.

In recent months, both Houses of Parliament have faced very difficult criticisms. Only yesterday, I received a copy of the Hansard Society’s Audit of Political Engagement, which concentrates on MPs but is a salutary text for us all in both Houses. One of the statistics is that the majority of the public—62 per cent—admit that they know not very much or nothing at all about the Westminster Parliament. However, 60 per cent of the public believe that it is worth while. It is up to us in both Houses to change the former of these findings and to build on the latter. Our work in the Information Committee can only help us.

My Lords, I, too, have the privilege of serving on the Information Committee, and was part of the inquiry that produced the report called, Are the Lords Listening? I assume that most of your Lordships will at least have had a chance to dip into it, but I imagine that fewer people will have had the time to look at the rather chunkier volume of verbatim evidence, which was published alongside it and which we took from various groups of people who came to see us in person. I take this opportunity today to refer to one section of that evidence, and I will quote from a few bits of it.

One of the most interesting and important evidence sessions that we had was when three groups of sixth-formers came to see us. What they told us really helped to shape some of our most crucial recommendations. They told us how they had thought of the House of Lords and what image they had of it before they came to see us. One of them described it as, “a big scary thing”. Another said that she thought that it was “for older generations”. Another said:

“A lot of people would associate the House of Lords just by titles and to be all toffs and big-wigs”.

Another said:

“A lot of people … do not think that politics is anything to do with them and especially the House of Lords”.

Another said:

“Younger people … think that the Lords are the elite society, they are really upper class and higher than us”.

This view of the elitism was compounded by the comment from another sixth-former, who said:

“People associate the Lords with a couple of centuries ago when Lords meant they were Lords and they owned land. People just associate it with a title and not the people behind the title”.

Fortunately, all this was modified, so we were a little less disheartened, when, after having spent the day taking a look at the place, one of the group said:

“I thought you were all of a higher status, but you're just like normal people who have worked to get somewhere”.

After their day with us, we at least managed to compensate for some of the more preconceived ideas.

Terminology can clearly be off-putting. I agree absolutely with what the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said about language. The word “Lords” is particularly misleading. The students who came to see us clearly expected to see a bunch of male, ermine-clad landowners. There is probably nothing very much wrong with continuing to call each other collectively “my Lords”, as we do in formal debate. However, it is worth considering whether for external consumption the institution might be better referred to as the House of Peers rather than the House of Lords. The word “peer” is a normal, accessible word with normal connotations. All those young sixth-formers would know, for example, what “peer group” means. Calling ourselves the House of Peers—as some people do informally—might be a better way to describe the institution formally.

Despite complaints about our quaint and rather alienating ways, during the evidence session we were also struck by how passionate and interested the sixth-formers were. They were not going to let all that stuff get in their way. In fact, they said it made them determined to change things rather than to be put off. The two topics that many of them mentioned they were most passionate about were the position of women in politics and climate change. We had some very interesting, albeit brief, discussions with them on those topics. One of the things that they had learnt through their visit was that although Members of the House of Lords do not represent a geographical constituency, as MPs do, we could be approached on the basis of declared interests and areas of expertise on a particular subject. I hope that as a result of our recommendations we will do something practical to create and publish clear information or a database along those lines in order to make ourselves more accessible to the public in ways in which they might want to contact us.

We also asked the sixth-formers about direct engagement with the democratic process through voting. I am glad to say that all of them seemed very keen to start using their vote when they were 18. They raised a couple of other interesting aspects of the democratic process although we did not have time to discuss these with them in any great detail. These were whether the voting age ought to be lowered to 16 and whether voting should be compulsory. There were mixed views on both those issues. Personally, I would like to see much more discussion on both these issues—especially the latter—on the formal agenda of this House. I, for one, have never bought the argument that young people do not vote because they are apathetic. I think it is much more likely to be a rational refusal to engage with a process and a category of people for whom they have little respect. There is a case for examining very carefully the Australian system of compulsory voting in exchange for a positive abstention on the ballot paper, and at least asking whether that might not also be a reasonable deal for the UK electorate too. If we were willing to initiate debates on such issues, it would be attractive to many people who might otherwise think that the House of Lords, and Members of Parliament more generally, are just self-serving and stuck in their ways.

Finally, I return to young people. I commend and pay tribute to the work done on behalf of this House by the outreach and education services. They are really important aspects of the work of this House. I hope that the recommendations of our inquiry to continue and strengthen this work will be rigorously implemented and fully resourced.

My Lords, this is an excellent report. I begin by congratulating and thanking the noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, and his colleagues for producing this splendid report with its excellent suggestions and ideas. The question is not only whether people listen to the House of Lords or how we reach out to people; it is much more basic. It is about the legitimacy of this place and the esteem in which we are held. When we talk about reaching out to people or getting them to communicate with us on a more regular basis, we do so because we know that the legitimacy and respect that this House enjoys depends on what people think of us.

I think that we ought to appreciate that this House represents an interesting paradox. On the one hand, we have enormous intelligence, expertise and good sense in the House. On the other hand, people at large know very little about it, and those who know something have mixed feelings, for all kinds of reasons. The expenses scandal is one. How are we appointed? Why am I here and not another professor?

There are also the scandals that have appeared from time to time, such as those of the noble Lords, Lord Archer and Lord Ashcroft. There is also the fact that when you belong to the House you do not have to attend it regularly, and stories leak out in the papers that some Peers may have attended only five, six or seven days in a year. There is also the case that people may be here for years without speaking or turn up simply to vote but not to participate in the debate, table an amendment or ask Questions. When people get to know about that, they ask disturbing questions.

In the Hansard Society’s research, when people were asked, “How much do you know about the House of Commons?”, 42 per cent of people said that they knew quite a bit, 58 per cent said that they knew not much or nothing at all. When the same question was asked about the House of Lords, 26 per cent said that they knew something about it and 74 per cent said that they knew nothing about the place.

The problem for us is twofold: how do we make ourselves more comprehensible, more accessible—both intellectually and emotionally—and how do we communicate on a regular basis with the wider British public? Those are the two questions on which I briefly want to concentrate.

It is striking, as many Peers have pointed out in your Lordships’ House, that there are many archaic features. I have nothing against archaic features; as an historian myself, I love the past. The more dead it is, the better it is. At the same time, the archaic elements have a tendency not just to make things inaccessible but to create the impression that we belong to a bygone age.

For example, people have talked about dress. I must confess that I have never taken to it. I have never worn ermine in my life and I do not think that I will. Language is another issue. The noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, talked about the use of the word “Lord”. I know that when people refer to me in public as “Lord”, I often feel deeply embarrassed because there is a stereotype to which I am expected to conform, and I cannot. I would rather be known as “Professor” or “Doctor” than “Lord”. People are also puzzled why lady Members of the House of Lords are referred to as Lords. People often ask me why I say, “My Lords”, and not “My Lords and Ladies”. I remember asking that question on my first day, and I was told that a Lord is a concept, a generic category under which Ladies are subsumed. I said: “It could be the opposite. Why not say ‘My Ladies’ and subsume Lords under it?” They said, “Oh, we cannot do that”. You can see the gender bias behind an apparently neutral exercise. Procedures are another issue.

Our dress indicates that we belong to a different age; our language indicates that we belong to a different species, the Lords, and our procedures indicate that we belong to a different world. It is about time that we started thinking about that more seriously.

In order that people should know more about the House, it is important that we think about travel subsidies. The report recommends travel subsidies to state school pupils. We should also think about visits to schools and universities. Let me give an example of one thing I did that evoked a lot of interest and might be worth thinking about. When I was a professor at the University of Westminster, the vice-chancellor asked me if I would organise public debates on important questions. We thought that a debate that was engaging the attention of the public and students was whether or not we should be part of the European Union, or what role we should play. We got together three Members of your Lordships’ House holding different views and organised a debate. That was one of the most successful debates that the University of Westminster had, attracting about 200 people. My friend the noble Lord, Lord Norton, has done something similar in Hull. It is a question not just of visiting schools but of using your Lordships’ expertise to arrange important debates.

In that context, I make a suggestion that I think needs to be thought about more carefully. One of the great qualities of this House is its debates. We hold wonderful debates such as this one, and many others that we had last week on higher education, universities, Europe and women's equality. What happens to those debates? They remain in Hansard. However, two things can be done. First, either in the form in which they appear in Hansard, or in a suitably abbreviated and critically edited form, they could be sent out to schools and colleges. Here we have debates which represent a wide variety of views, a lot of wisdom and a good deal of common sense. These debates could evoke much interest.

I will give a small example. My grandson is a 14 year-old boy at school in Oxford. I sent him the Hansard report of the debate on constitutional reform, because he is interested in that kind of thing. He read it and wrote back to me, saying, “Grandpa, I have shared it with other students and we are all excited. Will you from now on promise to send me copies of Hansard on a regular basis?”. This will give noble Lords some idea of how the quality of the debate can lead children to read and understand, and to relate to us intellectually. Word will begin to spread without us having to do much propaganda work. The Hansard records of debates can be used as a basis for reaching out to a large audience. I am told that there is a plan to increase the number of researchers when new office space becomes available at No. 1 Millbank. It might be a good idea to ask one researcher to summarise, in five pages, any important debate that has gone on for two and a half hours, and send out free copies to lots of schools, colleges and universities.

One suggestion in the report slightly worried me, and I would like us to be careful. In order that we are seen to be doing good work and playing an important constitutional role, we are told that we should point out from time to time how a piece of legislation came to us from the Commons and how we amended it. It is important that we amend it, and pointing out amendments that we have made would indicate the role that we play. However, if it is not done carefully, we could end up making the Commons look incompetent, and making ourselves look good at the expense of the Commons is not a useful political policy.

The last question is this: we may be trying to reach out to the general public, but are they waiting and wanting to reach out to us? The supply is there, but if there is no demand, there is no point to the exercise, because whatever initiatives we take, we would be inviting only disappointment and frustration. Therefore, we must look at the demand side, and I will make three quick suggestions. First, greater attention should be paid to citizenship education, which was introduced a few years ago in our schools. It is an important part of the school curriculum, but it is poorly delivered, it remains rather marginal and in many schools there are no specialised teachers.

Secondly, school, college and university students will be interested in what we are doing if they have some experience of public debate and of democracy. Therefore, we should encourage school councils, class councils and youth councils in local authorities, where people will get used to the cut and thrust of public debate.

Finally, it is important that we should seek comments on new Bills and policies. Putting the Bills on our website before pre-legislative scrutiny is a very important and effective idea. Another suggestion would be to make a public announcement of what Bills are coming up, and why we would be delighted to have comments on them from schools, colleges and the public. This would enable people to take ownership of what we are doing, and would also encourage them to take a sustained interest in what happens to the Bills on which we have invited them to comment.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, for giving us the chance to debate the report that he steered so efficiently and competently through the Information Committee. The debate has been extremely useful, and I have learnt a lot from the evidence that has been given.

What it comes down to is how accessible we are to the general public: do they understand what we are doing? I rather agree with the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, that we have to be careful about using a completely different language. I recall the words of a teacher from Kimbolton School who said that we should, “assiduously eschew obfuscatory prolixity and hyper-verbosity”. There are moments in the Chamber, when people are speaking, when I wish that we would hurry up. On the other hand, language denotes respect, and there are some things that I do not think we need to drop. “The noble Earl, Lord So-and-so” is nice old convention. The title is indicated first but because we are all Peers, we are all addressed as “Lord”, apart from Dukes who have something different. They are a cut above us, and there is only one left, a Scot. But an awful lot of other stuff needs to be cut out.

I have been thinking about disability issues now that we are being broadcast and published in text. What is an issue is that we put Questions in the way we do, because it does not help those with sight problems if the words are not spoken. In order to comply with disabilities legislation, we should start reading out the Questions at the beginning. That is a very good point.

But it is not always about language and ceremonial, which comes through later, and I shall say something about it. One of the reasons that the younger generation do not bother with watches and rely on their telephones while I use a watch is that I am now slightly challenged in trying to read the very small figures displayed on the telephone without assistance. If the telephone boys could give us much larger figures for the clock, I could drop wearing a watch. Unfortunately, however, they do not think that way at the moment.

Another way in which we have moved on and the world has changed is that we now live in a world of electronic idioms. The Lords of the Blog is a move in exactly the right direction, and I feel guilty that I do not write for it myself. The trouble is that I speak a lot—far too much—but I do not write so much. It takes me hours to think things through because I am terrified of putting the wrong thing down on paper. For some strange reason I seem to be far less terrified of putting my foot in my mouth. Most people are sensibly the other way around. That is why the work we did on data formats is important, and I want to draw attention to it, albeit briefly. If other people take this stuff and make mash-ups with it by incorporating it with other material to produce something more interesting and understandable for the general public, it has to be in an accessible format for them. That is all part of getting our message out there. Some will lampoon us, but others will view us in a positive light. We should not be frightened of the lampooning. If we really cannot withstand it, we do not deserve to be here.

Posting clips on YouTube is a wonderful step in the right direction. Again, it encourages people to be short, sharp, succinct and focused. TheyWorkForYou measures these things—I have just managed another three-word alliterative phrase, which will annoy the organisation because it does not think we should be doing that deliberately. But it is part of the modern world, and we need to focus in that direction.

The point was raised about people wanting to talk to the right Peer. Now that we have raised our profile and people know we exist, they have become more interested. They are aware that we do things and that often we are the subject experts in ways that do not exist in the Commons. It is something we need to improve on. We should not tread on the toes of the Commons because the Members represent constituents, but we can do a valuable job in providing certain bodies of expertise and being concerned with special issues through all-party parliamentary groups. On that subject, I must apologise because I am going to pop out before the end of the debate to greet a whole lot of people who are coming to a meeting of an all-party group at the other end. Having done that, I shall come back for the final speeches. The trouble is that there is always so much to do.

If people can get to you to discuss an issue, they feel that they have influenced the process in some way, even if only that someone has listened to them. That is something that frustrates people and discourages them from voting: they do not think that anyone is listening to them. Parliament is sitting here passing laws, the Civil Service is writing regulations, and there is nothing that they can do about it. If they can get to someone, whether through all-party parliamentary groups, blogs or whatever, they feel that they have contributed and been listened to, even if things do not then happen in the way that they want.

How we project the House is extremely important—again, I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam. I refer to the visual background, our backdrop. Recently, I had much help from Black Rod and the Yeoman Usher, who gave me a much better location in which to conduct an interview with the BBC. They have taken this on board and are thinking creatively.

It is important that we project our role correctly. We must make it easy for people to find a debate. I liked the idea that was suggested of having summaries of our discussions that people could access easily and from which they could drill down if they wanted.

I do not think that ceremonial is a block: I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, about that. People like ceremonial and tradition, but it must not interfere with their vision of us. Dr Meg Russell suggested that we should not wear robes for the State Opening of Parliament, so that we do not get photographed wearing them. A journalist from one of the more left-wing papers laughed and said that it would make no difference because they would still run pictures of us in robes. I am afraid that people who wish to present us in a certain light will continue to do so: we have to live with that. However, we must make sure that we have enough other good stuff out there to counteract that impression. Ceremonial lends dignity and conceals the fact that some of us may not be fighting fit and tough, with lovely six-packs or whatever it is that people want to see in their representatives. Robes conceal the difference: perhaps they can respect that. Sometimes it is the position that should be respected rather than the individual.

We need more interesting shots of the Chamber. It is hard to get ourselves projected and used in news clips if we cannot show something interesting. A picture of one talking head will not go very far: people will get bored.

In conclusion, I did like one thing. I have just been involved with the Digital Economy Bill, trying to work out how amendments affected other parts of it. I was scribbling things down and drawing little arrows. I welcome the Government's willingness to consider how in practice we could show how amendments alter a Bill. I look forward to seeing that come to fruition. It would help us in what we are doing, and would help the public to understand what we are trying to achieve.

I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Renton, for the remarkable leadership that he has shown in this area, and also the members of his committee, who have produced an excellent report. I am in broad agreement with almost all of it. I also thank the staff of the House, who have been very good at taking this forward.

I propose a special vote of thanks here, because when I left the House of Commons in 2005, I brought my blog with me but changed the title to lordoftheblog. I then decided to open it up a bit, so it became plural. I was delighted by how much support there was for it—it was much easier for me to get it up and running than I expected. That indicates to me that the House of Lords is far more open to change than many people think. In many respects, we can give a lead to the House of Commons and others. I think that I am right in saying that this is still the only legislature in the world that has a group blog facility for Members. We should be proud of that.

I will say more about that in a moment. First, I will build on what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam. We are going through a period of profound change—one can pick out any aspect of life and focus on it. I like the analogy of the watch: if I go out without my watch and diary, I feel distinctly undressed, whereas if my kids went out with a watch and diary, they would feel distinctly embarrassed. He is absolutely right to identify that.

In relation to the work we do, the changes that are affecting politics and the media are immense. It is important to note that the readership for all newspapers is declining. I may say a little more about that in a moment, but we should remember that when people buy a newspaper, they do not necessarily read very much of it. So when people ask who reads the blog, you might respond by asking who reads the letters page in the paper, and who reads your particular letter. This is about the amount of information available and how people select what they do and do not want to look at. I shall not dwell on the point, but if you had asked people in the 1640s what Parliament would look like in 40 years’ time, they would almost certainly have been profoundly wrong in their predictions. We are in a similar position for very different reasons. However, these dramatic changes are affecting all countries and democracies, and we have to find new methods of communication between the general public and legislators; there are many ways in which it can be done.

I endorse absolutely what has been said about language, and have mentioned it many times in the past so I will not repeat myself. What we ought to adopt in our mindset is that change is generally a good thing and that we should foster an open and encouraging approach to it. People can find good reasons for not doing something, rather than the other way around. When we say, “We cannot do that because—”, we need to question that “because” and decide whether it is in fact a problem that can be solved instead.

The issue I want to touch on now is that of the use of Hansard. If noble Lords take my point about people dipping into newspapers and so on, given that the amount of information now available is enormous, everyone looks at the superficial bits and then wants to get below only some of that. The best way to check this is to find something you are not interested in and ask yourself how you would find out about it if you wanted to be interested. I use for my own case the example of football because I am singularly uninterested in it. For a Member of Parliament with a football club in the constituency, that was seriously bad news. The point is that if I want to know the score of a particular game, I would know how to find it quite easily. If I want to know more detail about the game, what I need is access to routes to find it. The importance of Hansard in this cannot be overstated. For years, literally hundreds of years, we have produced Hansard as a written record of the House which people have a right to see. That is absolutely reasonable. What we need now is a means by which people can find out roughly what has happened and then go into more depth if they need to. That is why the blog is important. We need to see these things as being linked.

For example, when I posted an entry about the Venables case yesterday, I included a complete quotation from the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, because I thought it was profoundly important. I wrote only three or four lines about the case, attached the full quote from the noble and learned Baroness, and then provided a link to the relevant Hansard. Some 1,300 people have already visited that entry. What I want them to do, although I do not know if they will, is to go on to look at Hansard. Given that, Hansard needs to be presented more like a newspaper website where you can look either at a summary—one of the recommendations of the report is that Hansard should have summaries of speeches and debates—or be led into a full reading if that is what you want.

Only a minority of people will want that, but it is important. Similarly, I posted an entry this morning on dangerous dogs. Actually, I did it last night, but because you can post-date entries it went on to the website this morning at about 8 o’clock. I know that it has had hundreds of visits already. I also linked that to the Home Office report and asked people for their views on the consultation document that has been published. That is how we link these things up. If we have a Hansard that is visual—that shows pictures of the debate—has short summaries, relevant links and a complete reading of the debate, if that is what people want, we give them the options that they need in today’s rather complex world.

At the end of all this, we want people to be fully engaged. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, took part in my genuinely innocent blog on home education, where I suddenly discovered that I had tapped into a great deal of feeling on the part of a lobby group. I am very much in favour of lobbies, so I congratulated it, but it piled in. As the noble Baroness said, some of the comments are intemperate.

I will talk briefly about the at times intemperate nature of these things. It is important to remember that a blog—the original term was “web log”—is a public meeting place without walls. One of the reasons I set mine up was my frustration at the collapse of public meetings, and blogs allow you to communicate with people. I have a more dramatic example. The noble Baroness described the comments as intemperate at times. I do not know how she would describe some of the comments that I received when I was an MP. One guy railed about just about everything about me in the most offensive language imaginable. I was minded to strike it off, but I was rather struck by the last sentence, which says a lot: “However, I have to say, it is a very great privilege to be able to address this matter with you”. I thought, “Okay, so it’s worth it”. I think we all know this, particularly people who have done the elected politician bit and have had to deal with complex meetings.

The noble Baroness, to her immense credit, went along to the public meeting for home educators, which was held in the House. I had to leave before she spoke, but they were incredibly deferential with me, having been quite rude from time to time on the blog. That is what tends to happen, and frankly I do not have a problem with that. We obviously have to edit and delete particularly offensive comments, but by and large we have to have a thick skin about some of the things that are said, because we take it as part of the political process and it should not worry us too much. When people are not addressing you in person, they tend to be much ruder than when they see you in person. I always think that this is a bit odd, because I tend to be the other way around; I am terribly polite in letters but rather more direct in my speech. There we go; we are all a bit different, I guess.

Let us try to merge the processes about which we are talking. Let us make Hansard a much more central part of our ways of communicating what is happening in the House. It should be linked into Bills and into some of the other suggestions in the report about how you can make your views known. All those things need to be in it. We can do a lot of this without having great debates and discussions first. It is significant that Lords of the Blog was created without any debate or discussion about whether it should be started, other than through the committee process and with the Officers of the House. We could do a lot more like that. We need to be very positive.

We could also make more progress on interviews. I did an interview with Nick Robinson, which I hope to follow up with one with Alastair Campbell, although that will probably have to wait until after the election, for obvious reasons. The links to interviews can be very important, too, and perhaps we should think more widely about them. Why do not Members of the House of Lords who have a blog interview someone with a particular interest in a Bill and invite comment on that? We must think laterally and allow it to happen. That is a very important part of it.

I do not want to say anything else other than to thank the committee for an excellent report. Let us just try to take it forward.

My Lords, I am sorry that the noble Earl, Lord Errol, has left, because my first confession is that I, too, find it extremely difficult to read small type, so although I am reasonably wired up—or whatever the right expression is—I am dying for someone to invent a PDA that is not a Blackberry but an elderberry, which would have much larger type that I could deal with more effectively.

The next confession that I must make is that I was involved in the Puttnam commission set up by the Hansard Society—indeed, I am now a vice-chair of the Hansard Society. The noble Lord, Lord Renton, who has led this exercise so magnificently, was also a member of that commission. I also want to mention that this afternoon we have had four Lord bloggers here. The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, was here earlier; the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, is here; but the godfather of us all—if that is the right expression—is the noble Lord, Lord Soley. He has led us into that territory in a way that has been extremely helpful and good for your Lordships' House. It has shown us to be a lot more open to an interactive connection with the public than the other place, which tends to be party pris on these issues. I am proud that we have been able to make a real advance in that respect.

There has been comparatively little reference this afternoon to the second report before us, which, because it is more recent, is important in ways that have been less apparent. It includes the Government's response to the original report and, in appendix 2, contains a helpful assessment of recommendations and progress. Before the completion of Committee this afternoon, I hope that we will get some indication of what happens next.

This House is famous for good debates and for good reports. It is not so famous for indicating what action should take place on those reports. Paragraph 7 refers to,

“the Leader of the House, Baroness Royall of Blaisdon, responding to a question about the newly-formed National Council for Democratic Renewal”.

I challenge anyone here to tell me who is on the National Council for Democratic Renewal, and what the council is doing. The whole context of this debate is within that very important framework. We are all concerned about democratic renewal.

I do not know whether the Chairman of Committees can answer that question. It is rather unfair to put it to him, because it is not his department. However, I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, will be able to tell us not only who is on the National Council for Democratic Renewal, but why it is called a national council—I understand that it is actually a Cabinet sub-committee, which in our plural society is scarcely a national council—whether it has been meeting regularly, what it is doing and whether it is responsible for the considerable delay in any action on these extremely important issues.

That brings me to my important point about the main report before us, Are the Lords Listening? Frankly, it is not very encouraging that it has taken from 15 July 2009 to 10 March 2010 for us to have a full debate on this report. I know that there have been other debates in the Chamber. The noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, led a debate that touched on these issues. There have been other debates, Questions, and so on. It is implicit in the important report before us that we need greater topicality. If the House of Lords is to make itself relevant to the issues of the day, the number of months that have gone by before the report came before us is not encouraging. The electorate in general are understandably concerned that we will take so much time over issues that we will miss the trick in topicality.

The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, about the cohesive approach of Members of the House as regards the staff team of experts is extremely important. I have not detected that point in the report, but his contribution on it was extremely interesting. There have been important improvements in the cohesive approach of the two ends of the building in the past few years. That was a central theme of the Puttnam report. The noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, did not refer to it this afternoon, but I know he feels very strongly that we need to work more closely together, given our major responsibility as a cohesive whole Parliament to adopt a holistic approach to hold the Government to account. The officers of the two Houses work together in the Group on Information for the Public (GIP), but it is high time that Members of both Houses looked again at that.

The report’s recommendations are not controversial and there has been broad support for them all around the Committee this afternoon. The important point concerns what the action plan will be. That brings us back to the House authorities as, to a large extent, this is not a government responsibility, although there is a government response here and the Government have a role in some areas. I look forward very much to hearing the Chairman of Committees speak on that issue.

A number of Members have referred to the education and outreach activities. That is, of course, a combined operation and a very good one. It has hugely improved since the Puttnam report was published. I pay tribute to the staff involved in that exercise. The noble Lord, Lord Haskel, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Deech and Lady Gibson, referred to school visits. I had the privilege of attending a very large meeting—one of the largest meetings in the whole of my political career—of a county federation of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes. My contribution was somewhat truncated because I was due to be followed by Mr Bob Flowerdew of “Gardeners’ Question Time”, and the participants on that occasion thought that that was slightly more relevant to their primary concerns than what the House of Lords did. However, these occasions are hugely valuable. I pay tribute to the extent to which the officers of the House support us in that effort. I especially endorse what has been said about the Lord Speaker. Your Lordships’ House has led the way on this. Until the new Speaker arrived at the other end, the Commons was way behind us in this respect. It has caught up a little now, and good luck to it, but we have made huge improvements in that regard.

Language has come up regularly as a theme in the Committee this afternoon. This should be reviewed. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, about the use of the word “Lords”. “Peers” has the advantage of being gender neutral, but I do not know how one would address a Committee using that term. I suppose that one could say, “My fellow Peers”. However, we could address that issue in other ways. The example was given earlier of debates in which we move for Papers and then withdraw the Motion at the end. I dare a Member of the Committee not to withdraw a Motion for Papers to see whether there is a vote and it is passed. Where do the Papers come from? It would be very interesting to see what happened on such an occasion.

I am a great enthusiast for this amazing building. I am really a failed architect—one of my many failed careers before I fell into evil company among politicians. I love this fantastic building, which is built for ceremony, but there is an issue about the red dressing gowns. After all, that is only one day in the legislative year; the rest of the year we are all in working garb. There is a good case for us to look at that. I do not buy the idea of moving into Westminster Hall—that has been suggested—for the very good practical reasons contained in the Library note. It would be extremely difficult to organise the security. It would also be difficult for Her Majesty the Queen and there would be all sorts of other difficulties. However, to give the press the opportunity constantly to show us in our extraordinary garb is quite absurd. I must confess—another confession—that I have not yet attended in full garb and my wife and I have decided that we will not do so until the tumbrels are outside and someone has sharpened the guillotine. Then we will come for the last one.

Engagement with young people is extremely important. This week, there was a report that the 18 to 24 age group is simply not registering to vote, let alone going to vote. Nearly half of them are not going to register, for goodness sake. Therefore, our not speaking their language and our not being in a position to respond to their interests is extremely important. The evidence points not just to the way in which we behave in the two Houses of Parliament, but also to a feeling of disconnection—they feel that they have no impact, and that they will not get any result. Having seen an extremely important report from the British Academy this morning on the choice of electoral systems, I am led to believe that having so few people having any real impact with their vote is part of the problem. I leave that on one side for others to consider.

The noble Lord, Lord Parekh, made a very important point about familiarity. It is not a given that greater familiarity with something will make people more favourable to it. We must be very careful. By opening up the way in which we operate, we do not automatically make people think that we are doing a better job. We have actually to do a better job. It was very interesting that a noble Lord referred today to the need for more pre-legislative scrutiny. That goes right across Parliament. Parliament has to work better before it can be seen to be working better. We cannot just invent a new image for Parliament. That applies to both Houses. The emphasis on outcomes by the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, was absolutely right. In that context, the report and the work of the Information Committee, which is hugely valuable, are part of a much wider exercise. It concerns the reform of how we at both ends of this building do our job. It is important that we should see it like that. It is part of the comprehensive modernisation of this House.

The noble Lord, Lord Haskel, made an extremely interesting point about the change of culture and of mindset. We are a working House. We need to show ourselves to be a good working House; we are, in many respects—I do not deny that—but there are ways in which we can improve. The way in which the Lord Speaker has led the discussion about how we, too, can change the way in which we operate is extremely important. Last week, as many of your Lordships will know, the House of Commons voted on the Select Committee report on ways in which it could improve its working methods. We will have to do that sooner rather than later.

I turn to the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam. The disenchantment and disengagement with your Lordships' House, with parliamentary democracy and with politics in general, is very serious. We should not delude ourselves that because it has faded a little, last year’s so-called crisis over expenses and allowances has gone away and people have lost interest. The evidence of the Hansard Society audit last week is that it has not gone away. It was and remains one of the big talking points, but it goes much deeper than simply worrying about remuneration. It is a general feeling of us and them. That degree of disengagement is very serious.

I think that change is our ally. I cannot remember who first said that, but I believe it to be true. The noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said, “Let go”—but we must let go in a way that creates more transparency, so that we can be seen to be accountable.

In my last few words, I certainly do not suggest that this is the right moment to talk about the composition of your Lordships' House. However, the question will not go away; it is still there. In the mean time, we have had two extremely interesting and important reports from the Information Committee. We all welcome its work, and this has been a fascinating debate. I am sure that when we receive the response from others, it will continue to be so.

My Lords, it is a privilege to take part in this debate and to respond to the report on behalf of Her Majesty's Official Opposition. I join other noble Lords in paying tribute not only to my noble friend Lord Renton but to all members of the committee who contributed to this outstanding report. My noble friend Lord Renton has led from the front in the area of technology. I looked on the web and found a very fetching YouTube performance, as well as blogging. The YouTube performance was distinctly better than that of the Prime Minister recently. It was a real progress and a good example of what we can achieve.

As noble Lords mentioned, the first report of the committee was an ice-breaker. The area of communication and engagement is front and centre of the agenda. Some very positive things are happening. The Information Committee is concerned with the Parliamentary Information and Communications Technology service, the Library service, the information service including Hansard and public information, bicameral services and the parliamentary archives. As a relatively new Member of this House, with experience in another place, I have been hugely impressed with the support received from these departments and services. The dedication, professionalism and courtesy of the staff are enormously impressive and must be recognised and celebrated at every opportunity.

In common with several Committee members, I have had the privilege of welcoming guests here, and also visiting schools and colleges to talk about the work that we do. Last week, I welcomed to this great building a group of sixth-formers from Emmanuel College, Gateshead. I was struck by two things. First, they were incredibly knowledgeable about the House of Lords and its workings. Doubtless that was because it was part of the curriculum—they were working on a project—and also because of access to the internet. They were also immensely grateful for the red bags of goodies that were prepared and given to them to take away: that made a difference as well. In the areas that puzzled them, there was only one question that I had difficulty in answering. They asked why it was that after Question Time had taken place, which they had observed from the gallery, the House emptied from 200 down to 10 at a speed which would grace any fire drill. I found it difficult to provide an adequate answer: it might be something to which more established Members of your Lordships' House might turn their attention.

Mention was made of the excellent website TheyWorkForYou. That has helped journalists to keep track of when we are speaking. However, TheyWorkForYou will not cover this debate, because we are in Committee. That is a disappointment. Perhaps my noble friend Lord Renton, on behalf of his committee and others, could take that up with the excellent people who run the website, because Grand Committees are not covered.

As one would expect from an Information Committee report specialising in communication, I found the annual report one of the easiest documents to digest that I have ever read. That may be because I have become used to studying government legislation over the past few months. In particular, Appendix 2 sets out the recommendations in a very clear form. The Government might take note of this as a way in which data can be presented. Of course, one of the downsides of presenting accessible information in a transparent way is that it becomes immediately apparent what has been implemented and what has not. Huge numbers of recommendations are being progressed, others are being considered, but I have yet to see one that has been implemented. That would be encouraging. However, as an example of how things should be presented, the report is outstanding.

I turn to the points made in the report. Engagement with the media is central to all that we do. I know that there is a wish for us to communicate directly with the electorate. However, for the next 100 years or so I am sure that we will rely on the media, and so having a constructive relationship with them and making it as easy as possible for them to do their job is a sensible approach. Having been interviewed in the “cupboard” a few times myself, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, has made a wise point. Personally, I rather like the idea of an Oscar winner designing a set for the studio of your Lordships’ House. If that were to be proposed, I think that it would be very welcome indeed.

The report begins thus:

“Parliament’s reputation is at a low point”.

Media coverage about Peers’ allowances and MPs’ expenses and the suspension of two Members of the House of Lords has had a negative impact on people’s perception of Parliament. I am comforted that this opening makes us all deeply uncomfortable. That is the point from which we start: that we have a problem. The fact is that in 2009-10 a Parliament which has been meeting on this site since 1215 when Magna Carta was signed has, almost 800 years later, reached a low point. It is a particularly difficult problem. Granted King John probably did not have to contend with a Freedom of Information Act, let alone the Daily Telegraph, but the fact is that we are at a low point and therefore action needs to be taken. That is what is required, and I am pleased that my right honourable friend David Cameron has made some clear statements about it:

“People are fed up with politicians hiding behind the cloak of independent inquiries and endless reviews. They want us to stand up, grasp the issue by the scruff of the neck and start dealing with it”.

He has set out in response a number of proposals to fix our broken politics. He has also said that we do not believe that an arrogant or controlling Government sitting in London passing endless rules and regulations actually make things better. In fact, they can often make matters worse. That is why we want to embark on the most ambitious shift of power from the centre as a way of engaging people in local communities that has been seen for generations. We will cut Ministers’ salaries by 5 per cent. We will have a pay freeze for all Members of Parliament. We will take a long, hard look, as they say, at the gold-plated pension scheme operating for Ministers and parliamentarians. We will cut the number of MPs by 10 per cent because we have one of the largest legislatures in the world.

As well as cleaning up Parliament, we need to empower it to fulfil its proper constitutional role of holding the Executive to account. There would be more emphasis on scrutinising how existing legislation is being implemented rather than proposing rafts of new legislation. There will be a focus on simplifying government and the tax system, not only because it would save money, but because complexity in any system obscures what is actually happening and makes it less effective. It makes it less accessible to the lay person. The fact that 3,700 pieces of legislation went through this place between 2007 and 2008 is a case in point. How on earth is a Parliament made up of 1,200 Members supposed to be able to scrutinise that amount of legislation going through at such a high rate?

We will introduce the power of recall to allow voters in constituencies to kick out MPs in mid-Parliament who are proved to be guilty of serious wrong-doing. We will introduce more open primaries to give every constituent the right to choose their candidates for election. We will create a right of initiative nationally whereby any petition that can collect 100,000 signatures will be eligible to be formally debated in Parliament. Any petition with a million signatures will allow members of the public to table a Bill that could end up being voted on in Parliament.

These examples are not in any way gimmicks, they are very much ways of engaging people, particularly young people. The fact is that young people using forms of social media could collect signatures for a Bill and have a direct influence on Parliament. It is something that will invigorate our system. We will also introduce a public reading stage for Bills to give the public an opportunity to comment on new legislation. We will limit the number of special advisers to protect the independence of the Civil Service, which is one of the most important guarantees of the independence and scrutiny powers of our system of government.

I want also to comment on the remarks made by Timothy Kirkhope, Leader of the Conservative Party Group in the European Parliament and vice chairman of the European Conservatives and Reformists group, as well as being a distinguished former Member of the other place and a Home Office Minister. He has made the point that one of the biggest constitutional changes in our history has been our membership of the European Union, and yet it has passed Parliament by largely unnoticed. We are hopeless at scrutinising European legislation.

Are we debating the committee’s reports or his party’s manifesto?

We are debating the committee’s reports, which talk about how we can improve the way in which Parliament communicates with the electorate. My speech is entirely in keeping with that. European legislation has an impact on people who watch what we do, and they want to see how Parliament scrutinises it. The point has been made that we are very poor at scrutinising European legislation, and we want to ensure that it is properly scrutinised. David Cameron has said that we will give the House of Commons more control over its own timetable so that the habit that has become the norm in the timetabling and guillotining of Motions—truncating debate and scrutiny places an additional responsibility on your Lordships’ House to deal with the inadequacies of legislation—will be tackled. There will be more free votes, and we will limit the use of the royal prerogative so that Parliament is involved.

I am a little bemused. Will the noble Lord’s proposals come before the Information Committee, because that is the whole ambience of our debate this afternoon?

I would be delighted for them to be considered by the Information Committee, if the committee wished to consider them ahead of a general election. The point is that Parliament has an image problem. Its procedures are in question and its reputation is in doubt among the public whom it is there to serve, and there need to be some radical responses. It is entirely appropriate in Parliament and on occasions such as this, given that we are weeks away from a general election, to set out alternative views on how it could be restored.

Finally, the report by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, and others, including Members of Parliament in the public eye, concluded, as has already been mentioned, that we need to create a Parliament that is accessible and understandable. That is the challenge for the next five years. These points are a response to that challenge. The Lords are certainly listening, and people are certainly watching.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, and the Information Committee for the reports, which I have found absolutely fascinating. When I read the report from the summer, I thought that when I find myself on the Back Benches again, it is one of the committees that I should try to get on to because it is so interesting. It made me rethink my view of how both Houses of Parliament, and indeed government, should communicate with the public. Although I did not start out thinking this, I have long thought of the traffic as one-way. Yet reading these reports I realise that it is very much two-way. It is not just on our terms but on the terms of the public. As the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, says, therein lie risk, letting go and the whole issue of control. The report was absolutely fascinating—and you will not often hear that from a Minister commenting on reports.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bates, about the committee encouraging the fundamental values of openness and two-way communication, which the Government strongly support. The committee members include, of course, the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, whose points about parliamentary language and electronic alerts I will take back to the Cabinet Office. This report rightly builds on the foundations of the group he chaired, which I now know included the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for the Hansard Society.

The House has made good progress on some of these recommendations. Building on those foundations, the latest report of the Information Committee reminds us that there is still some way to go to deliver the vision of a Parliament fully engaged with the public it serves. That was reinforced by several noble Lords. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, raised the issue, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson. We heard my noble friend Lord Haskel recount the work he does with many other noble Lords in the successful outreach programme and as an ambassador, and the telling responses he had from the students he spoke to.

The Information Committee clearly states that increased transparency strengthens trust and is key to democratic renewal. The committee has never been so right, as these are unprecedentedly difficult and buffeting times for Parliament. The noble Lord, Lord Renton, underlined the importance of the democratic renewal process, as did the noble Lord, Lord Bates. The Government wholeheartedly share that view. The Prime Minister himself said in his Liberty speech of October 2007:

“It is clear that to protect individual liberty we should have the freest possible flow of information between government and the people”.

He said in his Statement on constitutional renewal in the other place on 10 June last year that:

“Democratic reform cannot be led in Westminster alone. It must be led by engagement with the public. That is part of the lesson of the last month: the public want to be, and should be, part of the solution. So we must build a process that engages citizens themselves, people of all parties and none, of all faiths and no faith, from every background and every part of the country”.—[Official Report, Commons, 10/6/09; col. 797.]

Those sentiments were widely welcomed across the House and in the other place.

The Government therefore welcome the Information Committee’s truly first-rate report, Are the Lords Listening? Creating Connections between People and Parliament, and welcome the proactive and practical steps that have been recommended. Most of the recommendations are matters for the House itself and for its officers. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, will spring into action as soon as I resume my seat. The Government would not want to encroach on the prerogatives of Parliament.

However, as my noble friend Lady Royall promised in her speech in our debate on 16 June, the Government are very willing to share with the House our experience and expertise from having to address many of the same issues in the relationship between the Government and the public. I am glad to say that officers of the House wasted no time in taking my noble friend up on her offer. Indeed, the Government’s Director of Digital Engagement was approached before he could leave the Lobby that very evening. I am pleased to be able to tell the Committee that those contacts and the other discussions emerging from them, including the involvement of the National Archives and parliamentary counsel, have continued ever since. From the comments made this afternoon, perhaps they have not continued at the pace that some noble Lords would want, but they have continued and are increasing all the time. I shall return to the point in a moment.

The report mentions the work that the Prime Minister has asked Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who led the creation of the world wide web, and Professor Nigel Shadbolt to undertake. They are to lead the opening up of access to government data on the web. The first phase of this work culminated in the launch, on 21 January, of data.gov.uk. This provides a single, easy to use, online point of access to government data. It already contains nearly 3,000 data sets on subjects ranging from ambulances to animal feed. The Government have introduced a new licence for core Crown copyright material on data.gov.uk, which explains the right to reuse the data. Noble Lords have talked about the right of individuals and lobbyists to take and reuse information that can be obtained from parliamentary sites. Data.gov.uk makes clear the rights to reuse the data, including for commercial purposes, and is designed to be interoperable with the widely recognised Commons creative licences. Importantly, more than 2,750 people have registered to join the developer community and work with us to improve the service and use the data. Even more important is that we are seeing the emergence of new, innovative applications and products as creative people of all ages outside government—we have talked a lot about young people this afternoon—start using government data. The particular creativity of young people was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, and by my noble friend Lord Parekh.

There have been many innovative applications. For instance, Jeff Gillett has built an “ASBOrometer”, an anti-social behaviour order application for Apple iPhones that shows ASBO data by local area. For a while, this was the most downloaded free application from the Apple App Store. That is one way of using government information. The Newspaper Club has shown a postcode paper that provides a range of data on your local area, from allotments to travel times. Such applications add real value and provide new insights that would otherwise have remained untapped and hidden in government departments.

The noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, made a similar point in his reference to a huge well of hidden information. He was talking about the House of Lords, and how important it is to free up that information. We could say the same for government. My noble friend Lord Soley talked about the importance of letting information go out freely, and the creative use that will be made of it. In Smarter Government, published on 7 December, the Government set out their plans to extend data.gov.uk work into local government, set out the overall principles that would apply to the release of public data, and promised the release of further data sets in the months to come.

Improving the flow of information between Parliament and government is a key theme of the report. The benefits of this are clear: improved efficiency, greater effectiveness and a consistent view of information as it makes its way between government and Parliament. The Information Committee’s report made three recommendations for action by the Government, and I am pleased to tell the Committee that we have accepted and are working on all three. This answers the question of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, about what comes next.

The first of the committee’s recommendations for action by government concerns common information standards to improve the flow of information and to enhance the public’s ability to reuse that information. The Government are working with House officials on this. As we said in our response, we believe that Written Answers, currently moved from Whitehall to Westminster on paper, would be a good place to start. A number of government departments are interested in trialling a new system, and we are reviewing potential solutions from two technology providers. We will continue to work with parliamentary officials to seek a sound, cost-effective and affordable solution.

Secondly, the committee recommended that the Government produce Bills in an electronic format that complies with open standards and is readily reusable. The noble Earl, Lord Erroll, raised this point. As we all know, the Bill process is complex, time-pressured and draws on a range of stakeholders. Therefore, working with the appropriate officers of the House, we have brought together the relevant parts of government and are now working on the detailed standards, the revised processes, the technology requirements and the implementation plan, as well as the business case—the costing case—for the necessary investment.

Thirdly, the Government support the principles of producing informal documentation to show how a Bill would change the original legislation—some noble Lords raised this—although there are a number of practical difficulties to be resolved. Therefore, the Government suggested that a proof of concept be developed to show what could be done by testing this as an idea, and to gather feedback before any major investment is made. I am delighted to report that, combining the expertise and technology of the National Archives and Parliament, we have set up a web-based proof of concept linking the Digital Economy Bill to the latest available texts of the Acts it would amend from the statute law database. The noble Earl mentioned this. I pay tribute to the officials of the National Archives, Parliament, BIS and DCMS who have worked hard over the winter to bring this proof of concept to life. These pages have now been made public on Parliament’s Labs site and have already generated feedback. Feedback from noble Lords and from the public will be invaluable in informing us how best to proceed with this recommendation. I take the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, on following a Bill through online. Please let us know what you think, and how this could be improved for the future.

The Information Committee also asked how and when recommendations can be incorporated in Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s work on government data. The principles behind Sir Tim’s work are already reflected in Parliament’s work. I pay tribute to the work by Parliament's officers on the Procedural Data Programme, which has developed invaluable core reference data such as a unified Members names service. Parliament’s data are a matter for Parliament. However, I know that Sir Tim would be delighted if Parliament was able to put references to its data on data.gov.uk, so that whenever people look they can find parliamentary data as well as government data.

I pick up one or two points made directly to me as the representative of the Government this afternoon. The noble Lord, Lord Renton, said that he would like to see the Cabinet Office do more work to match the work done by PICT. I hope I can reassure him that the Cabinet Office is working constantly with PICT, the National Archives and the Bill teams to create the technology to which he referred. It has been a complex process and has involved a number of relevant stakeholders. We have shared expertise, technical knowledge and lessons learnt from other government initiatives. For example, the commendable consultation papers have been invaluable to this process and have led to the delivery of the proof of concept for the Bill about which I have just spoken. This group will continue to work together and the Government have offered to forge links through data.gov.uk.

The noble Lords, Lord Puttnam, Lord Parekh and Lord Soley, the noble Baronesses, Lady Gibson and Lady Coussins, and the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, talked about the language that it is important to use when you are trying to communicate with the public, particularly with young people. I am reminded by my officials that language is not only about clarity and relevance, but also the medium and the channels of communication that are used. It is also about the community.

The Government must continue to work with young people where they are, not where we are, by using social media. The Government have done a lot to harness platforms such as Bebo and the Big Think campaign which asks young people how they want to communicate and gets them involved in practical processes. It listens to their aspirations, and we have had over half a million responses. The MoD RAF video diary on YouTube has won awards for recruitment. Photographs of the work being done by DfID and the FCO have been made public by using Flickr. On outreach, the Government pay tribute to the tremendous work being done on this by parliamentarians both here and in the Commons. Many noble Lords have taken part in this work over several years, and I pay tribute to the leadership of the Lord Speaker in the programme.

The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, was rather scathing about the National Council for Democratic Renewal. It is a very significant Cabinet sub-committee. I understand that it was set up last June to discuss democratic renewal and related issues, along with the means by which the Government can take forward the agenda on engagement and renewal by including, for instance, citizens’ diaries. The members of the committee are the Prime Minister, the Leader of the House of Lords, the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and Lord President of the Council, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the Secretary of State for Justice, the Secretary of State for the Home Office, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Secretary of State for International Development, the Secretary for Communities and Local Government, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the Secretary of State for Scotland, the Secretary of State for Wales, the Chief Whip and the Attorney-General. That is the National Council for Democratic Renewal.

Can the noble Baroness tell us when this gathering of the great and the good last met, what it has done, why we have not seen any results, and whether it is responsible for the long delays in dealing with these issues? I hesitate to ask the noble Baroness to speak on behalf of such an amazing array of talent, but it is scarcely a national council. Actually, all it is is a gathering of Members of the Cabinet.

The noble Lord will know that Cabinet committees are quite significant in that they are the political leadership for government policy and direction, so they are not insignificant bodies by any means. I am not sure when the council last met and I will seek to let the noble Lord know. He asked what it has done. Many of the practical outcomes that I have outlined in my contribution are the result of that political leadership.

I shall conclude. We face obvious hurdles such as constrained budgets as we move forward. Noble Lords have talked about facilitating a culture change, which represents another hurdle across Parliament, Westminster and government. Change does not occur overnight. However, there are already signs of progress and great potential is evident. The committee’s report kindly pinpoints particular areas in which collaboration between the Government and Parliament can produce real gains, and shows that it strengthens crucial connections between ourselves and the people we serve—the public.

Perhaps I might ask the Minister for help on one issue. In the 2005 report from the committee on which the noble Lords, Lord Renton and Lord Tyler, also sat, we made eight recommendations regarding the televising of Parliament. I will address recommendation 36, which states:

“The ‘democratic value’ principles contained in the BBC's own Charter Renewal document imply the need for a significant increase in resources to BBC Parliament … The BBC should, in the coming months, provide a clear and substantial action plan for its development and for a targeted and ambitious increase in its impact”.

A year later, we did an audit and sadly came to the conclusion that no such action plan had been prepared by the BBC. At a moment when the BBC is looking at cuts and changes, can we assume that this important area of its work is being developed and is ring-fenced, and that the action plan that was asked for five years ago will be implemented and presented to Parliament?

My noble friend raises a very important point. I will certainly come back to him when I have found out what progress has been made.

Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, was being too precise in expecting the Minister to be able to say when the National Council for Democratic Renewal last met. I have a much simpler question: has it met at all?

Yes, it has, my Lords.

When did it meet?

It met in October, my Lords.

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to wind up this important and thought-provoking debate. I thank all noble Lords who have spoken. I congratulate in particular the noble Lord, Lord Renton, for his introduction to the debate, and his committee on this report, as well as on the helpful annual report for 2008-09. Now more than ever, it is incumbent on us to ensure that the public understand and engage with the important work carried out both in this House and the other place. The committee's inquiry was wide-ranging, and detailed assessment of connections between people and Parliament, and the benefits of this approach are clear to see. Speaking for the Administration, I know that the committee's report has helped to focus minds, and we now have a comprehensive and ambitious action plan in place.

Rather than list the huge number of initiatives in the action plan, many of which have been mentioned by noble Lords, I will summarise some of the latest and most interesting developments. One of the most effective ways of connecting people and Parliament is to encourage direct communication between Peers and the public. One of the most successful initiatives is the Lord Speaker's Peers in Schools programme, which goes from strength to strength. This has attracted universal praise from every speaker in the debate. The number of schools visited by noble Lords has risen from 96 in the last financial year to 125 this year. Letters have recently gone out to all schools about next year's programme, and already we have received a large number of expressions of interest. I congratulate all noble Lords who take part, and urge others to get involved in the programme and in our other outreach activities. The Information Office will shortly produce a leaflet outlining the activities and explaining how noble Lords can take part.

Another valuable channel of communication has been the Lords of the Blog site. Not only is it a good way for noble Lords to keep readers abreast of developments and issues in your Lordships' House, it also allows members of the public to feed back their views. I was particularly interested in the intensive exchange of views after the noble Lord, Lord Norton, who is a prolific blogger, asked for readers' opinions on a controversial part of what is now the Policing and Crime Act 2009. More recently, the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and the noble Lord, Lord Soley, blogged about home education in advance of the Second Reading of the Children, Schools and Families Bill, and sparked a staggering number of comments from the public. I was very interested to hear the speeches of both the noble Baroness and the noble Lord on this subject. I appreciate that not all the comments were entirely complimentary: however, this kind of consultation and engagement may be a harbinger of things to come. I understand that research is under way to evaluate Lords of the Blog, and to identify potential new audiences and how best to reach them. In the mean time, I urge noble Lords to become bloggers on this site.

It is also important that members of the public who actually visit the House of Lords should receive a high-quality visitor experience. With this in mind, I am pleased to report that the Administration and Works Committee, which I chair, agreed yesterday to improve Black Rod’s entrance to make it a more efficient and welcoming facility. There will be an extra search lane and camera, as well as vastly improved waiting room facilities. In the long run, we also hope to build a canopy outside the entrance to keep waiting visitors dry. The first stages of this work will take place over the Summer Recess, which I am sure noble Lords will welcome. We need support from English Heritage for the canopy.

Two initiatives will make it easier for people to follow proceedings in your Lordships’ House. Various noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Soley, referred to this in particular. First, the Information Office and Hansard are developing a web-based update on the House’s business, which would provide a brief summary of proceedings in the Chamber, enriched incrementally by a variety of hypertext links to proceedings and to contextual information, including the online glossary. This should make your Lordships’ proceedings far more accessible. The second innovation is the presentation of Hansard text and audio-visual proceedings of both Houses side by side on a web page, a project which I understand is on track for June this year. I hope that this will prove a popular and useful tool for the public and, indeed, for Members.

The Information Committee also made a number of recommendations on filming in the Palace. In particular, it wanted,

“a presumption in favour of factual filming throughout the House of Lords, except in specific areas”,

and a revised leaflet that sets out the filming regulations. I am therefore very pleased to inform your Lordships that the Administration and Works Committee agreed yesterday to much shorter and simpler regulations, which state that,

“the presumption is that appropriate requests for filming will be granted”.

We have had to retain a number of important caveats, but I think the Information Committee will agree, once the new regulations have been published, that they are much crisper and more positive than the existing ones, which are positively Byzantine. The new regulations are now in force and will be included in the next edition of the filming leaflet.

The Information Committee also asked for a more appropriate room near the Chamber in which noble Lords could be interviewed. As your Lordships know, accommodation is currently in very short supply, and there are already three convenient places for interviews: the Peers’ Lobby, the Television Interview Room and the Media Room. I take on board the point which the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, made about the furnishings in the interview room, and I will see whether anything can be done about them. At this stage, we have not been able to provide an additional room, but I am glad to report that the Administration and Works Committee has agreed that interviews with noble Lords may take place in the Moses Room when it is not in use for other things. This location has the same geographical convenience as the Peers’ Lobby, but without the background noise.

Finally, I draw noble Lords’ attention to “People and Parliament: Connecting with Communities”, the major outreach project that is being led by the Parliamentary Archives. The aim is to raise awareness of the holdings of the archives and the history and work of Parliament by working outside the confines of Westminster. Partnerships have been formed with five regional archive services; and through exhibitions, regional events and web content, the project uses material held by these archive services and the Parliamentary Archives to explore the impact that Parliament has had on communities and the ways in which local people have influenced Parliament. The first regional events have been held with the project’s first partner, the Norfolk Record Office, and feedback has been very positive indeed. I look forward to the ongoing expansion of this very worthwhile project.

Before turning to questions that have been raised by noble Lords, I should mention the committee’s annual report for 2008-09. The report provides a very useful summary of the wide range of issues which the committee keeps under review, and reprints, as an appendix, the Government’s response to Are the Lords Listening? I am sure noble Lords will agree that the annual report amply demonstrates the ongoing value of the committee’s work, and I look forward to seeing the committee continue to thrive in the new Parliament.

I shall now address various points made by noble Lords in the debate. The noble Lord, Lord Renton, gave us a useful overview of the activities taking place in response to his committee’s report. I echo his warm words about the excellent work being carried out by PICT and the Education Service, and I agree that it is crucial for Members to get involved with outreach activities. On his suggestions about the composition of the Information Committee, which was also taken up by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, there are some complex procedural issues to consider, but I am sure that the Clerk of the Parliaments will pay close attention to what he has said.

The noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, spoke about the need for electronic alerts. I am pleased to say that people can now sign up for email alerts on the Parliament website, enabling them to follow Bills in which they are interested. Parliamentary language was also mentioned by the noble Lord and by many other speakers. I understand the points that have been made and encourage noble Lords to put specific proposals for change directly to the Procedure Committee, which I chair, for consideration. I have taken on board the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, about having to withdraw Motions for Papers—indeed I heard his speech in the debate instituted by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, the other day. I will put the issue to the committee, but I would mention that if possible we want to avoid divisible Motions on general debating days. That would not be what we want. However, I also note that the noble Lord, Lord Renton, has tabled a Motion for a specific debate on this subject.

The noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, made a thought-provoking speech about how Members of this House can seek contacts with public representatives outside Parliament. I have no particular suggestions to make on that front, but I am sure that noble Lords will take his views into account. The noble Lord, Lord Haskel, made the interesting point that a comprehensive web presence is not enough in itself. We need Members to act as ambassadors for the House. I quite agree, and that is exactly why the outreach strategy is so important. He mentioned the Hansard Society’s Audit of Political Engagement, which interestingly concluded that the more the public know about Parliament, the more they value it, thus surely demonstrating the importance of demystifying what we do here. I was also interested in his suggestion of self-appraisal by Members, which I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Renton, will have taken on board.

The noble Baroness, Lady Gibson, highlighted the valuable visits paid by noble Lords to women’s institutes, as indeed did the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. I agree that we should target a variety of groups across society and not just schools, although that effort is extremely important. The noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, spoke about the desirability of the public approaching Members on the basis of their areas of interest, and I think other noble Lords mentioned this. More information on areas of interest will be made available as part of the work to improve information about Members, which is already well under way on the website.

The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, made a number of interesting practical suggestions about making our proceedings more comprehensible. I fear that the idea of putting the text of amendments on the Annunciators may be difficult, merely because of the size of the Annunciator screens. This afternoon, for example, they are displaying the proceedings of both the Chamber and the Moses Room at the same time. But the suggestion that noble Lords should read out the text of their oral Questions when asking them is worth pursuing. On the issue of promoting the work of our committees, I point to the great improvements in recent years and the valuable work of our Press Office.

I was interested to note the emphasis placed by the noble Lord, Lord Soley, on the importance of providing website links on blogs to the relevant passages of Hansard and other supporting documentation. The brief summaries of proceedings that I mentioned earlier will start to do this and will become an accessible and valuable resource as they develop over time.

The noble Lord, Lord Parekh, spoke about the importance of engaging young people in the proceedings of Parliament and in the skills of debate. The debating events for young people which have taken place in the Chamber of the House have been very welcome in this regard, and I am sure that there will be more of those in the future. They are just one of the ways of looking at this subject.

The noble Earl, Lord Erroll, made a number of interesting points about the importance of some of our apparently arcane terminology and ceremonies, and I agree that we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I enjoyed the contribution by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. On what happens next, I have already mentioned the comprehensive action plan which the Administration has put together, and I am sure the Librarian will be happy to provide him and any other noble Lords with a copy. The Information Committee reviews the plan regularly. The noble Lord also mentioned pre-legislative scrutiny. This is an important tool, and I am sure we will all keep a close eye on how the Government’s new procedures develop.

I welcome the supportive remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Bates, on the content and layout of the action plan, and his positive view of the goody bags which the Information Office hands out to visiting school children and students. Beyond that, it would not be appropriate for me to comment on the merits of Conservative Party policy at this stage.

I know that I have not covered all the points that noble Lords have made, but I hope that I have covered the major ones. If any noble Lord would like me to look into anything further, please let me know. I apologise if I have missed any queries.

In conclusion, I thank the Information Committee once again for its two reports. It is clear that the Administration takes very seriously the need to enhance connections between people and Parliament, as shown by the comprehensive action plan that has been put in place. None the less, I encourage the committee to keep pressing for the implementation of its recommendations, and I look forward to seeing an ongoing programme of change over the coming months and years.

My Lords, I hope that colleagues will agree that we have had an excellent and interesting debate that did justice to our committee’s work. I jotted down a few aphorisms as the afternoon went on: greater use of technology is essential; young people do not wear watches—I had never thought of that before—our recommendations on the report are practical and possible; we must always remember to think not only of the puzzle but of the people behind the puzzle; and legitimacy derives from what people think of us. These were grand thoughts in the midst of a very serious and detailed debate. I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, my noble friend Lord Bates, the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, and the Chairman of Committees, the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, for what they have told us this afternoon.

I have just two points to make. I very much welcome the affirmation of support by the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, for the work which parliamentary and government officials are doing in partnership, and I look forward to seeing the result. Again, I welcome the news of the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, that new filming guidelines have just been agreed by the Administration and Works Committee, and that the facilities at Black Rod’s entrance will be improved.

I am sure that colleagues will be delighted to hear that I do not intend to synthesize all the speeches that have been made this afternoon into a brilliant five-minute summary, but I will respond to the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler: what happens next? As a chairman who has only a few more weeks in office in front of me, it is very much a question that I ask myself. I very much hope—a hope that comes from this afternoon—that there is a momentum of thought, support and encouragement for what the Information Committee is doing, and that, after the election, it will be enabled to go further both in implementing the report about which we have been talking today and in looking at other related subjects. I hope that that will be the future of the Information Committee, and I send it my good wishes. I warmly thank all colleagues who have taken part in the debate this afternoon.