House of Lords: Press Office

Lord St John of Bletso Excerpts

Wednesday 27th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord St John of Bletso (CB)]

My Lords, I join in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, for introducing this short and very topical debate. I was a member of the Information Committee in 2009 when it had a report on the findings of the People and Parliament inquiry, which looked at how the House of Lords could improve public understanding of its work and role, as well as how the public could better interact with this House and Parliament. Thankfully, many of its recommendations have been taken up. There has certainly been an improvement through the information office in increasing the coverage of the role of your Lordships’ House through social media, including the Twitter and Facebook pages, as well as better coverage of some of the two and a half hour debates. Sadly, however, as everyone has mentioned, the press all too often revel in and focus on negative publicity about your Lordships’ House. Few of the public are aware of the enormous depth of expertise here or of the enormous amount of time spent in revising, examining and improving legislation.

The briefing pack for this short debate gave an excellent overview of the work and objectives of the press and media office, especially regarding your Lordships’ Select Committee reports, but there are clear limits as to what it can do to proactively publicise in an apolitical manner the progress of legislation. The press team have done their best with media rebuttals of unfair and inaccurate negative publicity about the work of your Lordships’ House and certain individuals in it. I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that we should have a specialist communications expert to be responsible for rapid rebuttals.

The Lord Speaker’s regional outreach programme is to be commended as well as the new parliamentary education centre launched last year, which takes between 500 and 600 visitors a day, mostly school groups and teachers, and provides 20 workshops a day. I want to make just one brief recommendation: that Select Committee chairmen should take a bigger role in becoming public spokesmen for their inquiries. We certainly need to become much more proactive.