David Lepper

Labour Party | Brighton Pavilion

Webcasting Parliament

As published in The House Magazine

There's a general consensus that one way to make Parliament more relevant to the wider population is to make it more accessible and this week the House of Commons and House of Lords launch a joint pilot project which will enable people to watch and listen to Parliamentary debates, live, via their personal computers.

It's a particularly important move for the House of Lords whose debates, though recorded for television, are rarely shown live on any channel and never in their entirety.

But it's important for the House of Commons, too, for as well as being able to watch live debates in the main chamber people will be able to see the experimental ‘parallel chamber' in Westminster Hall and hear Select Committees in action live.

It is 12 years since Parliament was first televised and I believe parliamentarians are justified in asking to what extent the present system really provides viewers – the citizens of this country – with an accurate picture of what goes on in Parliament? Does the concentration on what happens in the Chamber of the House of Commons give the public a somewhat distorted image of what Parliament is about and of the work done at Westminster by Members of both Houses.

“Gavel to gavel” coverage of the Commons often reveals areas of unoccupied green benches. Too little attention is paid to what goes on in the Committee Rooms on the first floor of the House of Commons or Portcullis House where Select Committees meet to question witnesses and Standing Committees scrutinise the details of a new Bill. Some might argue that while the Chamber is the dramatic set-piece it is the Committees which are at the heart of the work which is done in Parliament. And, of course, there is also the Westminster Hall Chamber where backbench MPs have an opportunity to debate issues of particular importance to them.

The one-year pilot project in the webcasting of Parliament – a recommendation last year of the Commons Select Committee on Broadcasting – gives an opportunity to test ways of developing that greater understanding of what Parliament is about.

In all the new web site www.parliamentlive.tv will offer four channels to choose from.

Audio-visual coverage of both Houses will be available 'gavel to gavel' on two dedicated lines, while two other channels will carry either audio only or audio-visual coverage of a variety of Select and Standing Committee and of Sittings of the House of Commons in Westminster Hall.

www.parliamentlive.tv will be given 'added value' by links through to Parliamentary websites carrying details of background documents, Agendas, Bills, Members' biographies and research papers. It is proposed that various 'options' will be offered over the course of the pilot scheme, including access to a simple archive retrieval system so that people can watch or listen to ‘live' debates when it suits them.

The Technology

In its recent report “ The Development of Parliamentary Broadcasting”, the House of Commons Select Committee on Broadcasting argued that access to Parliament via the internet should be available to everyone in the UK. The technology now being used has been chosen to achieve the widest possible reach.

The webcasts are being encoded at multiple bit rates so that they are accessible to the full range of PC users, from a home viewer with a 56k modem to people with access to high quality broadband or ISDN connections. All four channels are being delivered across the internet on the two most widely used PC player technologies, Windows Media and Real Player – and there's little chance of not being able to get on line when you want to: the system can serve as many as one million individual viewers at a time!

Importantly, the web site has also been designed to encourage feedback from users. Over the course of the coming year we will not just be setting out to establish how many people use the service, but what their needs are and how best they can be met. The two Houses will also need to look at the economics. The long term future of www.parliamentlive.tv has to be an informed decision.

David Lepper MP

Chair, Broadcasting Select Committee