ePolitix.com speaks to director of information services John Pullinger about the growth of online services within Parliament and how MPs are taking politics to the people.
Could you outline your role?
It effectively splits into two distinct but complimentary roles. The first one, as librarian, is making sure that members and their staff – just in the House of Commons in this case – have got the information that they need in order to do their jobs properly.
That involves running the library, owning books, running the research service, which does analytical works for MPs. We did about 17,000 individual inquires last year. We put out, on a typical sitting week, about 50 publications that are on the intranet for members and their staff to look at. We run events, courses, all sorts of things that just help members understand the issues that they are dealing with in Parliament and in their constituencies.
The second half of the job is the one that has changed the most over the last three or four years. It is engaging the work of Parliament with the public. There are three main elements to that. The first is the website, the second is visitor services and thirdly, trying to reach all those people that don't necessarily use the website or come here. So it is trying to find clever ways of getting to the tens of millions of people that really ought to know about Parliament but don't.
And how do you reach those people?
If we take the website as an example, in 2004, the modernisation committee in the Commons called for a radical redesign of the website. Over the last three years, we have had several re-launches of the website. It has become increasingly interactive and appealing to a wider range of the public ever since.
How long have you been in Parliament?
I took up post in December 2004, which was a perfect time for this public engagement work. It was in January 2005 that the House of Commons voted to do something radical with the website. And they voted by 375 to 14 to do a whole bundle of things. The real headlines were fix the website, do something with schoolchildren, and send a guide to every 18-year-old on their birthday to tell them that they can vote now and that the House of Commons wants them to be involved.
Just this year, we have sent our millionth guide out to 18-year-olds, which very few people know about. Everybody gets a personal letter from the Speaker on their birthday. My scepticism was brushed away when one of my own children, who was extremely sceptical, went to university. The first room he went into, a fellow student had one of these on the wall. It is just trying to think of slightly different things. Things wouldn't necessarily expect the House of Commons to do.
How do you work with Parliament's education services?
That has been an area where there have been really quite substantial changes. The administration committee last year produced a report on education facilities and recommended a range of things.
The first one was that we should set up an education centre in Parliament where we could bring in 100,000 schoolchildren to visit. But in the meantime, they encouraged us to get on with getting as many schoolchildren here as possible. In the last three years, we have gone from 11,000 to 37,000 schoolchildren visiting. We always try and get the local MP along to talk to them; sometimes a peer will come along.
In Portcullis House, there is an exhibition with Kingsdale School in South London. It is a project using art as a means of helping schoolchildren to interpret Parliament. It has really got under their skin and inspired them. They have produced their own little manifestos that are on T-shirts and we've involved the local MPs in what the school's been up to. The children all came here recently and got a sense of the place. With the education team, it's trying to think of new ways of getting children to think about Parliament. Not something boring, but something that's actually fun and testing and that they should be bothered about.
How do you encourage MPs and peers to embrace the advances in online information services?
A lot of them really do embrace it. There has been a big change at the last election in 2005 in the expectation of members, not just the new ones, for what would be happening online.
On education, we are currently working with a number of MPs on a game for schoolchildren called 'MP for a week'. You could picture how the game might work in the classroom. On Monday morning, they might be getting emails coming in, they might get bids from the media to do something, or their party wants them to go to a meeting, or they are on a committee and they have got to do this, that and the other. Oh and by the way, your constituency is in Leeds, so how are you going to get there?
Just to put in schoolchildren's minds what it is like to be an MP. That works fantastically online.
As part of the celebration for Big Ben being 150, if you go onto our website now, there is a new game called 'Race against chime', where you are going up and cleaning the clock face of Big Ben. But you have got little bits of parliamentary knowledge in there. Stephen Fry commented on it in his blog and suddenly we had a whole bunch of new people coming in to look at that.
More substantively for Parliament, one of the most dramatic changes that I am very pleased with is getting select committees to run online forums. A lot of them have done it now and they work very closely with the media service to ensure that committee work gets understood by the public. And also, that the public get a better change to engage with it.
Two inquiries really impressed me. One, the home affairs committee did an inquiry into domestic violence. It is extremely difficult to get victims of domestic violence to present evidence in a traditional format. But the committee was able to set up this forum in a way that got some fantastic testimony, which really helped them get under the skin of some of the issues.
There was another one on armed forces medical services, where again it is quite hard to get serving forces people to talk frankly about the conditions they are facing and the medical services they get, particularly if they have been serving overseas. Using online was something that members saw as a new way of helping them run committees better. That's really neat.
But some peers and MPs still don't have email addresses. How do you change their attitude towards online services?
We can inspire them with what other people do. We can make it easier for them by going along and talking to them. Sitting at their PCs and just showing them, demystifying it.
It can be a bit scary for people who have not been brought up with it. But ultimately, it is up to them. They are accountable to their constituents and they have to find ways to communicate with those constituents and ensure their re-election. I don't think we have got any particular lock to push them. But we can show them.
What is most striking about working in Parliament?
I was the first librarian of the House to be appointed from outside. All my predecessors spent there entire career here. There were three things that struck me that were quite powerful in the culture here. The first one was the sense of pride that people have in working here. The second one was the real depth of expertise, which I really think is quite unusual. Particularly within the library service, we have a group of people who really are dedicated to their subjects and dedicated to interpreting their subject for Parliament. That is quite special.
The other thing that struck me was the ability to perform what is almost impossible. The deadlines of parliamentarians are very quick – an hour is a pretty normal deadline. But you have got a group of people who are pretty well tuned to it. That is a very powerful combination to help you get things done.
Is there a future for the 'paper' library considering the move to online services?
We are a library that is dedicated to members of Parliament. We will provide whatever they want. Members of Parliament do like reading books. You go to any MPs office and there are books everywhere. I don't expect books to vanish but online gives us a richness of accessing materials that is very difficult with books.
We have recently digitalised Hansard back to 1803. Very few people now would come to the shelves along the library corridor and take down a very old Hansard because you don't need to. If you want to look up what Gladstone and Disraeli said, you can go on the website. Online gives you a fantastic richness which compliments what you can get from books. But we will be driven by what individual MPs actually want to have.
What areas are you most asked about for research?
Certainly over the last year, the area of most dramatic growth has been on business and finance, where members have wanted to understand what is happening in the world of finance. That has always been a busy section, but it has been extraordinarily busy over the last few months.
It does go up and down. In the early years of this Parliament, the really dramatic demand was in home affairs, where there was a lot of home affairs legislation going through. So we adapt to the rhythm of the place. They come to us because we have got something special to offer. We've got scientists, we've got people who have spent their career understanding business performance.
How have you sought to change the workings of the library and the research centre?
Because of the changes in the way members work themselves, with more staff, more online resources, for us to be successful it is very important that we understand what members' working lives are like.
The key thing that I have emphasised is contact with members. Having the opportunity to meet members, go out to their offices or even out to their constituencies so you can understand what it is like to be them. It is not just the subjects that they are interested in but the way that they operate.
Often, giving a member a 100-page report on something isn't going to help them. They want something much sharper. But some members do want the detail. It is only by knowing them that you can really do that. This year, we have managed to count 75 per cent of members as regular users of the library. Given that no-one has to use it. I feel impressed by that.
Could you tell us a little more about some of the more unusual things in the archives?
This library is a very unusual library because it is entirely a working library. We only keep material that is of current interest to parliamentarians.
Actually, our stock of historical and special documents is very limited. Our pre-1912 collection is now housed in the British Museum. It is relatively rarely used by members here but it is quite a nice collection of books.
I am quite interested in gardening so there are some wonderful Victorian plant books. But they are now available to the public in the British Museum.
What do you make of the current mood towards Parliament?
I think that at a time when there are a lot of negative public perceptions about members' expenses, those perceptions coexist with a whole series of positive experiences that people are having about Parliament on things that matter to them.
That is not to underplay the expenses thing but it coexists with another Parliament that is still operating. It is still out there. It is still engaging with people.
