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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D’Arcy: And I'm Mark D’Arcy. And welcome to another of our special summer recess editions where we're taking a look at Parliament's biggest weekly event, the Wednesday bun fight that is Prime Minister's Question Time.

Ruth Fox: Yes, the half hour when 15 randomly selected MPs get the chance to ask our head of government about any issue they choose and the Leader of the Opposition gets to put six questions to the Prime Minister.

Mark D’Arcy: One of the leading academic PMQ watchers is Ruxandra Serban, Lecturer of Comparative Politics at UCL, who's compared the way [00:01:00] Westminster interrogates its PM to the practice in other parliaments.

Ruth Fox: So we began by asking her what she thought the public made of Westminster's weekly gladiatorial combat.

Ruxandra Serban: Well, it seems that by many measures it's not an ideal view of Parliament. You see politicians arguing with each other, clashing over things, having this sort of very confrontational dialogue in many ways, and there's a lot of shouting as well. There's an unusual level of noise for the kind of exchange that is happening. So that might seem puzzling at first.

You know, why do we have the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition having this sort of exchange and then followed by a relatively more quiet exchange between the Prime Minister and back benchers? I always think there's this very, very charged beginning, with the first six questions, and then it kind of all comes to a level with the more kind of quiet exchanges with back bench MPs.

So there's this kind of weird dynamic where there's [00:02:00] this initial clash and then kind of mellows down a bit.

Mark D’Arcy: This is the gladiatorial clash between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. And sometimes it spills over into the leader of the third party as well, but that's the bit that is right up front, usually quite early on in a Prime Minister's question time session, and it's the bit that's the noisiest and the most confrontational.

Does anything ever really come out of it?

Ruxandra Serban: I suppose one good thing about PMQs is that it exists. It's this routine opportunity for the Prime Minister to come to Parliament once a week to be questioned, to be questioned on various aspects of government, politics and policy and to have to defend those points to the public.

So, you know, obviously there's the exchange that goes on in the chamber, but various people in the chamber speak to external audiences. Actually, so I think that the main good thing about PMQ is this sort of routine element. Having the head of government in [00:03:00] Parliament once a week as a fixed opportunity is sort of the core thing that is good about PMQs, and maybe as we'll come on to talk later, other parliaments aspire to have this kind of opportunity to question the Prime Minister individually once a week, because that's another distinctive feature of the UK model that the Prime Minister comes to the Chamber to be questioned on his or her own. Whereas other parliaments organize in a sort of more collective executive questions model.

Ruth Fox: One of the perceptions the public have, for Ruxandra, certainly when we've done research on this in the past through sort of focus groups and so on, is that it's like a children's playground.

I remember that many times. This was how it was described to me by people we had in in focus groups around the country. It's like a children's playground. They're all shouting and screaming at each other. It's yah-boo politics and I do wonder sometimes whether the politicians think that, because it gets high audiences compared to almost any other form of parliamentary activity and debate and questions and so on, and because it's [00:04:00] high sort of level of public awareness that the politicians think that that's absolutely a good thing. But actually sometimes the public are watching it, not because they're laughing along with the politicians, because they're kind of privately laughing at them slightly behind the hands in front of their eyes and sort of the horror of it all.

And one of the things I just wondered in terms of your research is whether you've sort of detected any changes in public perceptions over the years. You know, has there been any improvement in public perceptions of it? For example, now Keir Starmer is at the despatch box, you know, does it, does the attitude change from Prime Minister to Prime Minister, or is it fairly consistent?

Ruxandra Serban: I think there hasn't really been, and I would love to see that systematic research into public attitudes to PMQs. I would love to see how that develops over the years. I think the evidence that we do have is a bit puzzling in the sense that, as you say in surveys and focus groups, people say that PMQs is something off putting it's the type of behaviour that they wouldn't see in any other workplace [00:05:00] on the one hand.

On the other hand, other studies have, especially one comparing questioning mechanisms across different parliaments, and I think using a survey to look at what people think of questioning in different countries, that showed that this type of more adversarial questioning draws attention to politics. So it's exactly the dynamic that you were describing, that people don't like this, but also at the same time, it draws their attention to what politicians are doing.

So there's this kind of really puzzling nature of it, which in many ways, PMQs has many puzzling aspects.

Mark D’Arcy: Mm-hmm. Is the paradox here that people will say that they want something that's more staged and grown up and more obviously sensible, but actually would be bored by it?

Ruxandra Serban: In reality, that is quite likely.

I mean, there is obviously a point to be made here that on the one hand it is a bit ridiculous to watch politicians having that kind of exchange. There is something that makes us uncomfortable, almost, watching that exchange, right? [00:06:00] So there is a deep unseriousness almost in making those staged scripted jokes and all of that type of thing that goes on at PMQs on the one hand.

On the other hand, it's something that indeed catches people's attention. It's an established way of doing this form of questioning. And other parliaments, so I will may, maybe we'll come onto this later, very recently the French Parliament has tried to revitalize its questioning mechanisms. So that was a terminology used in the discourse around the reform to revitalize questioning in the chamber by bringing the Prime Minister to be questioned.

So there's something about this more adversarial style that people seem to think draws attention to politics, although again, we can debate whether that's the best way to do politics, whether this kind of adversarial, constant negative discourse is the best display of what Parliament does. But as you said, and as you've discussed on the podcast many times, you know, Parliament has many strengths.

The actual weight of scrutiny happens in [00:07:00] other places, and PMQs is just this sort of shiny display of something weekly, but the heavy lifting happens through other mechanisms like urgent questions, departmental questions. The Liaison Committee question the Prime Minister maybe. So PMQs is this sort of flashy routine checkup on the Prime Minister, but the actual scrutiny happens elsewhere.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, I think the Liaison Committee is a good example of what you were talking about, Mark, because that is arguably a more stayed sedate context of a committee setting—

Mark D’Arcy: In inverted commas, ‘grown up’.

Ruth Fox: You know, serious questioning.

But without the drama and the theatre and the noise and far fewer people watch it

Mark D’Arcy: And eyes glaze when they do sometimes.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Yeah. And interestingly, in our research, about 10 years ago, we found that people who watched it or saw it only through the clips in the news, you know, the News at 10, for example, on the BBC, where they got the most theatrical moments, those very noisy moments, Alexandra, which you referred to at the beginning with the [00:08:00] clash between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, they had a much more negative view of it than those who actually had seen the whole of Prime Minister's Questions and therefore got both the noisy elements and the slightly quieter elements with the engagement with the back benches and the range of questions.

So how much you see of it does affect your perceptions of it.

Mark D’Arcy: Is there a thought, Ruxandra, that maybe what you are seeing is a supposedly public questioning session that is actually a kind of internal leadership display ritual? Mm. The leaders are out there trying to score points off one another, not so much to impress the public as to impress their own troops.

You'll often read the Keir Starmer scored points off Kemi Badenoch and therefore strengthened his position as leader or vice versa, when they're under fire. So maybe the problem is that the public are spectators in an internally focused ritual.

Ruxandra Serban: That's definitely true. I think in many ways PMQs is a mix of parliamentary rituals in the way [00:09:00] that it's evolved as well.

It has all these sort of procedural relics, like the engagements questions and all of that. But yes, so there's a lot of that kind of internal dynamics. So whenever, even even in this week's PMQs, Keir Starmer responds to some of Kemi Badenoch's questions, kept listing the government's achievements. And that's sort of something like a signal to the government's back benches more than anything else.

It's not really a signal to the public. So in many ways, yes, there's that. There's also the Leader of the Opposition. This is their opportunity every week to have a moment in the spotlight. So, they'll be preparing carefully and making sure that they're on their best behaviour at PMQs. And there's also a learning curve, so every prime minister and leader of the opposition get used to each other and kind of calibrate their styles over time.

So that's interesting to watch as well. So in many ways, yes. So when Keir Starmer is preparing for PMQs, there are lots of things to bear in mind, but one is this dynamic with the Leader of the Opposition. So in many [00:10:00] ways it's very internally focused.

Ruth Fox: You mentioned there, Ruxandra, the the ritual of the open question.

Can we just touch a little bit on the history of PMQs? Because yeah, every week an MP gets up and asks the Prime Minister if he will list his official engagements, and that's the open question that we don't see with other secretaries of state and their oral question sessions during the course of the week.

So where does this come from?

Ruxandra Serban: Back in the 1960s, so in the beginnings of PMQs in 1961, when the house formally, following a brief experiment, agreed to take questions to the Prime Minister separately from questions to other ministers. And initially, obviously any MP could ask any question to the Prime Minister, but there was some variation in the extent to which different prime ministers actually agreed to answer questions.

So often their private office would transfer some questions to other ministers when the topic was seen as kind of more appropriate for a particular minister. [00:11:00] What that meant in practice was that MPs would get an answer in the chamber from that minister or an answer in writing if they didn't get to the question on the day, but they missed the chance to question the Prime Minister.

So they came up with this system to ask what are called transfer proof questions. Initially, these were about visits to the member's constituency or visits abroad, something that only the Prime Minister could answer. And I think later in the 1970s, this was fleshed out into what we see today as the engagements question.

So asking the Prime Minister what engagements they have for the day, which is basically a question they cannot transfer to another minister who wouldn't know what the Prime Minister's engagements would be.

Mark D’Arcy: And it opens up an opportunity then for someone to say, will the Prime Minister take time out from their busy schedule to do something about something I care about?

Whatever the issue is.

Ruxandra Serban: Yes. So the whole premise of this was that then the member could ask any supplementary question they wanted because this was an open question. One interesting thing to note here is [00:12:00] that at this point in time, so in the 1970s PMQs, were still formally a questions with notice procedure.

So MPs had to give notice of this engagements question, as it were, and it was only until I think, in the early 2000s that they no longer had to actually table this question, it was no longer printed on the order paper. So, this is where we have what we see today where most questions are questions without notice.

We rarely see closed questions being tabled, but in effect all of the questions at PMQs, the ones that come up in the shuffle are engagements questions. So this is a sort of relic of this development historically,

Ruth Fox: You just mentioned the shuffle there, Ruxandra. What is that? Can you explain that for our listeners?

Ruxandra Serban: This is the process through which MPs put their names into a shuffle. So a process through which 15 names are selected randomly every week. So they have to do that by the Thursday before the following PMQs. So these 15 names are selected [00:13:00] randomly and printed on the order paper. And as we were just saying, very rarely do they actually have a question written next to their names.

Usually it's just the MP's names and they're allowed to ask any question they want.

Mark D’Arcy: And now the process has actually been kind of foreshortened. Once upon a time the Prime Minister would get up and, having been asked his engagements for the day or her engagements for the day by a back bencher, would say, I refer you to the answer I gave some moments ago.

They stopped bothering doing that, and also the backbencher stopped bothering to ask, "will the Prime Minister take time out from his busy schedule or her busy schedule to do such and such?" And so it just became a mechanism for directly asking a question and not wasting the Commons' time with a bit of procedural formality along the way.

Ruxandra Serban: Yes. So we only really see this question in the form of the first MP saying, number one, Mr. Speaker. So even they no longer say literally the engagements question and it's no longer printed on the order paper [00:14:00] either. If you go back to Hansard of the 1980s, which I recommend to anyone, that's really fascinating.

It's really interesting to see that the engagements question was actually printed for every MP on the order paper who was due to ask a question at PMQs. So I find that really, really fascinating and an example of how Parliament kind of incrementally modernises, even though it hasn't been a full review of all of this, but it's changed incrementally over time.

Mark D’Arcy: I think Speakers have just got tired of having a repetitive ritual played out and essentially wasting time during the process. So you just get the one – "This morning I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in this house. I shall have further such meetings later today." – kind of formulaic, formalised answer. I also remember Tony Blair, his last Prime Minister's question time, saying "I've had meetings with ministerial colleagues, in addition to my duties at this House. I shall have no such meetings ever again." One of his great moments.

Ruxandra Serban: Well there's something perhaps interesting to say about that first answer that Prime Ministers give to the [00:15:00] engagements questions, as it were.

So, one piece of research I've done recently with my colleague, Dr. Tom Fleming at the Constitution Unit, is into Keir Starmer's approach to that initial answer to the first question. So what we noticed is that there is this typical answer that all prime ministers give about engagements on the day and meetings and so on.

Many prime ministers in the past, so since Tony Blair, I think that's where we found that it all started, they also added a brief remark on usually non-partisan issues. A lot of the time it was paying tribute to military personnel, various other events that were going on in the week of PMQs. But Keir Starmer has started doing something a bit different.

So he almost uses that answer as a kind of opening statement at the start of PMQs. So talking about what's the government's legislative agenda at that point in time? What has the government done recently? What are the kind of key three talking points that he wants to get across about what the [00:16:00] government is doing?

And I found that quite interesting. It means the Prime Minister is finding this kind of little space to set the agenda of PMQs in a way that is unusual, but it's also not outside of the rules in any way. So that's something to think about in terms of how PMQs might develop.

Mark D’Arcy: Certainly prime ministers have started doing this, and I think that Tony Blair was very diligent in naming British casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq when British forces were engaged in those countries, and it did completely change the atmosphere.

It made it very difficult for opponents to get over partisan with him, at least in the initial phase of questioning. So as well as being something that Prime Ministers ought to do to acknowledge, for those who've given their lives to the country, it did also change the dynamic of the question time session.

Ruxandra Serban: Yes, definitely. So we definitely see this starting with Tony Blair. So I think he's is actually the first remark of this type. I think we found that it was in [00:17:00] November 1999 or 1998, he said something about Remembrance Sunday. And since then, prime ministers have used occasionally this opening answer to make, again, usually nonpartisan remarks.

We found some about, you know, royal weddings and other happier events as well. So it's usually a way to start PMQs on a non-partisan note and we, we see a change in that with Keir Starmer using it as a kind of opening statement of the government.

Ruth Fox: Can we talk about other parliaments? Because you say that, you know, in other countries the sort of desire to have their prime ministers held accountable each week, and those countries that don't have it, often say, oh, I wish we, we had something like PMQs.

Mark D’Arcy: Dear, sweet innocents that they are.

Ruth Fox: There are of course a few countries that do, I mean Westminster, Commonwealth style, parliaments have it, in some cases. You've done a study of some of these, sort of Australia, Canada, Ireland, and so on.

How does it compare? Are the public attitudes the same? Do they take the same approach to sort of [00:18:00] managing the questions process and so on?

Ruxandra Serban: I would say one interesting difference in how Prime Ministers are questioned across various parliaments, so that includes Commonwealth Parliaments as well as European legislatures, one distinctive feature is that you have the UK model where the Prime Minister comes on their own to Parliament to be questioned, and you can have some variation in terms of how often that happens. So it could be weekly, it could be monthly. I think the Nordic countries have a monthly Prime Minister's question hour or something similar.

I think that's in Norway. And on the other hand, actually, the default in most legislatures is that prime ministers are questioned together with other ministers. So there's a general question time or question period in Canada where you have all members of the government or, you know, some subset of the government, coming to be questioned again with a varying degree of frequency, to the chamber. And those do include the Prime Minister just as alongside others. [00:19:00] And in those models, which if we take Commonwealth parliaments, operate in particular in Canada and Australia, the Prime Minister is usually questioned at the start of the questioning session and questions then move on to other ministers that are present. I think in terms of public attitudes, some places are more confrontational than others. So you know, Canada and Australia stand out as again, particularly criticised for this type of adversarial dynamics. I think question time in Australia has had a particularly bad press for their levels of noise and —

Mark D’Arcy: Shocking, shocking.

Ruxandra Serban: And what goes on during question time. I think from all of these examples, we have actually had one case that I've looked at recently. So in Canada, Justin Trudeau had this initiative in, I think, 2015. So it started in 2015 to have a Prime Minister's question period on Wednesdays. So during the week you have the usual question period where you have the Prime Minister with the [00:20:00] other ministers.

And then on Wednesdays he would answer all the questions in the chamber, and that was a commitment of the Liberal Party before coming to government in 2015 again to revitalise, to modernise questioning. I think the Liberal manifesto said to make the Canadian Prime Minister more accountable to Canadians.

So again, there's this aspiration for more accountability by just having the Prime Minister on their own to be questioned. It did last for the duration of Justin Trudeau's premiership, but the new Prime Minister, Mark Carney, has decided to stop doing it and to revert back to the traditional question period model.

So sometimes these things are short-lived.

Mark D’Arcy: They had an experiment with this idea in France and it didn't work out awfully well. Describe for us what happened.

Ruxandra Serban: Yes. So in 2024, the Bureau of the National Assembly, so this is the collective body that governs the French Parliament, which is also bicameral, decided to invite the Prime Minister at the [00:21:00] time, Gabriel Attal, to do an experiment, of answering all the questions one day a week instead of, again, the usual model of answering questions together with ministers. They had tried this before, so a couple of years before, they had tried this with the previous Prime Minister who was not very keen, so they finally had a bit of political momentum around this.

They trialled this for a few sessions in the spring of 2024, just to see how it would all work out. My colleague Calixte Bloquet and I looked at some of these questioning sessions and we found that one effect of the new model was that more MPs had access to questioning the Prime Minister in particular.

So before that it was mainly party leaders that got to ask the Prime Minister a question, but under the new model, back bench MPs also got the chance to ask a question. Obviously, topics became more diverse as well. This, however, was not [00:22:00] adopted in the end by the National Assembly as a permanent feature, for several reasons.

One was that there were elections in France that year. So the composition of the Assembly changed. The Prime Minister changed. There was a new government and, when the procedure was reviewed, the Bureau concluded that there wasn't enough appetite for this to continue. Part of the reality was that the new Prime Minister at the time, Michel Barnier, also was not very keen on continuing with this.

Interestingly, there wasn't a lot of political momentum for the procedure when it was first trialed, and I think these reasons are very, very interesting. So the junior Coalition partners of the government at the time thought first of all, that it would be bad for the reputation of the Prime Minister to be constantly questioned in the chamber.

Which sounds a bit surprising, but it was a reason that they invoked and Opposition parties said the opposite thing, which was that, you know, this is just a move to [00:23:00] use a chamber as a platform, as a personal campaign platform. And they thought that was really inappropriate. So within the context of the election, that again became very contested.

But another aspect here we think is the fact that the constitutional role of the Prime Minister in the French system is different from the role of the Prime Minister in a Westminster type parliament, for example. So, parties in the National Assembly don't see the Prime Minister as a key executive figure in the same way that, you know, in Britain or Australia or Canada, the Prime Minister is the key executive figure to be questioning.

Mark D’Arcy: Oh, I see. So it would, if it had been President Macron taking questions from parliamentarians, it might've been a whole different game.

Ruxandra Serban: Yes. So, you know, why would we question a person who's essentially the second fiddle in the sort of executive configuration, and why can't we just question the ministers who are actually in charge of policy? So there's this sort of awkwardness of the constitutional position of the Prime Minister [00:24:00] in France that made questioning him individually just not very effective in any way in the view of parliamentarians there.

Mark D’Arcy: And was there a great interest outside? Were people switching on their televisions to watch this?

Ruxandra Serban: I think there was some interest in terms of media coverage. It was also broadcast live on YouTube, so I think the Assembly was trying, in terms of public engagement, to kind of drive engagement towards the questioning procedure in this kind of spirit of revitalising it. I haven't really seen evidence on improved kind of public attention to Parliament on this. I'd be curious to see, but clearly they've decided to drop it, so we might not hear about this for a while.

Ruth Fox: Have they adopted any other reforms of questioning then as an alternative? Having dropped PMQs as an option? Are they looking at other things or is that all just now going to be dormant?

Ruxandra Serban: It looks like they've reverted back to the model where the Government is questioned twice a week, essentially [00:25:00] in the Chamber. And the Prime Minister is also present, but just receives sort of occasional questions. So it seems like that's the equilibrium that works for them.

Ruth Fox: And just in terms of these other parliaments that have PMQs.

Do the politicians' and the parties' approach to questions differ at all from Westminster? So one of the criticisms here, of course, is that there's this magnificent opportunity for an individual MP to stand up in the chamber in one of the most watched moments of parliamentary proceedings each week and ask a question.

How frustrating it is watching them to see some of them ask the toady questions, the patsy questions.

Mark D’Arcy: Does the Prime Minister agree he's absolutely wonderful in every way?

Ruth Fox: Not quite that bad sometimes, but sometimes it's not far off. But you know, really frustrating that you get these questions, but it doesn't often seem to be actually that much party management behind it. I mean, we know the Government whips, for example, will be trying to [00:26:00] find out what Government-side MPs who appear in the shuffle and are going to get to ask a question, what they're going to ask so that the Prime Minister can be briefed. And obviously they'll be taking a good guess at what the Opposition are going to ask.

But it isn't that orchestrated. Is there a different approach in other parliaments, you know, do the parties try and manage it all a little bit more?

Ruxandra Serban: That's a great question. There's definitely more evidence of party management in other countries that have a mechanism for questioning the Prime Minister, especially in Commonwealth parliaments.

My assumption when I started researching PMQs a few years ago was indeed that there was a level of party management going on at PMQs, but actually the evidence from other countries puts that into an interesting contrast. So, one example I'll start with is Canada, where on paper the Speaker can select people to ask questions during Question Period.

In practice, this is also governed by a few conventions. One is that it starts with leaders rounds. [00:27:00] So again, the Leader of the Opposition and then the next largest party get to ask questions, but parties crucially submit lists of questioners to the Speaker ahead of Question Period. So there is an internal party machinery to manage this process. There's a Question Period tactics committee that meets to decide which MPs get on the party list to ask questions. This is a practice that started around the 1980s, I think, with Speaker Jeanne Sauvé, I think she asked parties to give her party lists of questioners to manage Question Period better at the time when Question Periods started being televised.

So this is anecdotal. It could be that the origin of this story has either deeper or shallower roots in some ways, but this is sort of the anecdote of the origin of this. So basically, yes, this is the most party managed model I've come across where there are lists of questioners given to the Speaker.

Now there is some degree [00:28:00] of freedom for individual back benchers to still come up with their own question and come to party management and say, I want to ask this question, could you put me on the list? But there's less of that, and kind of more management of who actually gets on the list.

Mark D’Arcy: I suppose in the Westminster context, the random element is much more controlled by the Speaker because you get a randomly selected list of people who are going to ask questions, and the Speaker's job is to balance it up in Government versus Opposition terms.

So if there are a preponderance of Conservative MPs randomly selected, the Speaker will have to call an equal number of people from the Government side to balance that up, which does mean that it's the Speaker's choice that can determine a lot about the shape of a Question Time in Westminster in a way that doesn't seem to happen elsewhere.

As you say, if the Speaker is just channelling party lists in some parliaments, it's a rather less dignified role you might say.

Ruxandra Serban: Yes, definitely. So this principle of alternating between the Government and the Opposition when calling MPs to ask questions [00:29:00] also applies in Australia at Question Time. So there too, you get a question from the Opposition and then one from the Government.

And I would say that sort of the degree of helpful questions, at least in the research side a few years ago, the proportion of those questions seems to be slightly higher in Australia compared to Westminster, where we saw some constituency related or more independent questions. And even though we can't really get at the mechanism of party management directly empirically, because it's hard, you know, to open that black box of party management and actually study it, we do see some evidence that in one case, so in Westminster, there are presumably slightly more independent questions from back benchers as opposed to always asking the helpful question consistently.

Mark D’Arcy: My particular bête noire is the constituency question. "Will the Prime Minister congratulate my local football team?" Or "Does the Prime Minister plan to come and visit my wonderful constituency and drink the local beer?"

Cheers. Again, which I suppose is all very well for putting on your local social [00:30:00] media as a member of Parliament, but which seems pretty much a wasted opportunity when you've got a chance to question a head of government about something substantial.

Ruxandra Serban: Yes. I mean, there is evidence that there are some, I suppose, questions about local issues, actually more serious issues that MPs put to the Prime Minister.

But yes, as, as you're saying, a lot of those questions are self-congratulatory and sort of like friendly, on a friendly tone.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah, I tend to use the word fatuous. I'm not saying it's completely unreasonable for an MP to ask about the fate of their local hospital or the need for a local bypass or some other substantive local issue.

Sometimes you get something that just seems to be, "I want to name check my constituency and look like a good guy without actually offending anybody".

Ruxandra Serban: Definitely, I suppose we could still see those questions as sort a bit less party controlled in a way. So if we want to see the positive side of this—

Ruth Fox: The glass half full.

Mark D’Arcy: But I have been struck, I mean, you talking about the way that some of these are orchestrated in other countries. I have been struck that [00:31:00] you very seldom see an Opposition MP following up on the question that the Leader of the Opposition has asked. "The Prime Minister brushed off the question from my Right Honourable friend earlier, will he now man up and explain exactly what's been going on in this dreadful scandal she was referring to?"

That might be quite a useful thing for an ambitious backbencher to do, but you almost never see it.

Ruxandra Serban: Yes. That's very interesting. There seems to be very little kind of coordination in a meaningful way within parties in that sense. So you could potentially come up with very sustained lines of questioning that, you know, you have a line that the Leader of the Opposition starts with and then it keeps coming up in back bench questions. Like that would be an effective way to keep that questioning line going.

Mark D’Arcy: Keep punching the bruise.

Ruxandra Serban: But we don't really see that.

Ruth Fox: So, Ruxandra, turning to possible reforms of Prime Minister's Questions. I mean, there have been various sorts of ideas mooted over the years, including from the Hansard Society.

I was once accused by the Evening Standard of wanting to turn Prime Minister's Questions [00:32:00] into Gardener's Question Time, which I thought was a bit much, but this idea that maybe with a few sort of adjustments and changes, you could improve it in terms of quality of questioning, the depth of it and the the public perception of it.

What thoughts have you got or have you seen from elsewhere that perhaps might improve or change Prime Minister's Questions for the future?

Ruxandra Serban: I would say two things to start with. One is that I agree entirely that this is one of those very difficult topics of parliamentary reform. PMQs, I find is very, very past dependent.

It's one of those institutions that, you know, everyone is locked into an equilibrium. Parties are all socialised into doing this style of questioning, and it's very difficult to not do it. It would require everybody to stop doing it at the same time, which is, you know, a collective action problem in a way.

Yeah, there's a very interesting example here. I'm going to digress slightly from Canada again. So in the famous election [00:33:00] of 1993, I think, where there was this influx of new MPs from the Reform Party, so they decided to do this thing where, at Question Period, they wouldn't cheer, they wouldn't shout, they would just be very polite and measured.

And in a short amount of time, they realised that the media was criticising them for doing that. Basically, there were the odd ones out. So again, it is a thing that either all parties agree to stop doing or it's not going to happen.

Mark D’Arcy: I must say the number of times I've seen an incoming Prime minister, or an incoming Leader of the Opposition, or maybe both of them, saying, "let's, let's try and make these exchanges more valuable and more consensual and just be nicer to one another".

And it usually lasts about three weeks before they're back bashing one another, just as they used to.

Ruxandra Serban: Yeah, so I think it's a model that it just suits everyone in a different way and just moving on from it would be very difficult politically, as Ruth was saying, we just have to kind of see how this could be tweaked around the edges slightly, but also kind of accepting that it does the thing that it does, and we [00:34:00] just have to make sure that are other mechanisms in place that do their serious scrutiny instead.

Some small tweaks that we could think of, one that I think works a bit better in other parliaments, so one example is Ireland, that also has individual questioning of the Prime Minister in the same way that the UK does, but split into two different mechanisms. One is questions to the Prime Minister, which are all closed questions.

So questions submitted. In writing in advance, and there's a separate on a specific subject.

Mark D’Arcy: So "what does the Prime Minister think about this particular thing?"

Ruxandra Serban: Yes. And then there's a separate procedure which involves open questions like at PMQs, and what we see is that the debate in the closed questions procedure is much more measured and less adversarial.

So, one option to have some elements of more detailed scrutiny within PMQs would be perhaps to include a set of closed questions more often. I've looked through Hansard a while ago. I remember it's very rare that [00:35:00] an MP submits a question on a specific topic and we can see why that's the case, right? So they want to be as topical as possible, and committing to a question a week before means that you might miss the opportunity to ask about the latest thing that is happening. At the same time, if we're thinking about kind of more long-term policy issues, this would be a small tweak to just try to bring in some of those types of questions at PMQs. So that's just a very small tweak that could be made more use of closed questions.

Ruth Fox: Is there any use elsewhere of trying to involve the public in questioning?

I mean, that was something we looked at. If you remember when Jeremy Corbyn started as Leader of the Opposition, he instituted this idea of a question that had been asked by Peter from Manchester and you know, trying to inject that sort of personal story into the questions. It was interesting at the beginning, but it began to get a bit rote and a bit repetitive and people started actually laughing at that as well.

So is there any example sort of elsewhere of that kind of thing [00:36:00] happening and being more effective?

Ruxandra Serban: I haven't actually seen that being tried elsewhere. I have seen mentions of constituents as a kind of way to ask a question. Yeah. Which is genuine or not, I'm not sure. But I think genuinely introducing a mechanism for questions from the public would be an interesting way to innovate in and kind of refresh the way in which PMQs is open to people outside the chamber.

Ruth Fox: Or have a separate session, public question time of the Prime Minister.

Mark D’Arcy: Have a ballot of questions submitted by the public and take them through somehow. I don't know.

Ruxandra Serban: I think there was a drive to improve PMQs a while ago in, in the wake of the expenses scandal. So often it's a crisis moment that triggers big reforms.

So, you know, all of the former Speaker John Bercow's initiatives to increase the time for back benchers at PMQs was also part of that. I think in the end, what we see today as a result of that is that PMQs tends to [00:37:00] go on for a bit longer than it's scheduled for. There is a question there whether more time for back benchers to question the Prime Minister one way or another, even separately from the main exchange with the Leader of the Opposition, that could be a direction to explore, potentially.

Ruth Fox: I also wonder sometimes if the Leader of the Opposition will be better varying the number of questions because there's no reason why they have to ask six questions, and former Leaders of the Opposition, I mean, Margaret Thatcher for example, didn't always ask six, and the fact that you're kind of expecting six means that you can manage it in terms of your responses a little bit more.

I do think sometimes if they varied it, it would make it a little bit harder for the Prime Minister to know what was coming.

Mark D’Arcy: And take your questions in a couple of blocks maybe.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Yeah.

Ruxandra Serban: Perhaps one tweak, linking back to what we were saying earlier, is to get rid of the engagements question.

This is maybe something for the modernisation committees to think about in terms of making Prime Minister's Questions just explicitly questions without notice procedure, [00:38:00] with the potential to ask closed questions should people wish. Kind of removing that ritual at the beginning, which doesn't really serve a purpose anymore, even though we've seen that Keir Starmer has managed to make something of it.

Mark D’Arcy: Usually the answer's so formulaic, it's not really worth delivering. So there we go. But maybe that can be said about the whole thing. Sometimes I wonder, Prime Minister's Questions though is the shop window of Parliament, and just a final thought from you really. Do you think that the customers looking through that shop window are repulsed by what they see or attracted by it?

Ruxandra Serban: I think it's probably a mix of both, and I think that's part of the reason why PMQs is so sticky as an institution and we've seen it endure for such a long time in a very, very similar and recognisable way. It hasn't really changed much. If you watch PMQs from 20 years ago, you would recognise it entirely as it is today.

So there is something about this that endures over time and it does perform specific [00:39:00] functions. In a paradoxical way to go back to what we were saying in the beginning, this also prevents it from changing at all because everyone is kind of locked into this way of doing things, and it perpetuates with every new generation of MPs, it seems.

Ruth Fox: Well with that, Ruxandra, that was great. Thank you very much for joining us. And we'll see what happens with PMQs when MPs get back after the summer recess.

Mark D’Arcy: See you then.

Ruxandra Serban: Thank you so much for inviting me.

Ruth Fox: And listeners, just before we go, a few housekeeping points. If you haven't already done it, would you mind completing our listener survey. It'll really help us in terms of developing the podcast and ensuring we can get those adverts on the podcast, which help pay for this frankly. And if you haven't already done it as well, please do review the podcast on your favorite app. Five stars only please! Again, Mark and I don't really understand the algorithms, but we're told that it really helps to grow the podcast and for other listeners to find us on places like Apple and Spotify. So it's kind of essential and it's one way that you can help us on the podcast.[00:40:00]

So with that, we'll be back with another summer recess episode in a couple of weeks, and we will see you then.

Mark D’Arcy: Join us then. Bye-bye.

Ruth Fox: Bye.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.

For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media at @HansardSociety.

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