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

[00:00:18] Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

[00:00:25] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark Darcy, coming up in this special edition.

[00:00:28] Ruth Fox: Why does Parliament find it so difficult to reform itself, even on relatively basic issues like sitting hours, on which MPs often find themselves deadlocked.

[00:00:37] Mark D'Arcy: Well, some intriguing answers to that question can be found in a new book, Inside the Political Mind, by Greg Power, who was a special advisor to two reforming leaders of the House of Commons in Robin Cook and Peter Hain. He's also, incidentally, a former director of research here at the Hansard Society.

[00:00:53] Ruth Fox: When we sat down with Greg we asked him what do people with a grand design for parliamentary reform most often get wrong?

[00:01:01] Greg Power: This is the central argument in the book which is that institutional designers, people who are interested in parliamentary reform, tend to focus often much more on the structures, on the processes, on the design of the buildings, rather than on the people who work inside those buildings.

[00:01:18] And my own experience of working at Westminster and as a special advisor for the Leader of Commons, and then internationally over the last 20 years, is that political institutions only change when politicians want to change them. And you have to ask, well, why would they want to change them? And if they're not changing, why aren't they changing them? And that's the centre of the book.

[00:01:38] Mark D'Arcy: So it's about, if you like, the incentives that they have to want to support change in Parliament. And what sort of incentives might those be? Is it more money? Is it more power? Is it the ability to get things done that they can't get done?

[00:01:52] Greg Power: It's all of those things, and other stuff as well.

[00:01:55] Um, if I, if I take a slight step back, I mean, part of the challenge of trying to reform a parliamentary institution is that you do tend to think about the processes, you do tend to think about the structures. But, around the world, if you look at parliamentary institutions around the world, they all look broadly similar.

[00:02:11] If you read the Standing Orders or the rules of procedure in any parliament, they would look broadly similar. The way they work in practice is entirely different from country to country. And the best way to understand that is to think about traffic and how traffic works in other countries and other cities.