Hello and welcome to How Westminster Works, a podcast and politics home that takes a deep dive into the history, quirks and peculiar practices of UK politics.

I'm your host Alan Tolhurst and in this episode we'll explore the process by which everything that politicians say in the House of Commons and the House of Lords is taken down, written up and recorded for posterity in something

known as Hansard. Hansard is the official report of all parliamentary debates where every day

a team of reporters produce a near transcript or as they describe it as substantially verbatim

account of the proceedings. I'll speak to current hands hard reporters and editors,

as well as historians and politicians, about its importance in the modern era, as well as being a vital tool for aiding our understanding if our democracy has operated for the last

few hundred years, some of which some MPs might have preferred not to have been preserved

in print forever. Lord Samuel once described it as history's ear already listening, but here's Charlie Brown,

who's been a reporter at Hanside for almost a decade to explain how the job works.

We work in a team of 16 reporters a day, and we go in and out of the chamber and listen to

like five minutes of debate each, which we call a turn.

We actually stay in the chamber for like the five minutes beforehand as well.

So we go in in pairs because it's, you could have 650 members in at a time and you can't keep an eye on them all at once.

So we like to have two pairs of eyes so that you can see if somebody heckles on one side of the room.

While somebody else is speaking on the other side, you can see who it is.

And all of that kind of stuff. So we do like check noting for five minutes and then we take

over at an appropriate point and then we put the five minutes that we're responsible for

reporting. So I'd sit in there and I'll take a log. So basically note down which members are getting up to speak.

Things that I might check when I get back to my desk,

like names of companies, like how they're rendered,

perhaps quotations that a member is read out,

just verify those.

...