Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
As executive Managing Editor of the team who exclusively report proceedings in the Commons Chamber, Vivien's many and varied responsibilities include ensuring that publication deadlines are met, resolving pressures on resources and communicating editorial decisions to MPs and departmental officials. Here she contemplates the hidden highlights of a career at Hansard.
As a regular reader of the Hansard blog (I know you’re out there) you will be familiar with the first and, some say, seminal post published in July 2017: Being a Hansard Reporter: 10 things you thought you knew. In fact, it was so seminal it pre-dated the Hansard blog itself.
I confess that when I joined Hansard in 1991 as a trainee House reporter I had no such misconceptions. Mainly because I had no conceptions. I had come from working in local newspapers, having done an English degree, and the advert in The Guardian included the words ‘reporter’ and ‘shorthand’. Also, I wanted to move to London. Life at Hansard has since educated me, enlightened me, stretched me, sometimes exhausted me, invigorated me and become a defining, ever-challenging and fulfilling career.
Today for many the workplace is a fluid if not precarious concept. Who doesn’t change their job every few years? And why wouldn’t you? Over the past 34 years at Hansard, the House of Commons Administration has remained my employer, but I’ve lost count of the number of times my roles, responsibilities and daily routines have changed.
There’s been intensive classroom learning; late and sometimes all-night sittings (Ah, the Maastricht treaty); early-morning Committee sessions about caravans, adoption services or pelagic fish; sifting through hundreds of applications before interviewing, recruiting and training new reporters; serving on project boards; outreach work with charities and universities; producing staff magazines and organising all-staff meetings; and representing Hansard at international conferences. Much to my delight, though, I’ve never had to work 9 till 5.
The days of Hansard reporters using shorthand are of course long gone. My hard-earned qualification for capturing 180 words a minute on the Stenograph (it was never fast enough) is now good only for occasionally freaking out friends around the dinner table by reading back verbatim ramblings! But the skills of following the argument, translating the often jumbled spoken to the grammatical written, and producing accurate and faithful reports of debates in double-quick time are just the same in these days of digital audio. The typewriters and cassette players have gone too, but the deadlines and the camaraderie remain.
And then one day, your job is not only the words, but the people, and your career enters another phase. I am delighted to be working with such bright and capable people, and to have the chance to pass on what I have learnt. In my time at Hansard, Governments and MPs have come and gone. Back in the early ’90s, the House Administration, the politicians and the politics were very different. I’m not sure if I miss those days or not.