That greatly suits me, as I don't have a prepared presentation, apart from what I've written in the last 15 minutes during the sound checks.
It might be helpful if I explain what I'm doing in this context and then talk the committee through, very briefly, what we've done in the last four weeks, which has probably been the biggest set of changes to how the House of Commons works in the last 700 years.
I was asked by the Clerk of the House, John Benger, to coordinate all the different work streams that are going on to deliver what we are loosely calling “virtual Parliament”. That's across the work of our select committees, the chamber coming on stream, electronic remote voting, and then beyond that the virtual legislation committees, which in our system are different from our policy-based select committees.
That's quite a lot of work. We've also had to liaise closely with our colleagues in the House of Lords, as we have a shared parliamentary digital service and a shared broadcasting service, which support both Houses. Those two teams have been under particular pressure in the last few weeks.
So, what happened? Just before our Easter recess, so late March, the House passed a motion allowing for select committees to meet virtually, that is, to allow participation by electronic means under the authority of the Speaker. The first virtual select committee took place two or three days after that. Appropriately enough it was the Health Select Committee, talking about the coronavirus with the health secretary.
Over the Easter recess, which was slightly longer than usual because of the pandemic, we had an increasing number of virtual select committee meetings. In parallel, the Speaker wrote to the Clerk of the House on March 31 asking him to ensure that by the time the House returned on April 21, we had arrangements in place to allow for remote participation in questions to ministers and for statements by ministers in the House on the basis that members could participate either physically or virtually, which is why we are calling this a hybrid model or hybrid proceedings.
We worked exceptionally fast to work out whether this was possible, what was possible, and then to deliver it. We also worked in parallel with the government, the Leader of the House and the party managers to ensure consensus with what we were proposing, and the Speaker played a very active role in doing that.
We had to agree to procedural motions that were required to enable all of this to happen, so on our first day back, April 21, by special agreement with the Speaker, we chucked out that day's business and just agreed to motions moved without notice to enable what we call hybrid scrutiny proceedings to take place the next day.
The next day, April 22, so still not very long ago—like last week I think it must be now—we had our first virtual question time and virtual Prime Minister's question time. We then immediately passed motions to extend this hybrid model further to other classes of business, including legislation. We also agreed in principle to electronic remote voting so members would not need to come to Westminster to vote. We have now had four of what we call our hybrid chamber days. We've had the second readings of three bills on three days this week.
One thing I'd like to mention at this point in particular is that we've done everything with incredible speed, and that has been a real challenge for the House service and digital service. We have risen to this challenge, I would say, magnificently, and the Speaker and everyone else have said the same thing.
We've learned very fast completely new ways of doing things, and this is supported by large numbers of staff working remotely from their front rooms and rooms like the ones we're sitting in now, but it has also required a lot of staff still to come to the Palace of Westminster. They work in the broadcasting studios in the chamber because we have physical participation, and to some extent in committee rooms. It still does mean we have a lot of colleagues who have to come and work in the building.
We've had to be very frank with members about what is deliverable, both due to technical capacity and due to the human resource capacity of how long you can keep people for setting up. We have seen how much time colleagues spent on the set-up for this committee meeting. We are having to do that for maybe 60 members at a time for a full day's proceedings, and that's quite a large staff undertaking.
The other thing we've done is adapt practices. We've dropped large classes of business from our agenda for now, and we have dropped, for technical reasons, a lot of the traditional ways we do business. There are no interventions in speeches. We have published lists of speakers so that everyone knows who is coming next, so that the broadcasters know whom to queue in, and so that we know who is speaking virtually or physically. We've set much longer deadlines for members wishing to participate in proceedings, because we need to do all the planning and make sure their connections work, and all the rest of it. That's made a very big change to the feel of how things work.
It is also weird, I have to say, sitting at the table of the House in a chamber built for 400 people with 20 members present, with the member speaking beaming data, and eight large screens suspended from the galleries. I'm now wearing headphones at the table of the House, as is the Speaker's secretary, so that we stay in touch with the broadcasting team, who are in a different building.
I can't underestimate how big the cultural, technical and political change has been. The things that I would say are essential are consensus among the parties about what's happening and an agreement on what is doable, an agreement among the political parties on how we extend and build going forward so that we can do more of this in the medium term, and also really strong and effective leadership of the staff involved, to ensure that we, as very senior managers and leaders in the organization, can have those frank conversations with members about what we can and can't do, but also to ensure that we support and motivate our staff to keep on delivering this more or less impossible stuff.
The next big challenge will be electronic remote voting. Literally, as I speak, we are doing the first live test with several hundred members of Parliament. Planning for that has been.... Well, it's been interesting, I would say.
I'm very happy to stop there and answer further questions.