Hansard and the Commonwealth reporting community
Did you know that many legislatures across the Commonwealth have named their official report of parliamentary proceedings Hansard, after Thomas Curson Hansard (1776-1833), the original printer of the UK Parliament’s record of debates? These many Hansards are brought together by the Commonwealth Hansard Editors Association (CHEA), founded in 1984 by a group of Hansard editors from across the world to promote best practice in parliamentary reporting.
From in-person meetings to virtual conferences – Automated speech recognition takes centre stage
CHEA held an international conference of its members every three years until Covid, which delayed the conference schedule by a year—and when 2022’s conference did take place, it was the association’s first virtual conference, held over Zoom. It went well—more than 70 parliamentary reporting staff took part, from 20 nations, and guest speakers included the Commonwealth Secretary-General, then Baroness Amos—but afterwards, CHEA members were keen to resume in-person conferences; we found that there was no substitute for the networking opportunities that arise from people being in the same physical space. However, the CHEA secretariat, based in the UK’s Parliament, has struggled to find a host for an in-person conference, perhaps because CHEA’s institutional memory of how to hold a large in-person event has diminished in the years since the last physical conference. The secretariat is determined to bring back the in-person conference, but with no prospective host on the horizon, it decided that CHEA’s 2025 conference would again be virtual.
CHEA’s 14th conference was accordingly held on Microsoft Teams on 16 and 17 October 2025. It was hosted jointly by UK Parliament and the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, and it featured 21 speakers from 17 legislatures. The sessions held on day one were chosen and led by our colleagues from Ontario. Valerie Quioc Lim, Deputy Clerk of Ontario’s Legislative Assembly, gave an opening address, and then the session on automated speech recognition (ASR)—the most heavily subscribed session of the conference—got under way. This session featured presentations from Alberta Canada; Kenya the UK and Hong Kong. Tamus Hon, the Assistant Secretary General of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council Secretariat, gave a live demonstration of the impressive ASR software in use in LegCo, which can translate audio in near-live time between English, Cantonese and Mandarin. Interestingly, a sub-theme of the session was the importance of human editorial oversight of ASR output.
Interactive Hansard and the reader’s experience
The next session, entitled Interactive Hansard, was about optimising the online experience of Hansard readers. We heard from Meinir Gooch, Managing Editor of the official report in Wales’ Senedd, Adrian Kelly, Editor of Debates in the Houses of the Oireachtas, Ireland, and Kirsten Blair, Manager of Reporting Services in Canada’s House of Commons—all legislatures with sophisticated websites that prioritise a good user journey to the report of debates.
Different workflows, different models
The final session of day one was on workflow and division of labour. We heard from speakers representing the official reports of British Columbia, Canada; the Isle of Man; and Bermuda. This session made it clear that Hansards are run on all kinds of models. For example, Bermuda’s Hansard is produced offshore, by JanScription, a company based in the US and named after its founder, Janet Seffer. Janet and her team have developed ways of quickly verifying details, such as the wording of an amendment being moved in the Chamber of Bermuda’s Parliament, while being hundreds of miles away.
Regional updates from the Hansard world
Day two, hosted by the UK Parliament, kicked off with regional updates from Hansards from around the world. Adam Iddrisu, Editor of Debates in the Parliament of Ghana, updated us on the activities of CHEA – Africa Region. Erin Grace, Manager of Hansard in the New Zealand Parliament, recorded a message for us about the work of the Australasian and Pacific Hansard Editors Association. Steve Smal, Managing Editor of Hansard in Ontario, recapped the activities of the Hansard Association of Canada. Emma Kirby, Deputy Editor of UK House of Commons Hansard, spoke on behalf of the British-Irish Parliamentary Reporting Association. There are many CHEA members in the Caribbean, but they have no regional association; however, the session would not have been complete without a speaker from that region, so Nikita Small, Editor of Hansard in the Cayman Islands, let us know the latest from her Hansard. It has recently introduced ASR, which is working well, but has had a few hiccups—for example, she told us that it had rendered “Caymanians” as “onions”. We also heard from guest speakers from outside the Commonwealth: Benedicte Haraldstad Frostad from Norway’s Storting, and Bettina Brixa, Head of the Stenographic Reports Department in the Parliament of Austria. This was a step towards realising CHEA’s ambition of being more outward-facing, and hearing from a more diverse range of parliamentary reporting bodies.
A call to host the next conference
After a session on CHEA internal governance, we came to the final session of the conference, in which Dr Carlo Eugeni, Associate Professor of Audiovisual Translation, University of Leeds, spoke to us about incorporating easy-to-read language into parliamentary reporting. This presentation challenged us to think about our everyday reporting task as translation from speech to text, and about the impossibility of reproducing on the page the listener’s exact experience. Dr Eugeni was given a not-so-secret mission by the CHEA secretariat, which he fulfilled admirably: he spoke for a few minutes, after his main speech, about the joys of organising the Intersteno diamesic conferences. The aim here was to encourage participants to consider volunteering to hold the next CHEA in-person conference. His presentation was followed by a rousing speech by Mrs Lynette Joseph-Guevara, Inter-parliamentary Relations Co-ordinator at the Parliament of Trinidad and Tobago, who was involved in organising the 2011 CHEA conference. She exhorted CHEA members to us to embrace and enjoy the conference-planning process.
Many thanks to the UK and Ontario teams who planned this virtual conference. It was a delight to work with our co-hosts from Ontario, Steve Smal, Valérie Dosière and Eli Fox.
Joanna Lipkowska is a CHEA Secretariat member, and a Managing Editor of the UK House of Commons Hansard.
