Clerk of The Parliaments - Appointment and Duties

Appointment and Duties

The Clerk of the Parliaments is appointed by letters patent from the sovereign, who also holds the sole power to remove him or her. The Clerk has a variety of tasks within the House of Lords. Appointees were originally ecclesiastical figures, although the nineteenth century saw a shift towards members of the legal profession. He is assisted by two other clerks - the Clerk Assistant and the Reading Clerk.

The Clerk of the Parliaments, or another clerk, sits in the Chamber at the Table of the House during sittings, and calls on items of business. At the start of a sitting all three Table clerks (Clerk of the Parliaments, Clerk Assistant and Reading Clerk) are normally present. When at the Table the Clerk wears court dress (including a tail coat and waistcoat), a gown and a wig. The wig worn by the Clerk of the Parliaments is a bench wig as worn by a High Court judge; other clerks wear a barrister's wig. Male clerks wear a wing collar and white bow tie, and female clerks bands as worn by barristers.

As well as providing advice on procedure, the Clerk also prepares the minutes of proceedings in the Lords, signs all official documents and communications, returns bills to the House of Commons and pronounces the Royal Assent. The Clerk also supervises several offices, including his own (the Clerk of the Parliaments' Office), Black Rod's Department, which deals with security in the Lords, the Committee Office, which gives legal and procedural advice to committees within the Lords, and formerly (until 2009) the Judicial Office, which advised and assisted the Law Lords. Since the nineteenth century many of these duties have been performed by his deputies and his own office.