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Elizabeth Flood
Clerk of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, House of Commons
Elizabeth Flood has been a career clerk in the House of Commons since 1983. Clerks not only provide the secretariat for all the official, cross-party Commons committees but also staff the offices that give procedural advice and deal with the scrutiny of legislation; Elizabeth’s career reflects this diversity. She has been Second Clerk of the Agriculture and Transport Committees, Clerk of the Public Accounts, Trade and Industry and Home Affairs Committees, and has also been Clerk of the legislative committees dealing with Deregulation Orders (a type of delegated legislation intended principally to decrease regulatory burdens for business) and with European Community legislation. She also spent a number of years in the Private Bill Office, which deals with local and personal legislation, and, amongst other things, gave procedural advice during the passage of the Bill to permit the construction of the Channel Tunnel. She was Commons Clerk to a Joint Committee of Lords and Commons that reported on parliamentary procedures for giving planning permission for certain types of works.
In 1990 she completed a fellowship programme with the Industry and Parliament Trust (a not-for-profit body dedicated to increasing mutual understanding between business and Parliament, both MPs/Lords and officials). She is a member of the Study of Parliament Group, which brings together academics, Parliamentary officials and specialist journalists to research and publish on various aspects of Parliament. She contributed to a book on the House of Lords published by the Group, and has given evidence to Parliamentary Committees on legislative procedure, to Lord Wakeham’s Commission on House of Lords Reform, and to the Hansard Society Commission on Parliamentary Scrutiny.