Print Buying

The House of Commons, which came into being during the 14th Century, originally played second fiddle to the more prestigious and powerful House of Lords, but now wields the bulk of legislative power in the UK.

Jo Pitt has been the Commons’ head of print services since 1998. She is responsible for managing Parliament’s in-house production department as well as outsourcing jobs to external suppliers. She has previously worked in print-related roles at pharmaceuticals company GlaxoSmithKline and the Department for Transport.

The Commons launched its print services department in 1994 due to concerns about business continuity. In the last year 8,169 jobs were produced, achieving an estimated saving of £548,000 against commercial rates.

Pitt’s 10-strong team is regularly required to produce work to very short deadlines, often as little as half an hour. The kit used for this task includes models from Canon, Xerox and Riso. It also has a range of finishing capabilities.

Pitt has a range of suppliers she uses when outsourcing work. “We don’t try and produce work in-house for the sake of it,” she says, “if it’s too large for us it goes out.”

Pitt declined to name which printers the House of Commons uses, but last year it outsourced 154 print jobs at a cost of £117,558. Pitt says that she will continue to use printers for the coming years because, while electronic data is used where possible, the day-to-day workings of Parliament have changed little since its creation and still rely on printed pages.

She adds: “At the moment the written word is the legal entity in the UK. We have records going back 1,000 years and it would need to be guaranteed that something produced today could still be read in 50 years, let alone 1,000 years for a total move to alternative formats.”