How to write select committee evidence that actually gets read

Committees publish calls for written evidence regularly and most people never submit anything because they assume it has to look like a legal document. It does not.

What the clerks are actually after is fairly simple. Keep it under 3,000 words, and shorter is genuinely better rather than just tolerated. Number your paragraphs, because they cite by paragraph number. Put a summary of three or four bullet points at the top. Say who you are and why you know what you know, since lived experience is evidence and you should state it plainly rather than apologising for it. And answer their questions, in their order, using their terminology.

What gets ignored is unstructured anger, submissions with no dates or specifics, and anything that reads as a complaint about one personal case rather than a point about the system. Your case is the illustration. The point has to be about how the system produced it, and how it will produce it again.

Committee evidence is published and covered by parliamentary privilege. It is one of very few routes by which a first-hand account enters the permanent public record.