Priscilla Baines

Current Research

Honorary Research Fellow Wedgwood Archive

History of Parliament Research

Upon retirement at the end of 2004, I started conserving and re-filing the papers in the History of Parliament’s archive connected with J.C. Wedgwood’s proposed biographical volumes covering MPs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The questionnaires sent to surviving MPs and former MPs who had served up to 1918, the associated correspondence, and the biographies based on the replies to the questionnaires, have been transcribed and will in due course be available on the History of Parliament’s website. The questionnaires have been analysed and summarised in Colonel Wedgwood’s Questionnaire: Members of Parliament, 1885-1918, published in 2012.

Research and Publications

I was on the staff of the House of Commons Library from 1968 until the end of 2004. An agricultural economist by background, my early career was spent in the Library’s Research Service, first in the Economic Affairs Section, then in the Science and Environment Section. In 1991, I moved into management posts, spending over six years as Director of Human Resources, then becoming Librarian and Head of Department at the beginning of 2000.

I joined the Study of Parliament Group in 1977 and has contributed to several publications by the Group including:

- Britain in the European Union: Law, Policy and Parliament (2004),

- Westminster and Europe: the impact of the European Union on the Westminster Parliament (1996),

- Parliamentary Accountability: a Study of Parliament and Executive Agencies (1995),

- The New Select Committees (Gavin Drewry (ed) 1st edn. 1985; 2nd edn. 1989),

- Parliaments and Economic Affairs (1980).