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Political Studies Communication Award

Prof Robert Hazell

The jury’s choice for this year’s Political Studies Communication Award was Professor Robert Hazell. As Director of the Constitution Unit at University College London, since 1995, he has consistently worked to develop the constitutional reform agenda, to communicate these ideas to government and more generally to inject academic rigour and principle into public debate. The panel further noted the scope and timeliness of his reform interests, including devolution, freedom of information, and reform of the House of Lords.

Born in 1948 and educated at Eton and Wadham College, Oxford, Robert Hazell might have been destined to retire as a very senior civil servant. But instead of administering the political system from within, the focus of his career in the past two decades has been on reforming it from the outside. He began his career as a barrister in 1973, before moving into the civil service where he worked at the Home Office from 1975 to 1989. He worked in the Immigration Department, the Policy Planning Unit, the Gaming Board, the Race Relations Department, the Broadcasting Department, and the Police and Prison Departments. From 1986 to 1987 he undertook a Civil Service travelling fellowship to study freedom of information in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. After leaving the Home Office in 1989 he was director of the Nuffield Foundation, a grant giving charitable trust, for six years.

In 1995 he founded the Constitution Unit within the School of Public Policy at University College, London, where he is Professor of Government and the Constitution. As Director of the Constitution Unit Professor Hazell has been involved in every stage of the government’s constitutional reform programme. The unit has published reports on devolution, reform of the House of Lords, parliamentary reform, human rights legislation, freedom of information legislation, and electoral reform, which have influenced and guided government policy. The unit’s value as an advisory body has been demonstrated repeatedly. An early success was the passage of devolution legislation and the reform of the House of Lords soon after Labour came to power in 1997. Professor Hazell was keen to ensure that the government could learn from failed attempts to achieve these objectives in the 1960s and 1970s, and consulted everyone involved in the earlier failures to draw their lessons together.

He has served in a number of other public roles: from 1991 to 2000 he was a trustee of the Citizenship Foundation; from 1992 to 1995 he was vice chairman of the Association of Charitable Foundations; from 2002 to 2003 he was vice chairman of the Independent Commission on Proportional Representation. He has been a member of the Council of the Hansard Society since 1997 and was vice chairman of its Commission on the Scrutiny Role of Parliament in 2001.

Professor Hazell has published numerous books and journal articles, including Devolution, Law Making and the Constitution (2005) and The English Question (2006), and articles on English regional government, the dynamism of constitutional reform in the UK, Westminster as a three-in-one legislature, the absence of the courts in devolution disputes, the need for better parliamentary scrutiny of constitutional bills, and parliament as a constitutional guardian. He was awarded the Haldane Medal by the Royal Institute of Public Administration in 1978 and has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts since 1991. In 2006 he was awarded the CBE in recognition of his services to constitutional reform.