Oral evidence: House of Commons Governance, HC 692Tuesday 4 November 2014
Oral evidence, 4 November 2014.
Witnesses
Rt Hon Mr David Blunkett MP, Rt Hon Mr Peter Hain MP, Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MBE MP, and Mr Bernard Jenkin MP gave evidence.
Chair
Thank you very much for coming. We are still waiting for Margaret Hodge, but we will crack on. As you know we are expecting votes some time around 5.45 pm—there will be three votes, so we will have to stop the proceedings then. If we run out of time and we have to find some more we will do our best on that. Thank you very much to each of you for your excellent written evidence. Jacob is going to start, but if there are things that you want to add by way of preliminary points, please do so.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Thank you very much for coming. Could each of you set out your views on whether the roles of the Clerk of the House and chief executive should be split or continue to be performed by one person? If they were to be split, with each accountable to the Speaker, what in practice could be done to protect each one from the other interfering in their area of work and to ensure that there was an integrated service? If the role of Clerk and chief executive were to be split, who would be the accounting officer? Mr Blunkett, if we start in alphabetical order I hope you will not think it is unfair.
Mr Blunkett
Thank you very much and thank you, Chair, for this opportunity. First, it is perfectly feasible to define the role of the Clerk. In fact, in the debate in the House in September the role was defined. It was very clear that people felt that the expertise, the development of experience, the knowledge that the Clerk and those working to him—as it is at the moment—have about procedure, process and constitution were clearly defined and were crucial to retaining that particular function at a very high level. I think it has defined itself, and because that experience has to be gained—this point was made over and over again—within the particular confines of the parliamentary process itself, it is by definition a separate role. An independent chief executive can gain experience anywhere, and they should be able to apply that in those areas that would apply in other areas of our life and business and commercial activity, of which we are all aware, whereas the Clerk’s experience would be very specific. I have seen this work in areas such as Education, where it was perfectly feasible to have an independent chief inspector of schools and a permanent secretary running the Department. Although from time to time there may have been disagreement, there was a very clearly defined role, and the chief inspector was a Crown appointee. I have seen it happen and I have seen it work, and I cannot see any other way of working this, because if the role of the Clerk is to be defined in the way in which Members with all sorts of different points of view have defined it, it is impossible for that person to gain the wider experience necessary to have overall charge. I think that the two should be on equal terms. The chief exec—not a chief operating officer—should have a very clear role in terms of managing the estate and the employees that would be under that function, as opposed to the Clerk’s, and should then be able to carry out a modern function in a 21st-century Parliament.
Mr Hain
I agree with that. I will simply answer your specific point about the accounting officer. Ultimately, as I argued forcefully in my submission, both posts should be senior posts, with the Clerk obviously in charge of parliamentary procedure, privilege and everything to do with the running of legislation and Parliament itself in terms of its primary function, and the chief executive responsible for the administration and services—but both ultimately responsible. In that sense, other than the Secretary of State in a Whitehall Department and the permanent secretary as the chief accounting officer, it is a slightly different position, because both would be answerable to the House of Commons Commission and the Speaker, so it is a different situation from Whitehall Departments. But in my view, in those circumstances, the chief executive would be the accounting officer, because the chief executive would be responsible for finance, administration and services. Obviously, they would discuss these matters with his or her colleague, the Clerk, and they would work together—they would need to. I do not think that the current situation is satisfactory where we effectively have a part-time Clerk and a part-time chief executive, all in one person. That is not to denigrate the role of the Clerk. I formed close friendships with the Clerk when I was Leader of the Commons. In fact, Sir Robert Rogers, for whom I have the highest regard, used to bring me apples from his orchard, such was the nature of the friendship when I was Leader of the Commons and he was, I think, a deputy Clerk. This is not to show any disrespect for the Clerk, but we are in a situation now where we have a House of Commons—let alone the other side of the Palace of Westminster—with 1,700 direct employees, and another 1,700 employees of Members of Parliament. The Clerk in the chief executive role is responsible for 3,500 or so people in conditions where a litigious culture exists, and where there are health and safety, IT and diversity issues. All these are questions for a modern organisation, and we are a big organisation—in business terms, we are huge. Yet although we are being run by very able people—some of the most able people I have ever encountered in my life—in the form of the Clerk, you simply cannot do both jobs. That is why I strongly feel that it is in the interests of the Commons and of the Clerk him or herself—they have only ever been hims—to have that distinct role on the parliamentary legislative side, and the administration side should be under a chief executive.
Mr Jenkin
I think that we can all agree, and I think that recent Clerks would concur that it has been very difficult for them to do their job. However, the question that we should be asking is whether that has been because of the structure or other factors. I am sitting here as the Chairman of the Public Administration Committee, with their approval, and for the evidence that I have submitted—[Interruption.]
Chair
Mrs Hodge, our apologies: we tried to get a message to you, but we are going to have to finish at about quarter to 6 for a vote. If necessary, we will have a re-run. There will be three votes, we think, from quarter to 6, so I truncated the earlier session by 15 minutes. I had search parties out for people.
Margaret Hodge
I did not get the message.
Chair
Mr Rees-Mogg will catch you up with the questions. We have come to the key question, which is what you do about the role of the Clerk and the chief executive, and Mr Jenkin was just answering.
Mr Jenkin
I will carry straight on. All the advice that we have seen—everything that we have learned—has shown that organisations tend to fail not because of structural reasons but because of reasons of culture, behaviour or attitude. The questions we need to ask to understand what is going wrong and why are therefore about those things,. When we get to the end of those questions and understand why things are going wrong there may be some consequent changes to structure or governance. I can do no better than quote from one of the advisers who has helped prepare our evidence: “Your view of Clerk and chief operating officer, and the idea of a separate Clerk and CEO, could still end up solving little. Unless the teamwork and the relationship between the two is exemplary, then they will hide behind their governance protocols and in fact make an already undesired situation worse.” One can just imagine, in the atmosphere that can pervade this place, a situation in which there is no accountability because they push the blame for what is going wrong on to each other rather than sharing and understanding. We should be looking at the relationships in the organisation first—the quality of those relationships.
Chair
Mr Rees-Mogg, would you mind repeating your question?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Certainly. I will repeat it in truncated form. Basically, the question is whether you feel that the job of chief executive and Clerk can be done by the same person, or that the roles should be split; if they are split, who they should report to, whether on an equal basis or not; and which one—conceivably, it could be both—ought to be the accounting officer.
Margaret Hodge
Okay. My experience comes from being a member of the interview panel trying to replace the existing Clerk. My other experience comes from being a Back-Bench Member of the House who works in this building—my office happens to be in this building. When we went through the interview process, it was absolutely clear that trying to find an individual who could fulfil both roles was well nigh impossible, so through that process I became convinced that the two roles should be split. I also have to say as a Back-Bench Member of the House that I do not think that the House works well. Priority has always been given to ensuring that the way we conduct ourselves in our proceedings is well supported through the Clerk, but I do not think that the House works well. I do not think that it works well as an open institution as part of our democracy.
Chair
Do I glean from that that you are saying that the procedural side of it—the debate on new clause 1 to the Modern Slavery Bill, and making sure that what is decided is recorded, and the complications, and so on—works okay?
Margaret Hodge
I am talking about the Palace of Westminster—the support to Members, and the administration. The other thing I would say, as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, is that the budget is £200 million, which is a lot of money. We all have tight budgets at the moment and we are seeing massive cuts in public expenditure. I am waiting to get my beady eye on that £200 million to see whether it is efficiently, effectively and economically used. I will give a couple of examples of where the administration of the House does not work well. I get a lot of visitors coming to see me. Time and time again, they wait an hour in the queue to get into the House. That is completely unacceptable. This is a key part of the fabric of our democracy, and easy access, not just for Members of Parliament but for members of the public, is vital. When the computer systems are changed, that is always a total mess, and you find that you cannot use the IT for a few days because the changes have not been properly implemented. To give a recent example, if I may, last week the Public Accounts Committee held a conference on tax avoidance. It was a fantastic conference. We got all the players in a room together, so we had the development charities and the tax campaigners together with the big four and a lot of multinational companies. It was a really good opportunity. It felt fantastic to me to get all those people in the same room together. When I tried to get a tiny bit of funding to support the holding of this conference, I was unable to do so, despite the fact that we have a budget of £200 million. Thanks to the generosity of the City of London and the Institute of Chartered Accountants we were able to hold it—actually in Guildhall—and then it even came down to having to pay for the breakfast in the Speaker’s House. We had a lot of visitors here and people from other countries. I could not even get the money to have a little breakfast of croissants and coffee. So it doesn’t work well.
Mr Blunkett
You would have been alright at No. 11; they do that well.
Margaret Hodge
I would split it. Can I just say one other thing, Jack? I would not be happy with a compromise, in effect the status quo, which is that the Clerk would be the chief accounting officer and you would have an administrator under him. I would not be happy with that. The only solution and way forward for me would be two equal people reporting up to the Commission of the House of Commons.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am very impressed that the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee got her event privately sponsored. That seems a very good way of avoiding spending public money. On the issue of the Clerk and chief executive, if they are two different people, what happens if they disagree? Who makes the final decision? If it is a matter that impinges on the Chamber but costs money, can you not see the potential for quite serious clashes? You then have to have either very good working relationships or an order of seniority.
Margaret Hodge
I do see that the tasks are very different. I am sure that you can imagine a very odd circumstance in which they would come into conflict with each other, but I think they are very different jobs. Making sure that we function effectively as a legislative Chamber is one task and ensuring the good administration of the building is another. Were there to be conflict—I just cannot see it happening.
Mr Blunkett
Chairman, can I ask Jacob if he could give an example?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I can give a couple of examples. One is the fairly obvious one that running the Chamber is very expensive, so you may have things relating to printing costs. The Clerk feels it is very important that Members have the right to pick up the papers, which is an expensive thing to provide. The chief executive says that this is an obvious area for saving and we must cut it back. The other example is security. Members have a constitutional right not to be obstructed from getting in and out of the Palace, but that adds very significant security costs, because you cannot secure every entrance in the way that a chief executive might want to.
Mr Blunkett
But aren’t the options for budget costs put to the Commission? I am asking a question here, not answering it. Aren’t the options put to the Commission? The only time, incidentally, that I have never made it to the Chamber is when the Division bell did not work in Portcullis House, which is another example of the dysfunctionality of this place.
Mr Hain
But on the question of disagreement over printing costs in respect of the House’s functions, ultimately, if there is a literal stand-off and two rational top-qualified people cannot find a way through, then the Commission—
Margaret Hodge
Yes. Mr Hain:—and the Speaker have to resolve it. In the end, the Commission is the statutory body in charge.
Chair
I understand the strength of the case that you are making. There has been a lot of evidence that the post should be split. There has been a great debate and a multiplicity of evidence about the relationship between the two. If you take the issue of security that Mrs Hodge has just raised, although all of us have had experience of this, without going into detail, part of the problem—I have gone into detail about this and Mr Hain is aware of this as well—is that there is not clarity about who is in charge. There is not a clear line of command all the way up. The worry that I have is that, if you have two of these posts and they are primus inter pares, there will be a lot of jostling. The other evidence that we have had so far is that the Speaker and the Commission do not operate in the way that a Secretary of State does. If you had a Secretary of State, you could sort it out, but the Speaker does not, on his evidence, give the time—nor, I suggest, does he necessarily have the natural qualities—to do what amounts to the managerial direction that we who have been Secretaries of State have to go for.
Mr Blunkett
I shall be brief. If it is a security issue, I had a parallel experience when I served under the chairmanship of Menzies Campbell on the Committee that examined the events surrounding what happened with Damian Green. That was a classic example of why we need to sort this place out. To be honest, the person who was dumped on was the Serjeant at Arms. If you have never seen an example, you just have to go back to the script of the evidence given to see people shifting the blame on to someone else in terms of decisions. The sooner we sort out the accountability lines for a whole range of managerial activity in this place, the better.
Mr Jenkin
There is a lot of assertion about the advantage of splitting the roles, but I do not think that you have actually been presented with evidence that that would fix the problems. There are problems and they do need to be fixed, but a high-functioning organisation requires relationships that are based on a very high degree of trust, openness and honesty. I suggest that that is what is lacking in our arrangements. We need to look at why that is the case. It will be because of the way people tend to behave and the attitudes they tend to adopt. It is a big challenge in this place—in what is essentially a divided House of Commons with people generally opposing each other and jostling for power—to create a governance and management structure that reflects a unity of command, a sharing of intent and objectives, mutual support and all the other things. The engagement scores we see in the House of Commons people survey are actually quite impressive. Most of the individuals involved who I have spoken to are very willing and very aware of things not working as well as they should. They are dealing with an environment that is extremely difficult to operate in because of the way the governance structures work. I was pleased to hear the previous discussion, which concentrated on the role and composition of the Commission, and the role of the Management Board. We elect the Speaker very much by popular suffrage in the House of Commons, based on how good a presiding officer he will be or for other extraneous political reasons. That is legitimate, but we tend not to think about how good a chairman of a strategic board he or she will be. This Committee should be considering whether, in fact, the chairman of the Commission should be separately elected with that particular expertise and capability in mind.
Margaret Hodge
There is a danger that we are moving off the main point if we get into that.
Mr Jenkin
I do not think we are.
Margaret Hodge
If I may say so, with the greatest of respect to Bernard, the argument that he made about whether the roles should be split is deeply flawed.
Mr Jenkin
What is your evidence?
Chair
Hang on a second. Both of you chair Select Committees, so would you mind accepting the authority of the Chair for a moment?
Margaret Hodge
It is deeply flawed. You cannot have a structure which is entirely dependent on people getting on. What Bernard was suggesting was, in essence, that we maintain the current structure and just try to ensure that people get on better.
Mr Jenkin
No, I am not sure that that’s right.
Margaret Hodge
That is how I understood it. Three of you in this room have been Secretaries of State. Government is complex and there are many issues that you tackle in government, as Cabinet Ministers, which go across departmental boundaries. There are lots of issues where you have to work across departmental boundaries, but you manage it perfectly well. If we are very clear about the definition of security and where the responsibilities lie, and if we set those out sensibly, we can perfectly well manage what is currently an unmanageable job. When you interview these people, it is absolutely clear that they cannot be both Clerk and chief executive, so stop trying to do it and recognise that both roles are equally important but we have to separate them.
Ian Paisley
We are doing the classic political thing—we are all saying what the problems are. Most of us know that there is a problem here, but what is important is that we get prescription. Peter, you said in the House that the Management Board is not as effective as it should be. What should be done to make it more effective? Bernard, you said that there is opacity like a Victorian mystery about how this place is run. Can we have a clear prescription for what should be done?
Mr Hain
The Management Board should be led by a chief executive, just like how a chief executive would lead any other organisation. That is the key missing ingredient here. I do not think the problem is solved by the fudge of having a chief operating officer under the Clerk with the Clerk still as chief executive in all but name. You have got to have clarity here. That would provide the direction, supervision and co-ordination that the Management Board lacks at the present time because it does not have a leadership that gets a grip on the whole organisation in the way that a chief executive would.
Ian Paisley
Okay, give them some clear lines.
Mr Hain
Clear lines of accountability and so on.
Mr Jenkin
I am not against changing the structure, but before we do that we need to understand why people do not feel able to talk about what is going wrong within the organisation, why there is a sense of client disengagement from the House service and Members, and why Members feel so uninvolved and disengaged from the management of the House service. Those are behavioural things; they are not structural. For example—this one of the things I said in my evidence—why doesn’t every member of staff wear a badge with their name and job title on it so that we know what they do?
Chair
I agree with that.
Mr Blunkett
You could fix that very easily.
Mr Jenkin
It is telling of an attitude. This is what Andrew Kakabadse, one of our advisers who advises corporations and Governments all over the world, says: “I have seen and been involved in scenarios like this”—he has read all the evidence—“with the same outcome. Structural adjustments are made, money is spent, but greater disengagement is the outcome and a considerable amount of time is spent trying to put right what was wrong in the first place.” We need to analyse what was wrong in the first place, why people don’t feel able to speak and why there isn’t an open and honest culture among staff.
Ian Paisley
We had three people in front of us earlier who are on the Management Board and I would say that most of us probably did not know who they were. I have been here five years and I do not know what they do. Whose fault is that? Is that our fault as Members for not engaging with these middle managers in grey suits? Because we are not getting the service—
Mr Jenkin
I think this Committee is an example of the House beginning to get a grip on the problem, but it is a shared problem and a leadership problem. It is not necessarily about what job titles or roles people have got. It is about having clear accountability, but, whatever structure you have, there will not be accountability unless you have an atmosphere in which people want to accept accountability, are encouraged to take accountability and are rewarded for that accountability not just in a financial sense, but a real sense.
Ian Paisley
They are well rewarded.
Mr Jenkin
I venture to suggest that it is much better than the civil service, but it is parallel. Incidentally, in the civil service, they split the role of head of civil service and Cabinet Secretary and now they have put them back together again, because they realised that it was a Tweedledum and Tweedledee situation that did not contribute anything to the underlying problems faced by the civil service.
Mr Watts
I have been involved in failed and successful organisations, and my experience is that leadership is what makes the difference.
Mr Jenkin
Absolutely right.
Mr Watts
If you are to fix an organisation, you have to recruit the right leader. Then you set out your aims and objectives and your business plan and your leader has to help you to deliver that. The point I am trying to make is that whoever does this has to have the ability and skills to do it. My worry is that if you do not separate the role and give power to the chief executive, the Clerk will retain the accountability. So the Clerk will spend their time looking over the shoulder of the chief executive because anything that goes wrong will end up in their court. I am asking whether you accept that, because if you do, leadership and the position of the chief executive is crucially important to fixing this place.
Mr Jenkin
I accept a great deal of what you say, but making the relationship between the Clerk and a chief operating officer work will depend upon the leadership provided by the governance structure and the way it is overseen, as much as anything else. That would apply even more so if you separated the roles so they could be in competition with each other. However, the point is that that is a secondary question. Let us find out why people are not talking to each other and sharing their objectives, and why there is not shared intent and shared understanding across the system.
Mr Watts
Isn’t that because there is no leadership?
Mr Jenkin
It might be because, as we heard in the previous session, the Commission sometimes micro-manages, sometimes does not listen to strategic questions that need to be addressed and sometimes takes an interest in strategic questions. We must address the consistency of the leadership at the top more than the mechanics of how you join things up underneath.
Mr Blunkett
But Chairman, Bernard is making a perfectly reasonable point, but he is making it about the dysfunctional system that we have got and translating it. He is saying, “I don’t want to change it. All I want”—if I understand him right—“is for the Clerk to take a bigger role than he has already got, with a chief operating officer and clarity about relationships, and we will all ask people to get on with each other.”
Mr Jenkin
That is what leadership is about.
Mr Blunkett
Put that to Tesco at the moment, and see what it thinks about it.
Mr Hain
Briefly, the chief operating officer would be re-badging the Director General of Facilities and giving him or her a pay rise—that is essentially what it would be—as opposed to getting clarity about who is the leader of the administration of the House of Commons.
Sir Oliver Heald
I want to ask about the Commission, basically, but I wonder whether Margaret can clarify one thing about the appointment procedure before I do that. Due diligence in respect of all candidates is a clear principle of head-hunting and recruitment, but it did not seem to happen, at least with one candidate, on this occasion. There were investigations going on in the Australian Parliament, and apparently the head-hunters did not brief the panel about it and full information was not available. Was that a decision of the panel, or were the head-hunters inhibited in some way? What went wrong?
Margaret Hodge
This is one of the areas, if I may say so with the greatest respect, where rumour became reality without anybody really knowing what happened in practice. I have been involved in a lot of appointments, and I think we conducted ourselves with total and complete integrity. I thought the process was really good, and in the end we appointed the only appointable candidate, given the job description we had. On the issue of whether that candidate talked about the investigations that are taking place in Australia, yes she did.
Sir Oliver Heald
What happened about the head-hunters’ briefing? Didn’t they tell you about that?
Margaret Hodge
No, she told us.
Sir Oliver Heald
Why didn’t they?
Margaret Hodge
To be absolutely honest, I can’t remember whether it was in the briefing, but it was certainly part of the interview process and there was a perfectly valid explanation. It is very difficult to talk about these interview processes, as you can understand. There was a perfectly strong explanation, which we all accepted, and she was the only appointable candidate with the job description and the duties we had before us. I can absolutely assure you of that.
Sir Oliver Heald
Right. May I ask you all whether you would support the election of Commission members—in particular, the three Back-Bench members? What do you think of the idea of having external members of the Commission and possibly an external Chair? Should the Clerk and/or the chief executive be on the Commission as full members?
Mr Hain
Having sat on the Commission with you, Oliver, when I was Leader of the Commons, I think the idea of external members is good—it is like having non-exec directors, to use a private sector parallel. I think the Commission should continue to be chaired by the Speaker, because ultimately under the constitutional basis of Parliament, or at least the House of Commons, the Speaker is supreme. Members elect the Speaker, and I don’t think people would want that chain of accountability broken. I don’t think there should be a different Chair, but I am open to the idea of Back-Bench members being elected. We have gone down that route in respect of Chairs of Select Committees, so I don’t see why we can’t transport it across to the Commission.
Mr Blunkett
For speed of operation I agree with that.
Margaret Hodge
So do I.
Mr Jenkin
I would just say that I thought John Thurso’s evidence on this was exemplary; that the Commission should feel much more like a regular board, with non-executives, and that MPs should be elected to it. There is a case for considering separating the role of the Speaker from that of the chief executive, because we elect the Speaker to be the presiding officer of the House, holding much less in mind all the executive responsibilities that currently fall under the speakership. We need a body that is going to provide much more coherent and much more structured leadership, under which any structure will function better than the present performance. That should be done as the priority and they should decide whether it is necessary: once you’ve got a new, coherent board structure with outsiders on it, providing scrutiny and assurance about what is happening, they should be in a position to decide whether the roles need to be split. This is jumping the gun; that is my only complaint. I am not against changing the structure, but this is jumping the gun, and if this change is made, we may well find that it doesn’t actually fix anything.
Valerie Vaz
I have a question for you, Margaret, and then one to everyone else. Is there anything you’d do differently in the appointment process?
Margaret Hodge
No. We put a lot of time into it, because of the challenge of trying to find somebody who could fulfil both roles, and we interviewed the leading candidates twice, because there was a real dilemma. It is very difficult to break confidence, but because we recognised the challenge of the dual roles, we did suggest in agreeing to recommend the appointment of one candidate that there should be a redefinition of the Clerk’s role, with increased financial compensation.
Chair
That is the redefinition of the Clerk Assistant’s role?
Margaret Hodge
Yes. We suggested it should be rechristened and that the post-holder should earn more. We were faced with having to define a job description and that was how we did it, but both in the search, the short-listing, the preliminary interviews and the second interviews, we were very thorough and completely professional, assisted by having an external person with us, and we were very representative of Parliament. I know people have questioned why I was on there. I think it provided gender balance and I hope that, after all my years in Parliament, I am a slightly experienced Back Bencher. I also have my responsibilities in the Public Accounts Committee, representing an important element in the House with a responsibility for oversight. We did a really thorough job and I think a bunch of people getting together to do it again would not do it differently.
Sir Oliver Heald
Obviously, I have already raised the issue of the lack of due diligence.
Margaret Hodge
There wasn’t a lack of due diligence.
Sir Oliver Heald
On the point of your position on the Committee, aren’t you conflicted on that panel? There you are, Chairman of the PAC, responsible for overseeing the National Audit Office, who do all the value-for-money studies in the House, and your Committee looks into all that. How can you appoint the chief executive?
Mr Blunkett
That is out of order.
Margaret Hodge
Where is the conflict?
Sir Oliver Heald
You are appointing someone as chief executive whose work you are going to be looking into as Chairman of the PAC.
Margaret Hodge
I don’t see that.
Sir Oliver Heald
I thought I’d give you a chance to answer the point.
Margaret Hodge
I don’t see that. May I answer the other question about the Chair of the Committee? In my role, I do oversee public expenditure, and one of the welcome reforms that this Government have undertaken is in the governance of Departments, where the Secretary of State now acts as the chair of the board. I think that that political leadership of a Department has been a good move, which has strengthened governance. I think we should imitate that, not draw away from it by distinguishing between the two.
Chair
Okay. That is a really helpful point. Whatever changes are made are going to impose a greater burden on the Speaker to manage this place and that will have to form a part of the job description. There are only so many hours in the day, but they obviously have to preside in the Chamber as much as they do. A lot of the rest of the time will be spent less on representational duties and more on running this, otherwise the parallel with the Secretary of State is mixed up.
Mr Blunkett
Chairman, that depends on the competence and leadership of the chief exec. As you, I and Peter know, the competence of the senior staff that we have related to and where we have determined policy has also determined the amount of time we had to spend on micro-managing, hasn’t it?
Chair
I am not talking about that.
Valerie Vaz
Just one final question from me to all of you. I don’t know if you had an opportunity to look at each other’s written evidence—thank you all for submitting that—but, Mr Jenkin, you suggested that there should be a pre-appointment hearing for the Clerk. Can you explain why? Maybe I could hear everyone’s views as to why there should or should not be.
Mr Jenkin
I think it is indicative and I don’t want to go into any criticism of Margaret or anybody involved in the process. It was indicative that as this happened, there was a lot of unease among a lot of Members—it was not just on one side of the House—and there was a great deal of reluctance to talk about what was happening. We finished up with a call for a pre-appointment hearing. That is certainly a way of strengthening accountability and engagement in the appointment process, and I think it is highly appropriate in this day and age. If I may just comment on the recruitment process, there was a lot of unease about it and a lot of distrust of it. There have to be lessons learned about that. I don’t accept that Margaret was unavoidably conflicted, but there should be oversight of the appointment panel that is appointed for the purpose—maybe by the Public Appointments Commission—so it is transparent and people have assurance that there isn’t some kind of hidden fix being cooked up. That is what a lot of people felt, however unjustified that may have been.
Mr Hain
I am open to that suggestion of a pre-appointment hearing, but I think, without knowing the detail that others do, they were being asked to do a job that was impossible. To appoint one person to two roles that, in the modern setting, which is really one of the principal issues before your Committee, you can’t have performed by one person. That was at the root of the problem that has given rise to all the issues that have spilled over from it.
Mr Blunkett
Related to the earlier question about the future role of the Speaker, so with the future role of the Clerk. If the Clerk were to effectively be the overseer—in practice, the chief exec—then the ability to do the job that is expected of them would be impossible. With the R and R, the development of the education centre, the demands that are being made on Parliament now, the changed advice that will be needed in relation to further devolution, including to city regions, and the relationship—if we have one in future—with Europe, all place a bigger burden on the existing practice role of the Clerk and make it impossible for them to do if they had to do the wider chief exec role as well.
Mr Hain
Added to which, this Commons may have to move—moving the whole shebang. That is a huge issue.
Valerie Vaz
Mr Blunkett, would you have a pre-appointment hearing?
Mr Blunkett
Yes, I would. I see no problem with that.
Margaret Hodge
I think it would be a good thing to have a pre-appointment hearing and it would tackle some of the issues that Ian Paisley talked about, such as Members not knowing who the Clerk is. I have just got to say this about the appointments process: the criticism of the appointments process has been entirely based on rumour and conjecture. Very little of it has been based on fact. If there is one thing I regret it is that the criticism has been so widespread without any basis in reality or fact.
Valerie Vaz
Just to go down once more, if the roles were split, would you have a pre-appointment hearing for each one?
Chair
For each post.
Margaret Hodge
Yes.
Mr Hain
Yes.
Mr Blunkett
Yes.
Chair
Last point, picking up on what Mr Jenkin has said, some people regard this issue of having staff with name plates on, a badge saying who they are and what they do, as a trivial point. I happen to be on your side and regard it as a really important point. It is interesting that, so far, there has been resistance to this.
Mr Jenkin
I think it is interesting that there is resistance to it. We need to ask ourselves why people might be resisting that and why they might want to avoid accountability when they should be grabbing it with both hands in order to provide a better service to Members. I think it comes down to leadership. I don’t accept that running this building, or even transferring it and running the project, is beyond the responsibility of one person, providing he or she has sufficient capacity and people to delegate to. Unity of command is the first principle of warfare, and it is probably the first principle of running any successful organisation.
Chair
Can I thank the four of you very much indeed? We packed a lot in to 45 minutes. Thank you very much. Oral evidence: House of Commons Governance, HC 692 7