Oral evidence: House of Commons Governance, HC 692Tuesday 11 November 2014
Oral evidence, 11 November 2014.
Witness
Rt Hon Angela Eagle MP, Shadow Leader of the House of Commons, gave evidence.
Chair
Ms Eagle, thank you very much for coming. You have an idea of the drift of the questioning. Our questions to you will not be that different. I did not ask Mr Hague—perhaps I should have done—whether he wanted to say anything by way of introduction. I don’t know whether you do. Ms Eagle indicated dissent.
Chair
Okay. If I may, let me ask you the same question as I put to Mr Hague, about the strengths and weaknesses of the Commission. In your case, I think you have been a member of it since 2011. What do you think about the Commission?
Ms Eagle
I have to say that it was always rather a mysterious thing before I got on to it. Reflecting on the whole issue, during my over 20 years in Parliament, I have to say that the management and structure of the place has always been rather mysterious. You only get to come across bits of it by accident, and if you are lucky enough to stay here long enough, you then stumble across more of it. I am not sure that that is exactly the right way to run a modern organisation. From my time on the Commission, I think it is perfectly reasonable place. Whatever people think, it has never been a source of great controversy or shouting matches; it generally proceeds by consensus. Rather oddly and unusually in this Parliament, it has a Government majority on it—by complete mistake, I think, because of the coalition. That has not happened since the Second World War, I believe, but we do tend not to divide on party lines.
Chair
Are you treating the Speaker as a Conservative for these purposes?
Ms Eagle
No, not really. The Speaker can be a little bit of both, in my experience, in the Commission. It works reasonably well. The Clerk attends, and other members of the Management Board attend as and when their particular items are on the agenda. I must say that I was quite surprised to see in the evidence the Management Board have given you that they feel that there is a problem in the way that the two bodies interact. Nobody from the Management Board has ever raised that with me, so it was slightly eyebrow-raising to read that. If you ask me, I suspect that there is more tension between the Management Board and the House Committees, particularly the Administration Committee, which has been quite rumbustious—particularly some members of that Committee—in how it has dealt with the savings requirements. That has put real pressure on the House for different sorts of decision making, and I think Sir Alan deals with that with great equanimity. I suspect, although I do not know as I do not sit on it, that the Finance and Services Committee has a more harmonious relationship with the Management Board, simply because John Thurso has driven the savings, during this Parliament anyway. At the Commission, we have had no real controversy. Probably the only thing that we have had that we have sent back to the Management Board was around the living wage and zero-hours contracts. We were given some information that was not as strictly accurate as we were led to believe. We were trying to get the House not only to be an accredited living wage employer, which it is now, but not to use zero-hours contracts. There were some interesting issues that we came across at the level of the Commission in the area of catering on that particular point.
Valerie Vaz
Moving on from that, do the reports come to you, or do you generate reports?
Ms Eagle
The agenda of the Commission is set by the Speaker. Effectively, we meet monthly and the agenda turns up, in its glory, a couple of days before for those of us who are going along to the meeting, so that we can check papers. There are different kinds of papers—there are papers that are there for decision at the time and there are also reports, which will come to us later and are just progress reports. To some extent, I think I would like to see more detail earlier. That would make us feel less like a rubber stamp. Sometimes things just suddenly emerge fully formed, and it may be that F&S and the Admin Committee know much more about them than the members of the Commission. Sometimes you suddenly see things appear fully formed that you might have wanted an earlier look at. But then there are those issues that come completely out of the blue, such as the controversy a few years ago over charging to go up Big Ben, which was generated and unforeseen by the Commission and caused a huge furore. Other furores come from the Lords, but I suspect that you will ask me about that subsequently.
Valerie Vaz
A couple of quick questions. First, this complex organogram: would you like to change it and make it much more streamlined? Secondly, with whom does the buck stop?
Ms Eagle
It is a complex process because not only is the House complex, but in this building we have two Chambers, two different bits of Parliament, which are both completely self-governing and there is a lot of duplication. It is more complex than is desirable, more complex than it needs to be in many ways, and it could certainly do with a good looking at. As for where the buck stops, I think the buck stops with the Speaker in terms of the decisions that are made, but the Management Board has responsibility for delivering particular things. In the current circumstances, the Clerk and CEO is the person who is responsible for what the House Service does or does not deliver.
Ian Paisley
You heard what William said about how you cannot serve two masters: if you have two positions of equal competing authority, they will naturally compete and will not work. I ask you the same question: should the office of Clerk and chief executive be split, and if so where should the real authority lie?
Ms Eagle
I think it should be split. I long ago came to that conclusion and what I have seen in the past few years has convinced me of it even more. It is something that is even more important going forward when I look at the challenges facing our Chamber and our Parliament. Restoration and renewal is the obvious huge organisational challenge that will involve both Houses and the entire building. The way that things are likely to change in the future in other areas is also important. For example, the issues around digital delivery and ICT have been particularly problematic for Members. There are other, more procedural, issues about Parliament, devolution and how we deal with a potentially rapidly changing situation procedurally and constitutionally. At the same time, the pressures to deliver and modernise are growing in the other bits of the job, the CEO bits of the job, but inevitably the very important procedural role that the Clerk has to play takes up much more of his or her—it has always been his—time than these other things. I think it is perfectly possible and desirable to split the roles. I do not agree that if the roles were split there would necessarily be immediate competition between the two. You could split them, and as long as you were careful about how you described what the jobs were, it would be easy to see them co-existing without competing.
Ian Paisley
You do not see the troubles—William put his finger on seven areas where he thought there might be conflict with this crossover between procedural House issues and organisational issues. Can you see the conflict there?
Ms Eagle
No, I think if you anticipate there might be difficulties in that area, you merely define them so that you give them to the different roles and make sure that there is a way of dealing with any difficulties that might arise. Clearly, the Speaker is the person who could deal with any difficulties that might arise from that point of view, but I do not think it is beyond the wit of a person to separate those out.
Ian Paisley
Should the accounting officer role be split also? Would it naturally fall that that would be split, or would one ultimately be senior because they are the AO?
Ms Eagle
It was interesting looking at the some of the evidence. People were asking who could dismiss who, but I do not think it is a question of that. It is about different, very specialist roles which it is increasingly difficult to find embodied in one person. I think we were quite lucky with Sir Robert, but there are not many people who can fulfil these increasingly complex roles all in one area, especially when they have spent 30 or 40 years getting to be the kind of procedural expert that they need to be to do the constitutional job that is required of the Clerk in our Parliament. I think it is the “Under-Clerk”, isn’t it, because in theory he is below the House of Lords Clerk? I have never noticed that particular hierarchy affecting the way in which our Clerk behaves in Parliament. I do not think that it is nearly as difficult as people imagine. There is the potential to pay much more attention to the CEO part of the job in this complex service, which has to be delivered in changing times when the place needs to modernise in all sorts of ways. It needs to make itself relevant in an anti-politics age, and reach out to an electorate that is increasingly sceptical and baffled by how we do things in this place. I think there would be a lot of value added by splitting the roles, and I do not see that it would be the kind of problem that some fear.
Ian Paisley
Who would be the accounting officer?
Ms Eagle
It is perfectly possible to see who had the budgets and have it delegated. There are different ways of doing it. You could have one AO, or you could have delegated accounting officer status in different areas. You get that kind of approach in other structures, and it is not beyond the wit of this Committee to come up with a way of doing it, I don’t think. It works perfectly well in other bodies, and I think you have had some examples in the evidence that you have taken of potential models that you could look at and adapt.
Chair
I do not think that we have had any evidence—I am open to correction on this—of organisations where there are two senior people of equal status.
Ms Eagle
My perfect model would be to have a CEO for the entire building and a Clerk for each Parliament, if you asked me in a greenfield site to do it. That would be the best way of working, I think. I am sure that their Lordships will be more than happy to engage with us on that.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I was going to ask if you thought that the COO and Clerk squared the circle, or would that not be sufficient authority for the person doing the detailed management of the organisation?
Ms Eagle
I do not think it would change very much. It is a kind of status quo option. It might sharpen slightly some of the role that could be done at the Management Board, but I do not think we would actually see very much change from introducing that kind of approach. I understand why it has been suggested, and I do not think it would be a bad thing, but nor do I think it solves the much more important problem of how we manage to get both these jobs done in the most effective way without having to rely on one single person with an almost impossible job description to deliver it effectively in both areas.
Sir Oliver Heald
Angela, we have had quite a bit of evidence about the make-up of the Commission. Some people have suggested that it should be elected from Members of Parliament; others have suggested external non-execs. What is your take on the composition?
Ms Eagle
Can I emphasise that there is no Labour party view on this, much as William did for the Conservative party? I am merely speaking off my own bat. I am quite open-minded about changes, but I think they have to fit in with other changes that are being made. You do not want to change the Commission in isolation, nor would you want to change Management Board in isolation. If you are going to make changes to the Commission, you have to do it in a way that fits in with changes you are making elsewhere. I have absolutely no objection to non-executives. I have come across them on the SCIPSA board, on which I have the joy to sit, and on the Audit Committee, where I think they make a great contribution. I know that they have worked well on the Standards Committee as well, although I personally have never been a member of that particular Committee. So I do not have a problem with the challenge that can come from having non-executives. I think it is particularly important in a place that is quite hidebound by its own traditions and can be quite inward looking at its worst. We all love the traditions of this place, but they can sometimes get a bit encrusted, and then this place can fall behind what is best practice in other places and end up looking very old-fashioned or daft, if it is not careful. I think non-executives provide a good antidote to that.
Sir Oliver Heald
And electing the members of the Commission?
Ms Eagle
Again, I agree with William that it would be odd not to have the Leader of the House and the shadow Leader of the House on the Commission. Before you ask me, I agree with him also that it is best for the Speaker to chair the Commission, but I am open-minded about how the others might be picked. At the moment, people ask around within parties, I think, so you could have elections within the political groups.
Sir Oliver Heald
Can you just explain the case for having the Leader and the shadow Leader on there?
Ms Eagle
The Leader of the House is responsible for ensuring that he is the voice of the House in Government and the voice of Government in the House, and the shadow shadows him or her. I think it is important, when it comes to how the House operates, that there is that connection—unless you are suggesting that there should be a complete separation of the Executive and the Legislature. Although we in the Labour party are advocating a constitutional convention, I am not sure we are going quite that far.
Sir Oliver Heald
No, I don’t think we want to do that. My final question is whether your Clerk and/or your chief executive ought to be formally members of the Commission.
Ms Eagle
I am not so sure. I think it works well having them—certainly at the moment the Clerk always attends and gives reports at every Commission meeting, which are extremely valuable. Other members of the Management Board attend as and when they have papers or documents that they are presenting, or presumably if the Commission wanted them to attend, it could have them attending. I am not sure what it adds to have the Clerk actually voting. I think we have to remember that the Commission is there to make sure that Parliament works, and Members of Parliament are those whom the Speaker and those of us who are on the Commission have to be accountable to, as we were when the Big Ben charges issue came up.
Mr Watts
Coming back to an earlier point you made, Angela, it seems to me that there is very little criticism about the role of the Clerk, as far as providing professional legal advice to Members and Committees and so on in the House, but there is quite a lot of criticism about the administration. At the moment, the person who is responsible for the administration side is the Clerk. Do you think that any Clerk is likely to have the sorts of skills that will allow them to drive an organisation that will deal with the problems that have been highlighted in the reports and in people’s evidence?
Ms Eagle
I think it is increasingly less likely as what happens in this building and the way we have to go forward gets more complex. Restoration and renewal is the obvious trigger for doing something different. My personal belief is that, after we have been through restoration and renewal—however it looks and whatever arrangements the House decides to come to to accomplish it—we will not go back to where we were before. It would be a good idea if we tried to prepare for the huge upheaval that restoration and renewal will lead to. We should get ourselves in the best possible position to deliver it without having any major disaster strike us, because the reputational damage will be huge if we get it wrong. We have nearly 2,000 employees in the House Service that the Commission is responsible for. There are more people who work in this building than are employed by Members of Parliament. We have large numbers of visitors—I think we get 1 million a year—and this is a UNESCO world heritage site. We are trying to modernise and make Parliament reach out to the electorate in our democracy again. It is just getting more and more complex, and I think that the Clerk’s procedural and constitutional importance is likely to take up more of his or her time in the future because of some of these other political changes I was talking about, particularly devolution and the flux in politics at the moment. So I am more convinced than ever that you need to have a separation of those roles.
Mr Watts
I want to conclude by asking you the question that we asked Mr Hague. What is the Opposition’s view about finding time to have a debate and finding time for legislation if there is a need for any change? Will the Opposition parties do all they can to make time available for both of those issues, so that the will of the House can be acted on before we go into the election?
Ms Eagle
Of course it is not in my gift to decide what the Government do with their legislative time.
Mr Watts
Will the Opposition do all they can?
Ms Eagle
I certainly think that it would be good if we could resolve this issue. Your Committee, Mr Straw, is meeting virtually every day to try to meet the extremely challenging timetable that you accepted.
Chair
We are.
Ms Eagle
It would be rather odd if, having worked like billy-o all the way to January, you came up with something and then that sat mouldering on a shelf somewhere. What William said about consensus and all of that is quite important. I was glad to hear him say that there will be a debate and obviously we will all be in a better position to answer your question when we know what is in your report.
Chair
So will we.
Ms Eagle
My view is that there have been three reports looking at the administration of the House—you will know about them: Ibbs, Braithwaite and Tebbit—and it has taken quite a long time to get progress on some of them. Tebbit has been progressed faster than the others and has made a real difference, but there are new and important challenges ahead of us, so it would be good if we could establish enough of a consensus to make rapid progress.
Mr Heath
Thank you for recognising the Stakhanovite tendencies of this Committee. It is much appreciated.
Ms Eagle
You are putting in a lot of work, and the least the House could do when you deliver your report is try to deal with it with the same degree of urgency.
Mr Heath
Coming back to the possibility of sharing services with the House of Lords, you described earlier your perfect solution if we have a greenfield site—incidentally, I share that view, and if we do not get restoration and renewal right we may have a greenfield site—
Ms Eagle
Or just a tent.
Mr Heath
Or just a tent. But given that we are not going to make very quick progress, even in the best of all possible worlds, are there areas that you think we ought to address as a matter of urgency where we might be able to make rather swifter progress?
Ms Eagle
Yes, procurement is one that the House Service has just put together, and we will see how that works. ICT, obviously, and PICT has always been a joint service. That is slightly more difficult to use as a huge exemplar, because of the difficulties of providing it. In general there are a range of possibilities. I know it is controversial, but I don’t see why catering, HR, a range of financial areas—
Chair
The Library?
Ms Eagle
Why not?
Mr Heath
Do your counterparts in the House of Lords agree?
Ms Eagle
I am sure they don’t. Certainly some Labour peers who I have talked to about this agree that there should be many more shared services, but it is a matter of controversy in some areas. You only have to look at the huge row that we had between the two Houses about the Education Centre to understand quite how dyed in the wool some people over the other end can be. I am being quite diplomatic.
Mr Heath
Yes, very diplomatic.
Ms Eagle
The idea that we should have more children visiting and looking at the heart of our democracy is something that I rather hoped would be shared across both Houses, but, alas, it wasn’t.
Mr Heath
Given that we have the R&R project coming, and that, as I said to William Hague, it has got to be a shared venture, is there an argument for having some sort of interim arrangements in answer to our immediate question, which could then morph into something more permanent to deal with that issue?
Ms Eagle
I know a lot of work is being done at the moment, some of it joint, to see what the best way of gearing up to handle R&R will be. Obviously neither House has decided—particularly this House has not decided—how it wants to tackle the issue yet. I detect among the House Service that they probably have and they would want a total decant; work is going on to see what the options might be. That is more controversial among Members, but looking at the range of asbestos in the building, the potential for keeping people safe while you are doing things—all that work is going on now. The more that we can agree on how to move forward and do this preparation work, so that the next Parliament can make really meaty decisions on this quite quickly, the more we will be in a position to ensure that we can explain the need for this project and get some understanding of how important it is and why it needs to go ahead. Having done that, we really need to be in a position where we can robustly deliver it, on time and to budget. I do not think that at the moment I feel confident. We certainly have not got the management structures in place to do it now. We need to create something particular in order to maximise our chances of achieving it. My personal view is that after the House has done that, it will not return to the old way of doing things. There is real merit in trying to get ahead of that curve—to have a bit of future looking and anticipation of where we are going to be, and then try to get there a bit early. Those changes will really pay dividends in the future.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Changing subject somewhat, you were one of the panel members for the recruitment process that has stalled.
Ms Eagle
Yes, 20 hours of my life were taken up doing that.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Which you will never get back, I am sorry to say.
Ms Eagle
No, I will never get them back.
Chair
It’s a mere second compared with the time we have had to spend on dealing with the consequences.
Ms Eagle
Let’s put it this way: I have some empathy with you.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
With hindsight, is there anything in that process that you would change? Was there anything that you felt was unsatisfactory about it, or any things that you feel were particularly strong about it?
Ms Eagle
What I said in the debate was that it was an open and transparent process, which it was, and that it was undertaken in good faith by everybody, which it was. Obviously some people did not like the result of it. It was a radical result and it was not appreciated by everybody, which is why you are here. I would make the following observation: prior to there being any process in place for appointing the Clerk, it was done rather like the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury is done. Two names were provided to the then Speaker by the retiring Clerk, and the Speaker decided between the two. I hope the Committee will think that moving away from that way of doing it is probably progress. What happened, I think, was that everyone was convinced—the Tebbit report said this—that the process should be more open and transparent, but nobody sat down and wrote out, debated, came up with or put in place a structure to succeed the old way of doing things. In 2011—I was not on the Commission then, but I think that you were, Sir Oliver—
Sir Oliver Heald
No, I wasn’t.
Ms Eagle
Oh. Well, in 2011, it was done for the first time in a semi-open way, but it was not open and transparent. We then got this way, but nobody had sat down and asked, “When the next Clerk is appointed, what would an open and transparent process look like?” There had not been a debate about what would or would not be acceptable. In hindsight, that should probably have happened as a result of the Tebbit report, but that demonstrates that the House is not as proactive as it should be when it comes to writing things down or changing its own procedures. People’s minds only come to thinking about it when the next Clerk has retired and you have five minutes to think about how you will deal with the succession. I do not know whether you would want to do this, Mr Straw, but you might want to think about what open and transparent means in that context, following on from the Tebbit report.
Chair
I think that is very good advice. Thank you very much indeed. Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses
Sir Paul Beresford MP, Rt Hon Sir Menzies Campbell MP, Rt Hon Hazel Blears MP and Nigel Mills MP gave evidence.
Chair
Thank you very much to each of you for coming along this afternoon. I will, if I may, ask each of you whether you feel that the role of the Chief Executive/Clerk ought to be split. If it were to be split, who, if either, should be subordinate to whom, or should they be pari passu? If it is convenient, Sir Paul, I will start on my left and work across.
Sir Paul Beresford
From bitter experience of local government, where I had a weak chief executive with a strong deputy, I would be emphatic that we should have one person, as was the system when Robert Rogers was in place.
Chair
You should have one person.
Sir Paul Beresford
In other words, not split. The opportunity for elected members to have an influence, and for the executive to have an influence back again, is very important. It is very much easier for the responsibility to go down through a single member. I had that in local government and also when I was a Minister. In both cases, we ran very tight ships—some would say too tight—and we did so because we had that system of one person being responsible—the head of the civil service, in effect. It was very constructive.
Chair
That argues that there should be one person who is senior, but is there an argument against splitting the two roles, which are obviously distinct?
Sir Paul Beresford
Yes, the second part of that is that there is a very specialised part for the Clerk. There is a limited field for it, and it is an expertise that we need. I am afraid that I must be partly responsible for suggesting in the Commission that we should broaden to look at the Commonwealth, especially the old Commonwealth. Despite the fact that the lady was Australian, I will not make any comment on that. The specialty required takes some considerable time to learn, whereas the other aspect of it, which integrates, in part, the administration with the Clerk’s work, means that you can get support for that and bring the support in. To some degree, we have seen that with Myfanwy Barrett coming in and helping and assisting the Clerk who has just retired.
Chair
Ms Blears.
Hazel Blears
Thank you, Mr Straw. I thank the Committee for inviting us to give evidence. I am here as a Member of Parliament with some reflections about the Government. I do not profess to be any kind of expert. I have had some dealings with the Commission in various ways. I found it, as the shadow Leader of the House said, to be a mystery before I began to delve into it and to find out how it works. I know a little more now. I take a different view to Sir Paul on this issue. I said in the debate in the House and in my written submission to you that I absolutely believe that these roles are so distinct that they should be split. I believe that that can be achieved, particularly by ring-fencing the chief Clerk’s responsibility for legal, constitutional and procedural advice. It is absolutely important that the chief Clerk remains responsible for that, particularly with some of the complications around devolution and so on, but I do not see that as an insurmountable barrier. If the jobs are not split, my worry is that we could have an extremely competent quasi-judicial person in the body of the Clerk with responsibility for human resources, finance, security, administration, information technology and cyber, which would be completely outwith the skill set of what is basically a constitutional expert. That would be a very damaging situation. Obviously, Sir Robert has done an amazing job so far, but the world is changing so fast that we would not find any other comparable organisation that would have a quasi-judicial figure responsible for all those other administrative issues. The House is facing a big renewal programme. Although I will not be here at that point, I feel very strongly about this as an ordinary Member of Parliament. I do not blame any individual for this, but there is certainly something to say about some of the services: security; access to the House, as inevitably people are late for meetings and meetings are delayed; catering; how the House functions; and the digital agenda. I do not have the skills necessary to keep up with all of that. Absolutely we need a professional, well-qualified chief executive together with a constitutional expert who can ring-fence that duty. I do not see it working the other way. We cannot have a chief Clerk who has the final say over all of that range of administrative business, just as we cannot have a chief executive who has a final say over procedural matters.
Chair
But you could have them of equal status. A lot of the evidence—not all of it—that we have received, including from people who are very experienced in management, is that that would create its own difficulties because of the overlap. If we were to have them split—we have had a lot of evidence in favour of splitting the roles—would you then put one just above the other?
Hazel Blears
Personally, I think that if you have a chief Clerk with the final say on administrative issues, it would be very difficult to modernise and keep up. Equally, I do not think that you can have an administrative chief executive with the final say over a constitutional and procedural issue. You cannot have that, but it is not beyond our competence and capability to have an effective and dynamic team who have clear delineated roles. What you have to think about is accountability and reporting structures in case there is a dispute. You would hope that with professional people working in each of those roles, a dispute is going to be a very rare occurrence, because they would recognise each other’s competence and skills. A chief executive is not going to say, “I disagree with your ruling in Parliament on this,” and I would hope that a chief Clerk would not say, “I am more qualified when it comes to a diversity strategy in HR than you are.” Disputes are likely to be few and far between, so there ought to be something through the Commission—I am sure you will ask about those questions, and I have a couple of points on that—to resolve such disputes. But we have to do it now, in advance, so that those reporting and accountability lines in the event of any difference are very clear—and, dare I say, transparent—in any recruitment process that happens next time.
Sir Menzies Campbell
Can I start by saying that we are not a public listed company? I think that some of this argument that we have had since the occasion involving the appointment that was made and then, as it were, withdrawn has tended to suggest that we are like a plc. We may have many obligations like a plc, but we are not a plc. We are an institution that—forgive the Latin—is sui generis. That is reflected by the fact that the chief—if I can use a very general term—official is constitutionally of very great significance. Indeed, his or her appointment has to be approved by the Queen. That is a mere reflection of the fact that government in this country is still the Queen in Parliament. It does not take many manifestations, although in your own previous experience of walking backwards, you will know that there are some of those that still exist. Therefore I think you have to come to this without any predetermined notion as to what other organisations think is appropriate for them. Now, I believe, as I think I have hinted, that the constitutional position has to be that the person who has the constitutional responsibility is at the top of the pile. I do not see how you can operate that in any other way. I know that people say that you can have two—kind of primus inter pares—but we know that even in the Cabinet there is a chief, because there must be some clear and identifiable chain of responsibility. That is why I favour very strongly the present arrangement: combining in that one person both the responsibilities to Parliament—the particular responsibilities of advice and sometimes the interpretation of the law—and also the overall responsibility for the management of this building. It is not impossible to find people of that kind. We employ some of the most talented people in the country as Clerks, and I have no doubt whatsoever that from within those ranks we can find someone who can fulfil that responsibility.
Chair
Can I put it to you, Sir Ming, that the combination of the two jobs made for difficulties in recruiting a successor to Sir Robert?
Sir Menzies Campbell
Indeed it did, but that, it seems to me—I played no part in the recruitment—was because of the approach. For example, if my memory serves me right, when the advertisement was made, the reference was only to someone having some knowledge of parliamentary procedure. In my view, you cannot be the Clerk of this great institution unless you have an intimate and detailed knowledge of parliamentary procedure. I will tell you why I think that that is particularly important. One way or another, we are about to embark in this building on a very substantial period of constitutional reform in which the Speaker and their role may become enormously significant in determining the way in which the House treats with these issues.
Chair
You are thinking about English legislation, and the ins and outs.
Sir Menzies Campbell
Across the board. There is going to be legislation about Scotland. There may be legislation about Wales. There may be legislation about Northern Ireland. In those circumstances, it seems to me that the role of the Clerk will be of enormous importance. I do not believe that you need, as it were, to bring in an expert on IT and put that person on the same level as the Clerk, because you can buy all these skills in. There are many people at the top of organisations who do not have skills all the way through the organisation, but provided that they have got the intelligence, the understanding and the application, they are perfectly capable of fulfilling the overall responsibilities. My solution, which I think I referred to during the debate that we had some months ago, is that you can have the Clerk, the chief executive and a chief operating officer, who can combine those skills that Hazel Blears has talked about. There would be a clear line of command. When you do not have a clear line of command, the risk is that you will find disputes. We all know well-intentioned professional people who have been at each other’s throats. Why? Because, unless there is a clear demarcation of responsibility, it is inevitable that there will be dissent and something rather beyond discussion.
Sir Oliver Heald
May I add a quick point for Sir Ming?
Chair
Would you mind if we asked Mr Mills first and then we will come back? Mr Mills, you have heard the exam question.
Nigel Mills
I can balance the panel and agree with Hazel that the role should be split. You would be extremely lucky on a regular basis to get a suitably qualified Clerk who could act as chief executive of an organisation as complex as this one. Effectively, if you insist on that you are almost saying that the No. 2 Clerk has to get the job as a matter of turn. This year, we have tried to change that and find somebody from outside, but that has not been entirely successful. From my four and a bit years on the Administration Committee, seeing how this place is run, it looks like it needs real professional experience and competent leadership to run the House Service. We are trying to bring that in for all the other directorates. We have a new director of security and we are after a new director of IT. We have had a director of finance come in. It seems odd to have them led by a willing amateur in that sort of situation, without being too pejorative. It looks like you need to have somebody very highly skilled and experienced to lead an organisation such as this, especially with the challenges we have got coming up. My instinct is that somebody has to be in charge, but I don’t see that much overlap of the two roles, between somebody in charge in the Chamber and somebody in charge of running the House Service. I suspect they would both report to the Speaker and the Commission. That looks to be a suitable enough way to tie break in the unlikely event of a dispute between the two.
Sir Oliver Heald
I wanted to take issue with Sir Ming on the plc analogy. Lord Browne told us that the person who should be at the top of a company is somebody who understands the business. I put it to you that a lot of engineering companies have a professional engineer as the chief executive, but they also have a finance person, somebody who does HR and so on. We do Parliament and the Clerks understand that. Do you want to come back on that?
Sir Menzies Campbell
A lot of engineering companies have chairmen who have not been engineers, because they have a clear line of command and control and ultimately responsibility. I go back to the constitutional point about which you can tell I feel pretty strongly. I also believe that to create a model in which you have people on equal status is bound eventually to produce dissent in some for or other. I also think that to invite the Speaker in those circumstances to be some kind of arbiter is to impose on the Speaker a considerable burden, which might result in particular circumstances, for all one knows, in one individual whose view is not upheld thinking, “I no longer enjoy the confidence of the Speaker, so I’m off.” I think it is fundamental that there should be a clear line of command. That is why I feel so strongly about the fact that you can have Clerk and chief executive, and you can have a chief operating officer who will do all of the things that Hazel Blears eloquently described.
Hazel Blears
Ming has said that twice, and I fundamentally disagree with the chief operating officer model. I think it entrenches the current situation and is the no-change option. The COO would be subservient to the Chief Clerk and you would then have the Chief Clerk having the final say over all of those complex things that we do. I agree with Mr Heald that we do Parliament, and that is really important. Parliament now does lots of other things: education, outreach, visitors, engaging the public. All of those are essential for us to have the confidence of the public. If those services do not work well, and people can’t get in and they can’t get a good visit or see Parliament working, we can do all the procedural stuff first class, but we will continue to erode the public’s confidence in Parliament.
Sir Paul Beresford
Oliver’s question proves the point as far as I am concerned. He is talking about an engineer heading an engineering company, and we are talking about parliamentary services headed by a Clerk. The example of the support of the engineer applies here as well. The thought of having a Clerk trying to produce services that are disrupted because of this crossover that the Leader of the House talked about is disastrous, and it will come to the kind of conflict that Sir Menzies Campbell was talking about.
Mr Watts
Can I try to find a way through this? It seems to me that the point that Hazel has just made is not arguing against a point you are making, which is that the constitutional position of the Clerk has to be paramount and protected. It is protected on statute, but it also needs to be protected by the House of Commons. I think there is a general acceptance that that has to be the case. The second point is that Hazel and other people believe that the role of the chief executive is equally important in our democracy to deliver all the things that we have set out. Is it beyond our ability to create a structure where we protect the role of the Clerk—the Clerk has direct responsibility for what he or she needs to do—and, at the same time, allow the development of a chief executive who can run the building and operation without having to go to a Clerk who does not know anything about the sort of roles that he might be asked about?
Sir Menzies Campbell
Going back in history, we used to have someone who fulfilled that role, and they were called the Serjeant at Arms. But some Parliaments ago, the role of the Serjeant was changed very considerably. The answer to Mr Watts’ question is, why should that not be performed by a chief operating officer? Why does the person have to have the letters “CEO” behind his or her name in order to fulfil all the issues that have been raised already about day-to-day management, catering and so on?
Mr Watts
You asked a question. My own view about that is that the chief executive is the driver of change. He or she is the person who gets hold of the organisation, identifies the problems and drives them through as their No. 1 priority. The Clerk, on the other hand, has other priorities, which is where the conflict comes in. I do not want anyone to go away from this meeting believing that we want to undermine the role of the Clerk, but we think there is a role for a chief executive. The present structure is not delivering the sort of services that Members believe this House is entitled to.
Sir Menzies Campbell
Why can a chief operating officer not do exactly that?
Hazel Blears
Because a chief operating officer would have to report to the Clerk.
Nigel Mills
Somebody has to be the head or the focal point and have the final say. If we have the Clerk as the line manager of the chief operating officer, we will not have changed anything. People will still try to go around the No. 2 in that situation to get a different decision. When they are with the Clerk, they will bat and bowl in the way they do now.
Chair
Under your proposal—we have had some evidence on this—you would have the chief executive as the line manager of the Clerk?
Nigel Mills
I cannot see any need to do that. I am not sure that the Clerk would need to report to the person running the House service in that situation. I guess that we would have think through some examples.
Chair
Well, the Head of the Department of Chamber and Committee Services is responsible for about a quarter of the budget. It is literally impossible to detach that spend exclusively from the other spend. There would have to be one accounting officer, as this is a relatively small organisation in terms of total Government spend. I do not think that the NAO would take it kindly if they were asked for two accounting officers. So who would be the accounting officer?
Nigel Mills
If I were doing this, I would probably want to look at exactly what the Clerk was being expected to do—
Chair
Yes, but that is not an answer, Mr Mills.
Nigel Mills
I would have the chief executive as the accounting officer. Under that logic, I am not sure whether I would want the Clerk running a quarter of the budget.
Chair
There is a perfectly respectable argument that the chief executive should be the accounting officer, but I think that the accounting officer has to be one person. Before we move on to the remaining half of this session, which is about the Commission and the Committees, do our colleagues who have not intervened have any questions on the issue of the chief executive?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I want to follow up on the issue of conflicts, because I do not think that it is as easy to separate the responsibilities as has been suggested. Let us take a couple of examples. The Commons would be run more efficiently from a security point of view if the doors were always carefully locked and you had to get through by putting your number in, but Members of Parliament have an absolute right not to be obstructed when coming through because they might be in a hurry for a Division. You could easily see a chief executive saying, “Security must come first,” and the Clerk saying, “No. The rights of MPs must come first.” Who then decides? Similarly, our rooms are increasingly let out to raise revenue for the House of Commons. That has become an increasingly important part of our budgeting. What happens if the chief executive has let out Committee Room 15, but then a Committee which is to meet tomorrow, as this Committee does, wants that Committee Room at exactly the same time? Who then decides? Does the Clerk get told, “You can’t have that Committee Room because we’re going to lose a £10,000 booking fee,” or does the chief executive get overruled? It is very hard to separate the constitutional aspects of what goes on in this place from the pure business side of it. I wonder what the views are, particularly of Mr Mills and Ms Blears, on how you deal with that.
Hazel Blears
I do understand that. It is partly because we are a slightly unique kind of place. There are not a lot of models that we can draw from because we are not a plc, but we have many other things in common and we can learn from those—I take that point—but if you are going to have disputes like that, you have a dysfunctional organisation. If you had disputes like that in a company, you would not be making a profit because your employees would be spending all their time arguing with each other. I know that we have a culture of arguments because we are a Parliament, and we therefore like to argue and take different views. But this is about having a team who work together and who recognise that if we have a problem, it is all our problem; it is not a Chief Clerk’s problem or a CEO’s problem. If we need a room for Parliament, that has to be found because Parliament is our first duty, but we would not impose that in order to punish the public organisation that had hired it. We would come up with a solution. The disputes that I would contemplate would be quite significant ones about serious matters, not about who had booked a room. If you cannot resolve that, your organisation has broken down. That is not because you have a CEO and a Chief Clerk; it is because people are not talking, discussing and resolving conflict.
Chair
Do you know any organisations where you have two senior people who are pari passu, without any distinction in their status?
Hazel Blears
Not in private sector business; I do not know of any.
Chair
Or in the public sector.
Hazel Blears
Again, you have a very hierarchical system. There are organisations that operate as mutuals and social enterprises which will have a more—
Chair
Like the Co-op? I am serious about this.
Hazel Blears
I am not using the Co-op Bank as a model of that, but there are some extremely successful social organisations that have a more collective approach to their management.
Chair
But there are also plenty of charities and social organisations that get completely bogged down in internal politics because there is not a clear line of authority in them. At the moment, I am catholic on the issue of who should be superior to whom or whether you should split these roles, but I think the evidence is very clear that you are simply institutionalising conflict if you have two people who are at the same level.
Hazel Blears
The way you deal with it is by delineating the roles very clearly indeed, and you therefore do not need to have conflict. You have a chief Clerk who has absolute protection because of Letters Patent and has a very clear role to play, and you have a chief executive who also has a very clear role to play. The way in which you minimise the prospect of a conflict is to design those roles very carefully, as well as designing reporting and accountability structures that are absolutely clear. That, I believe, can be done.
Nigel Mills
We have to be clear that everyone involved is trying to run a Parliament, rather than having one person running a Parliament and one person running a tourist attraction and banqueting function. I suspect that you would want your chief executive and the whole of the House staff to recognise that we are trying, first and foremost, to deliver an effective Parliament. Clearly, MPs need certain privileges and parliamentary business has to take precedence. You would not say, “Sorry, Parliament cannot be recalled that day because we have a big function booked.” That would be a completely crazy situation.
Sir Paul Beresford
Perhaps a more important example is that the Commission was looking at savings, and part of that was the printing system. The thought that there could be something in the savings programmes put through by a chief executive officer that inhibited in some small or large way the printing of Hansard, Committee papers and so on really frightens me—if we had a single individual at the top who could say, “Sorry, no.”
Ian Paisley
The issue of where there is no clear division of power and responsibility concerns me. William Hague told us about seven areas, such as television coverage, support staff, budgeting, legal cases and even the running of the Library, that could fall into both areas of responsibility if the office was split. Hazel and Nigel, do you not accept that two positions of equal and competing authorities would naturally end up competing with each other, and that it would be organised confusion at best?
Hazel Blears
Personally, I do not accept that as a conclusion to reach when we have never been in these circumstances. We ought to be able to design the roles with sufficient clarity to enable us to see exactly what the competencies are of the areas that they are responsible for. I genuinely think that the Clerk’s responsibility is about making decisions on constitutional matters and giving advice to Parliament. It is not about running the place. A person who has those quasi-judicial skills to the standard that we want is likely to have had a lengthy experience in that kind of area and will have very little experience in terms of running the place. Therefore, the other role is about running this place and the services that underpin the important job that we do. I honestly do not think that we should be reaching the conclusion now that there is bound to be conflict when we have never tried to go down this path.
Ian Paisley
Unlike Jack, I won’t say I’m catholic on this, but I haven’t reached a conclusion. I’m more Protestant on it, if you know what I mean.
Chair
For the avoidance of doubt, I was using catholic with a small “c”.
Sir Menzies Campbell
Ecumenical might be better.
Mr Heath
I have a brief question for Hazel and one for Sir Menzies, if I may? Hazel, I agree it would be nice if you could delineate the two roles so that they were entirely separate, but there is one problem: the Clerk runs the Clerks department. He is manager of the Clerks department, and each of those Clerks is his representative as the constitutional expert in every Committee of the House. How could the Clerk possibly not be the manager of the Clerks department? If he is the manager of the Clerks department, you immediately have the difficulty of one substantial part of the administrative budget remaining outside of the control of the chief executive.
Hazel Blears
If that is a problem to be resolved, it would be my humble submission that that is not as big a problem as the prospect of having the Clerk, who is a quasi-judicial figure, in charge of IT, finance, security, the renewal and restoration project—that whole tranche of issues. The fact that we would have to find a solution around the management of the people who give advice in Committees is, for me, of a slightly—I know that Ming will fundamentally disagree with me—lesser order than continuing in the way that we are with services in this place which, as I have seen over the past 15 years or so, are gradually becoming poorer because we lack the expertise to provide a first-rate way of running the organisation.
Mr Heath
Ming, a while ago you chaired a special ad hoc Committee rather like this one dealing with issues of privilege. One of your conclusions was that there was a difficulty in the chain of command. You have given some of your concerns about that already. Is there anything else that you learned from that Committee, given the confusion around the Speaker and the Serjeant, as well as the Clerk? Is there anything from that Committee’s findings that is relevant to our discussions?
Sir Menzies Campbell
Well, I recommend that colleagues around the table should read them, not least because the whole question of whether or not the police had the right to search the office of Damian Green or, indeed, to take over his computer, fell between the Clerk, the Serjeant at Arms and the Speaker. I think our Committee’s conclusion was pretty brutal: between them they had failed to fulfil their responsibilities. Was it on the basis of “It’s your job rather than mine; it’s my job rather than yours”? I suspect it was. What is notable in this discussion is that no one has yet been able to point to any successful organisation that has operated with two individuals with substantial responsibilities standing, as it were, on the same rung of the ladder. In the absence of that, it seems the inevitability is that the Speaker will be drawn into these matters when he or she should, in my view, clearly not be involved in that.
Chair
Thank you. I want to move on, because we need to finish at 6.15 pm, to issues of the Administration Committee and the wider issue of the Commission. Mr Watts, if you could ask your questions about the Administration Committee.
Mr Watts
Can I ask Nigel about the Administration Committee? Does he feel that it looks at the right issues? Does it have sufficient power or influence to actually be effective?
Nigel Mills
Well, we choose what we look at, so I guess if we are not looking at the right stuff, that is partly your and my fault, Mr Watts. The Committee clearly has no power. We make recommendations, which can be accepted or ignored at the decision of the Commission or the Speaker, depending on what topic we are on. That was intentionally written into the design of the Committee, I think, from a brief look at the previous reforms. I would suggest that is probably the right way. You probably want Members being consulted and advising, but not trying to micro-manage and take decisions on the basis of a quick consultation without really being thorough experts. I think we probably have the right balance. It is frustrating when we make perfectly sensible recommendations that are consistent with previous ones, and then there are occasionally decisions that are inconsistent and erratic. I am not totally sure where the Finance and Services Committee and the Administration Committee overlap, or exactly why you would need both those Committees. It seems bizarre to me that you have one Committee looking at services without, in theory, thinking about finance, and one thinking about finance without, in theory, looking at quality. I suspect you could work with one Committee, but having never been to an F&S Committee meeting, I guess I am not qualified.
Mr Watts
Do you think the Administration Committee has such a massive turnover of membership because it is dysfunctional? Do people just get frustrated? What is the reason for that turnover in the Committee?
Nigel Mills
Probably no one came to Parliament to spend a lot of time considering the price of a bottle of Coke in a vending machine. Clearly people’s priorities will be proper priorities of Parliament, not running the internal House service. Some people are press-ganged, rather than choosing to be there, and obviously people are promoted out of the way and therefore can’t stay on the Committee. I don’t think it is a sign that the Committee is dysfunctional, it’s probably a sign that we can’t actually make fundamental decisions. That is the way it is. It probably would be sensible to try to have more value for the Back-Bench Members on the Commission and, for the members of the Committee, it may be better to elect the Chair so that they have some kind of mandate from the House, rather than being elected by the Committee. When we went to the French Parliament, we could see that their Members who do the running of the House service have some more authority from those kinds of initiative, so I think there are things we could do.
Sir Menzies Campbell
I think these difficulties are caused—I don’t exempt myself from this criticism—by the fact that Members take no notice of how this building operates until they think something goes wrong. At that stage, they become very conscious of their dignity and in many cases probably have themselves to blame because they haven’t been alive to what has been happening. Maybe that requires more transparency from the point of view of the Committees, but it also requires far more engagement on the part of Members of the House of Commons. If the services are inadequate in some respect, you really ought to do more than just complain about it; you ought to be willing to do something about it.
Sir Oliver Heald
This is about the role and working of the Commission. I will start with Sir Paul, as he is on it. There are a range of issues, which you will have heard when we were questioning earlier witnesses. Is it an effective oversight body for the Management Board? Do the Commission members have enough time to do their work? Should the Commission members be elected? Should it have external non-execs on it? Should its chairman be an external non-exec, as you would have in a company—Sir Menzies made that point—and should the Clerk of the House or the chief executive be a member of the Commission rather than simply attending?
Valerie Vaz
Or all of the above.
Sir Oliver Heald
You can just answer yes.
Sir Paul Beresford
When I first arrived on the Commission, the first thing that I noticed was that those of us who were appointed were appointed for non-political reasons. They were appointed because they had some expertise to add, which I thought was refreshing. I very quickly discovered that it could work, but within closed doors there were some very robust discussions, shall we say. We were well serviced, and still are, by people from the Management Board, and the appropriate member of the long tier at that level would come along for an issue. The two Committees that mostly work to them are the Administration Committee—I noted with some amusement the point made from the Admin Committee, which I did not think was quite the way it was when the Committee discussed the admin reports—and the Finance and Services Committee. I am on that Committee as well. That worked well because at the very beginning, our members sat down with the board and the board members, and did a lot of the integrated work with them to bring the report forward to the Commission. The Commission—I talked this through with Robert Rogers long before he was going—needs better contact with the board. There are several ways of doing that. One of the logical ways we discussed in relation to R&R was that it would be possible for members of the Commission—perhaps the Back-Bench members—or perhaps combined with a few members of F&S, to work as an integrated tier with the R&R. That is going to be an enormous job. It would also, I think, be extended into looking at the efficiencies that we need. You will, I think, have seen the audit report that went to the Commission. I was reminded of my mother-in-law who, when she gets her Christmas cards, reads the words and says, “Every year, nice words.” The report contained nice words, but when you look into the words, there is a long way to go. I think the report uses the phrase “moderate success”, which I think is an insult to us, and I feel that we need to move very much further. We need to move much further by working more with the executive board. I think that the executive board is too heavy and too big. It might be possible to lift one member of the board up to chief operating officer under the Clerk of the House, or it might be possible, for savings reasons or better management reasons, to bring more of the departments together so that you have fewer on the board and you can make financial efficiency savings. We made savings of 17% over five years, which I think is pitiful. We could do very much more. There is an opportunity, in spite of what was said, to allow the House to look at this. That opportunity was this afternoon, when the report on funding and financial management went on to the Floor of the House and disappeared in short order. Sir Menzies is absolutely right that we only get an uproar when we do something that catches us by surprise, such as the leather-bound Hansards—that saved us £135,000, which is a considerable sum over about 10 Members—or the fees for the tower. It works well, and eventually, except on one occasion, it has ended up with agreement. Whether we should have the Back-Bench members elected or not, I am agnostic about. I am aware, as I said, that the people were allocated by the parties because of their ability to help. Mr Speaker does not always agree on helping, but we get there eventually.
Sir Oliver Heald
He was very nice about you when we saw him.
Sir Paul Beresford
That’s kind of him. As for having someone externally, I would say yes, cautiously, but not to chair it. That is for the same reason as when we were talking about the Clerk: we are trying to run a parliamentary system and it is an extraordinarily difficult one to run. We need someone at the top who is a reflection of the Clerk or the Clerk a reflection—in other words a Speaker. I am on the Standards Committee. We have lay members and they are finding it exceptionally difficult to understand how the House works. That is not aided and abetted by the visit of the Daily Mail the moment there is a bit of an uproar and being door-stepped. On the other side, the Audit Committee seems to work well and that has external experts on it. If our selection were careful and well done, it would contribute.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Ms Blears, you suggested in your submission that the Commission should take a wider supervisory role over the work of the House service, with less emphasis on the Speaker. How do you think that would work in practice?
Hazel Blears
I am certainly not particularly knowledgeable about the day-to-day workings of the Commission, though I have had some contact with it. I made that suggestion because of the concerns I had heard about what might happen if the roles were split and there was conflict—where would be the accountability and reporting lines? I do not feel that the Speaker should act alone, because that would not give sufficient assurance and confidence in the event of a conflict that the resolution was being dealt with completely objectively. Therefore, my suggestion was that, if you are looking at reporting and accountability, and we had to resolve that because there was a split role, that ought to be to the Commission as a whole, rather than simply to the Speaker. It was in that context that I said that the Commission should take a wider supervisory role. In relation to the other questions, I do not have many observations, apart from saying that I do think that having some non-execs to give challenge to the system and bring an outside perspective would probably be quite helpful. Finally, I want to thank the Commission personally for having supported my parliamentary placement scheme four years ago. The scheme has gone from strength to strength. Without the confidence of the Commission that would not have been possible.
Valerie Vaz
A couple of comments; I did not ask any questions earlier. We heard from Dame Janet Gaymer, who was a senior lawyer at Simmons & Simmons. I asked her whether there was anything outside in the public or private sector that is similar to this, and she said there is not. We are hearing evidence from everyone and probably coming to our own conclusions. The second thing is connected to the Damian Green episode mentioned by Sir Ming. At that stage, the Clerk did have a CEO role, and that still did not make things easier.
Sir Menzies Campbell
There was ambiguity. The Serjeant at Arms came out of a meeting and said to the Clerk, “Who is responsible for deciding if the police can look at the office of a Member?”, to which the Clerk, who was in the middle of a meeting, said, “You are.” The fact is that there was no proper line of control because the role of the Serjeant at Arms had been changed from what it had been previously and the Clerk had been part of the previous organisation. It is an illustration, in my view, of clarity.
Valerie Vaz
Yes, and it leads me on to my question very nicely about the governance structures.
Sir Menzies Campbell
A lack of clarity, I should have said.
Valerie Vaz
Are the governance structures currently responsive to Members? I personally do not feel that they are. You have all seen the organogram. What would you change to make it clearer? Maybe you think it is clear, but may I have your view on that first? What is the single thing that you would change to make it clearer?
Sir Menzies Campbell
Over the past 15 years, it seems we have been engaged in permanent cultural revolution. Every three or four years there is yet another change. You took the word “organogram” right out of my mouth. Look at the organogram. How do you decide where authority and responsibility clearly lie? In my view, the organogram does not make that clear. I have no experience of the Commission or any of the Committees. As I have said, I do not exempt myself from criticism in that regard. It does seem to me, however, that at the moment there are not only overlaps, but gaps. Whatever else you decide, there has to be an effort to try to create—I am back to my original theme—a much clearer line of responsibility, so that if you do not like the information technology arrangements, you can go to someone whose responsibility it is to put it right.
Nigel Mills
May I add a comment on the non-executives? I sense that we are employing very well-paid professional management and that we have a Commission which, to my little knowledge, looks like a non-exec board with non-execs holding the professionals to account. I would be as hawkish on stopping wasting money. I do not really believe in Member privileges other than the ones that we really need, but I am not sure what a lay person coming in adds other than another layer of complexity and probably another layer of cost. If the idea of the Commission is for parliamentarians to hold professional management to account, I am not sure whether we need lay people there or what they add.
Chair
Thank you. Just before we finish—
Valerie Vaz
Can the others answer the questions on the governance structure?
Chair
Yes.
Valerie Vaz
The actual governance structure and the organogram. What is your view of those things?
Hazel Blears
I think it is very complex and slightly opaque. Unless, like me, Members of Parliament have been to the Commission and have had to make an application, as I did, I will hazard a guess that very few will know who the members are and what the responsibilities are. Work could be done to ensure that the decisions that you make and the matters that you are considering are highlighted to Parliament. If people realised what the work entailed, you might then get more of them wanting to be a part of what is going on. It is shrouded in mystery at the moment and there needs to be much more transparency.
Sir Paul Beresford
This has been recognised, and we have done a considerable amount with the Commission to publish and put the news out, but there are none so blind as those who will not see.
Chair
Right.
Sir Menzies Campbell
Very quickly, on non-execs, it is a question not of having non-execs, but of having the right non-execs. There are plenty of people out there who have had 30 or 40 years in business—been CEOs of plcs, if you like—who could easily come in and be of assistance. One issue that we all know and understand, and are concerned about, is that of transparency. One of the ways in which you can make it clear that we are not, as it were, the judge in our own case all the time is to introduce an external dimension to how we conduct our business.
Hazel Blears
May I say one further thing on shared services? There is a paragraph on that in my submission. At the moment, I am working with both Houses to look at procurement contracts, which have now, for the first time ever, become shared. We are looking at whether we can put in those contracts clauses about social, economic and environmental impact, which would mean that the House could make a real difference for the money that is going to be spent on R&R. Again, the public would really appreciate it if we were able to make that happen.
Sir Paul Beresford
This is a very fast one. You have not asked us about the House of Lords. I am on the Joint Committee on Security. You have seen the security paper.
Chair
Yes, we have.
Sir Paul Beresford
There has been a lot of harrumphing from one side of the Committee. It reminds me of Hugh Lofting’s animal the pushmi-pullyu, but we have an opportunity with R&R to try to sort that out. If we do not sort it out, it will not work.
Chair
We have indeed seen that paper and it is important. We are seeing some of their lordships in due course.
Nigel Mills
As a last comment, can we try to bear cost control in mind? I sense that we, as a Government and a Parliament, are imposing efficiency measures and cuts on every other public sector body, and there is a feeling from outside that we are not quite so strict with ourselves, even though we have made a 17% saving in this Parliament. I am not sure whether layering more tiers of pretty well-paid management on top of tiers of pretty well-paid management is what the public expect us to be doing in this situation. I just fear that we are going to end up with another 200 grand salary being paid out.
Chair
That is a point well taken. Thank you very much indeed. Oral evidence: House of Commons Governance, HC 692 17