Oral evidence: House of Commons Governance, HC 692Tuesday 2 December 2014
Oral evidence, 2 December 2014.
Witnesses
Rt Hon Dame Margaret Beckett MP and Mr Andrew Tyrie MP gave evidence.
Chair
Dame Margaret and Mr Tyrie, thank you for coming along. May I ask each of you whether you wanted to say anything by way of general introduction before we come on to questions? We have received a paper from Mr Tyrie already, but there may be points that you wish to make.
Margaret Beckett
There is one comment that I would like to make that I will probably keep coming back to. I have not by any means read all the extensive evidence taken by the Committee, but I have dipped into some of it, including Andrew’s written evidence. One thing that strikes me forcefully and that chimes in with the important point that Malcolm Jack just made is that it is a lot of money, but in the context of the management of great institutions, this is not the biggest managerial challenge in the world. What strikes me very strongly from quite a lot of the evidence is that, in a whole variety of ways, a lot of people seem to have lost sight of what this place is actually for. We are not here to run the most efficient IT or catering service; we are here to facilitate the operation, and scrutinise and challenge the operation, of Government. We are the legislature. We are not just some other institution about which management is the most important thing. We have a core purpose. I get the impression that many people have got so attached to the idea, with which I completely sympathise, of getting rid of some of the nonsense—you and I both. I presided over many changes here when I was Leader of the House to modernise the place, so I am by no means an opponent of modernisation, but we need to not forget what we are here for.
Mr Tyrie
I strongly agree with that, but there is a serious problem to address in the management in the House. The House is a loveable shambles. Waste is everywhere. There is an absence of clear chains of command for many of the functions that are provided. The security arrangements are quite extraordinary. There has been some quite good evidence to you on all those points, so I will not repeat it, but the House is vulnerable to criticism once it has a budget of several hundred million, which is one of the reasons why the legislature needs to pay attention to the problem. It works despite, not because, of its organisational and management structure. It works because people are so deeply committed to making it work and to ensuring that the legislature functions. The second point that I would like to make is that the role of the Clerk is absolutely crucial. Their contribution has been enormous as a group and still is. They are a brilliant set of advisers. It is extremely important to maintain their collegiality, their sense of togetherness and also the collective memory that was referred to in the evidence we just heard. But the role of Chief Executive is a very recent one. It has only been created in the last 30 to 40 years. Over that time the House has transformed the way that it runs itself. It has increased the staff for which it is responsible by about tenfold since 1950. It is a dramatic transformation. I do not think that the way Clerks are recruited or the formation they have while they are here and their experience makes them well placed to handle that management responsibility. In that sense, we are probably wasting talent rather than using it to best effect. So there is quite a big job for you to handle, Chairman. There is one further point that I would like to make. We have been with these problems for a very long time, and all of a sudden you are now being asked to solve them by Christmas. I think that that is too big an ask, frankly. You might want to pose detailed questions about some of the difficult challenges you are faced with and hand them to others to try to take forward.
Chair
Thank you.
Jesse Norman
Margaret Beckett, if I may, do you have a specific view about how the administration of this House ought to be run?
Margaret Beckett
I do not have a detailed blueprint or anything like that. My main concern is that it should be run efficiently and well, in a way that provides services to Members and allows them to do properly and well the jobs that they do for their constituents. That is my primary concern. I am always very conscious of the fact that this is not a place like others and that the role of a Member of Parliament is not the same as others. One of the things that concerns me about some of the advice and evidence that you are getting—look at this place, look at that place and so on. I tend to find that when people start comparing how this place is run and administered or how Members of Parliament do their jobs, they say, “Look at other professional jobs. Look at other professional people. They don’t do this, so why do Members of Parliament do it?” That almost invariably leads people into entirely the wrong channel. I will give you a specific and concrete example of the kind of thing I mean, which does not directly answer your question but is germane to the whole issue. I think we probably all know that IPSA has ended the kind of severance pay for MPs which means that if you lose your seat, you do not necessarily get a payment. Fine; that is IPSA’s decision; they have made it. However, in the undergrowth, entirely separate groups of people are concerned about what might be seen as potentially improper links between Members of Parliament and lobbyists. So a whole lot of other people are saying that Members of Parliament—not just former Ministers, but ordinary Back-Bench Members—should not be allowed for two years after they leave this place, voluntarily or otherwise, to take a job that in any way relates to the fact that they were Members of Parliament. IPSA is depriving MPs of the payment because they are saying, “Other people don’t get a payment like this. Other professionals don’t. MPs aren’t any different from anyone else.” In the meantime, other people are depriving MPs of a way of earning a living that relates in any way to them having been MPs. Having been part of a cohort of MPs that were decanted from this place in 1979, of which only two—of whom I was, mercifully, one—got a job in six months, I think that this is a matter of concern. But that is what happens when people stray into other areas. I do not have a fixed view about the administration of the House, other than that it should be efficient. I do not even have a fixed view—I could live with either keeping the relationship of the Clerk and the executive role as it is now or, indeed, changing it, as long as I was comfortable with the kind of change that was being proposed.
Jesse Norman
Just to be clear, you are neutral as between the Clerk and Chief Executive being one person, their being split and the Chief Executive being first, or their being split and the Clerk being first.
Margaret Beckett
No, I’m not neutral between the three of them. I am very strongly of the view that the Clerk must be the senior. I know that is not Andrew’s view, but I say that because it goes back to the point I was making to you about how most people who are not related to the House—those who are not Clerks, other staff or the Members—don’t really understand how this place works or what the role of a Member of Parliament is. That means that you end up with all kinds of difficulties. Perhaps I put this not very gracefully when I spoke briefly in the House about the issue. The Clerks are bad enough; it’s sometimes difficult to get the Clerks to understand what the problem with a particular issue is for Members. The notion of having to try to convince someone who doesn’t even understand as much as the Clerks do—
Jesse Norman
Sorry, I did not mean to cut you off; we are a little short of time. So if there is a unified service, you want the Clerk to be on top.
Margaret Beckett
Absolutely.
Jesse Norman
But you do not object to the possibility of splitting the roles and having two heads?
Margaret Beckett
I am not convinced that two heads would work. I am perfectly comfortable with some other means—a Chief Operating Officer is being proposed, for example. I am comfortable with other solutions that allow further support in a different structure from what we have now to take on some of the executive responsibilities, but only—to my mind—if the Clerk is in overall charge.
Jesse Norman
Perfect. Mr Tyrie, welcome to the Committee. It is a joy to serve alongside you on the Treasury Committee. You have said very clearly in your submission that you think the role should be split and the chief executive should be in charge. First of all, can you briefly explain why? Secondly, is there a danger that that is in conflict with the two things we have heard today, one the importance of the parliamentary side being pre-eminent—a view with which you said you agree—and the other the thought that the Clerk’s role goes well beyond the purely procedural, and that the Clerk is ultimately responsible, as presently conducted, for the full spectrum of services across the House.
Mr Tyrie
I will not rehearse all the arguments I set out in the paper, which I hope are reasonably succinct, but I support that view with one big proviso, which is that the role of Clerk be very heavily ring-fenced and fully protected—that is, the classic role of Clerk that they were doing until this distraction of trying to run the building appeared about 20 years ago, as a result of the increase in other activity in the 20 years before that, and as the staff began to grow. It all derives from a series of decisions in the late ’60s and then the late ’70s. Actually, I was checking one of these points before this meeting. I think it was in the late ’70s that the Treasury finally lost control of the budget of this place, which meant that the House had to start running itself and thinking about its own budget. In any case, even after that, for some time I think the House was still dependent on the Department of the Environment to run the fabric of the building, so even then the responsibilities of the Clerk in this field were very limited.
Jesse Norman
And that ring-fencing could be accomplished even though, in your view, the Chief Executive would be senior and would control the pay and rations of the Clerk, in the way that they would control the pay and rations of any other member of the House service?
Mr Tyrie
He or she certainly should not. The Clerk’s role should be fully protected for the purposes of delivering the essential functions of the Clerk, which the House has felt it has depended on for so much of its life, perhaps for hundreds of years, certainly for many, many decades. We need to be very clear in our minds that this debate we are having is a very recent phenomenon; it is a consequence of very recent changes. The role of chief executive itself only really derives from Tebbit—you could say that there was a sort of semi-chief executive role being developed from Ibbs, but that’s about it—and even only 20 years ago, the House staff was half the size it is now and the budget much smaller.
Chair
I think I am right in saying that when it was run by the Property Services Agency, and before that by the Minister of Public Buildings and Works, there was a Minister who answered for what happened in the House.
Mr Tyrie
Yes, and the Treasury answered for expenditure and for ensuring that the money was made available for those services.
Chair
I am going to move on but, before I call Mr Rees-Mogg, I have been reflecting on Sir Malcolm Jack’s comments about the fact that this is a relatively small operation, compared with, say, the Ministry of Justice or the Department for Work and Pensions. Dame Margaret, you have extensive ministerial experience of big Departments, and you have interrogated many. Indeed, Mr Tyrie, you worked in the Treasury. From my experience, it seems dangerous to judge the complexity of an organisation simply by the size of its budget. The Ministry of Justice had a big budget and 80,000 staff, but many of the issues were simpler than those posed by running this place. Equally, although the Foreign Office’s budget was much smaller—I don’t know how Dame Margaret views this—the complexity of running it was much greater than running a domestic Department. Do you share that view?
Margaret Beckett
That is absolutely right. DTI, as was, had a tiny budget, but my God was it complex, not least because it had subsumed about eight other Departments by the time I got there. I agree that the money and the complexity do not necessarily link.
Mr Tyrie
In a nutshell, yes. However, if you already have a difficult and complex structure, as I think the House had even 50 years ago, although I have not studied it, the more you superimpose new functions, the more complex the already complex picture is likely to become, so size is relevant.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Mr Tyrie, I am very glad that you are getting an electric ring fence into the House of Commons as well as into banking.
Mr Tyrie
I have some experience of ring fences.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Absolutely. I want to follow on from Mr Norman’s question on the Clerk and the Chief Operating Officer. I know that is not your preferred view, but do you think that, in an institution that tends not to change very quickly—you heard some of the evidence that the Clerk gave about the evolutionary change—having a chief operating officer is a step in the direction you would like, and that it may work with the grain of the House of Commons rather better than the big upheaval that there would be if we put in somebody senior to the Clerk?
Mr Tyrie
I am not sure I would advise any top-class managers I know to apply for the post if they would be demonstrably subordinate to somebody who doesn’t know much about management and might have a different set of priorities. I set out in more detail why in my written evidence. I note that you have taken evidence from the NAO on this issue. I had a hand, actually, in the creation of the COO role. In fact, it was after the scandal over the expenses.
Chair
Of John Bourn?
Mr Tyrie
Of John Bourn. A group of us on the Public Accounts Commission decided, for the first time in 150 years, to take a look at the governance of the NAO, because we discovered that the CAG signed off his own expenses and we needed to do something about that. We put in place a new structure, part of which was to create the Chief Operating Officer role. A couple of points were not made in evidence to you—you probably didn’t get round to it. First, in statute, in a schedule, or somewhere in an accompanying memorandum of understanding—I am not sure which—it is made clear that the Comptroller and Auditor General can have what he wants without limit to do his job, full stop. So he is pre-eminent. Therefore, the chief operating officer actually does not have a ring-fenced set of functions. It would be difficult to organise things here in a way that could keep the Clerk from claiming that he needed to exercise an override into a chief executive or chief operating officer type of area. The second point to make, which is very important with respect to the NAO panel, is that the chief operating officer and the chief executive—in this case the CAAG—have exactly or virtually the same objectives or end point, so they are working very closely together. Here, that would not be the case and the priorities of the two people are likely to be somewhat different. One of the troika you have just had in front of you—I can’t remember which one, but near the end—made the point about personalities. They were absolutely right on the NAO. The personalities are working and have been since 2011—I am still on the Public Accounts Commission—but they may break down at some time, in which case, for the first time, we will discover whether this structure we have devised is any use. But it might not be.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Thank you.
Margaret Beckett
May I just come back on that? There are two things that Andrew said that I thought were interesting. One is the issue that there could be difficulties, and of course there could. My principal concern, having read Andrew’s evidence, is that management skills are hugely important and immensely valuable, and business skill and experience is important and immensely valuable, but they are not always enough on their own. Without naming any names—some have done better than others—I am extremely mindful of the fact that there is quite a long track record of people being brought in cold, straight from the business community, because it was believed that they would be a great success as the Minister for this, that or the other. Mostly—I shall say mostly, to allow some room—that has not proved to be the case because operating in a political environment is completely different. I have worked with people who have come in in such a capacity, who were excellent people and did a great job, but who had incredible difficulty coming to terms with the difference between being in the world of politics, or even of Government, and being in the business community. It is not the same.
Chair
Campbell Adamson and Frank Cousins come to mind.
Margaret Beckett
At least. The difficulty is that it is not easy to find an example that is outside that.
Chair
No, I agree.
Mr Watts
It is important to say that it seems to us that we have not had any evidence whatever from people who want to undermine the role of the Clerks. Everyone we have heard evidence from wants to protect the Clerks if there is a change, so that they can give the constitutional advice that we all need. But there is less support for the way the rest of the House is managed. I want to pursue the split role. If we were to split the role so that we had the constitutional side, and the rest, as I know there is more to it, and then had the Chief Executive role for managing the day to day, and that role was directly responsible to the Commission in some shape or form, to put Members in charge—we think it is important that Members are in charge at the end of the day—then where should the point of accountability be? Where is the accounting officer: is he with the Clerk or with the person doing the day-to-day role of managing the House of Commons?
Mr Tyrie
There are two possible routes to that. One is to provide a ring-fenced budget to a Clerk for the purposes of delivering those services and to make him accounting officer for those, and then to provide another accounting officer for the rest. The second is to provide one accounting officer for both, which would be the Chief Executive, but to make it clear—and it would have to be embodied, in statute if necessary, but certainly in a resolution of the House—that, where the Clerk felt that a function that he considered important was now imperilled, he had recourse to the Commission or to whatever arrangement you are going to put in place, as it may be reformed, to ensure that he got a full hearing with politicians for his view before the decision was implemented.
Margaret Beckett
I confess to a degree of scepticism on whether, in the end, if the Clerk is not the superior officer, they might not find themselves in a position of some difficulty if what they felt was the right thing—I notice in some of the evidence you’ve had that people have talked about the importance of some of the other services in the House, such as the information service. They are very important, not least in trying to do better to convey to those who elect us here what on earth we think we’re doing. But the notion that the information services are of equal importance to us actually getting right our constitutional role, particularly in a country without a written constitution and with a principle within that unwritten constitution of parliamentary sovereignty—I am horrified that it is even suggested.
Mr Watts
If I may, I think it goes back to the general acceptance that Clerks provide good constitutional advice and service to Committees. There is a view, however, that perhaps they do not have the skills to manage. There does not seem to be in the process any system of actually giving them management control and developing it. I wonder whether you think that needs to be developed within the House of Commons and that people need to be given the ability to develop their management skills.
Margaret Beckett
What you just said was the conventional view at one time, but I do not think it is the case any more. I am not saying that they have got enough management skills and that one would not look for ways of strengthening the management capacity of officialdom in the House, or that everything is perfectly all right; I completely accept that things need to be improved, but my understanding is that ever since the Ibbs report—Ibbs said that you had got to start being more professional—management capacity has developed more and more. I am not saying it is adequate, but to say that it is not there does not chime with my experience or my understanding of what most people would say about the role of the Clerks now. In any contact I have ever had with any of the Clerks, they certainly do not see their role as purely procedural any more, if they ever did.
Mr Tyrie
I disagree with that. I opened by saying that I think that the management of the place is a shambles, and the evidence for that is so overwhelming that one hardly knows where to begin, but try going to the gents’ lavatory on the second floor of Norman Shaw North any time in the past 12 years that I have been on the—
Chair
We have had evidence on this.
Mr Tyrie
Every few months, the urinals flood. Every year or two a team is sent in and the toilets are closed down for a week or two to be repaired. Within a few months, they are back to how they used to be. About a year ago they had a complete closure for a long period, with everything completely ripped out and everything completely new. As we speak, the urinal is blocked and all three wash basins are blocked. When I happened to mention that to my female staff, they said, “You should try going into the ladies’ loo. The real problem is the smell we get from the men’s loo”. I am not making this up; this is going on right now. Someone very senior came into my office and said, “You know, Andrew, the management of this place is not all that bad. It all functions pretty well.” He made to move to the door, and part of the door handle came off in his hand. I said, “That has been coming off every few months since I got the office, four years ago.” Sorry about this; I just think it needs to be pointed out. In most organisations, things are not like that. Could we train Clerks for the role? The point is that they do not self-select for that job. They self-select for a completely different job.
Margaret Beckett
May I say that Andrew’s story, which I do not quarrel with at all, could be repeated in any Government Department and in a lot of the private sector? The notion that everywhere else these things do not happen, management works well and it is all resolved—I am sorry, but that is fantasy.
Chair
Thank you very much. We will try to elevate the discussion now.
Mr Tyrie
I apologise, Chairman, but I was being egged on by others.
Chair
No, don’t. These things can be really irritating, and let me say that I questioned John Borley about the extraordinary saga of the renovation of the gym.
Valerie Vaz
But this is important because it prevents us as Members from getting on with our work. We have to make phone calls and be there when things are sorted out. But I want to move on—I never usually do this, but I am going to ask a three-headed question, only because the Chair is going to shut me up in a minute and we are running out of time. Let’s turn to the Commission, and it may be that your management issues could be answered in that. Do you have any views on the current working of the Commission and on its future working? If your views are that it needs to be made better, how would you make it better?
Margaret Beckett
I will be quite frank; I haven’t been paying much attention to the workings of the Commission, until they came up with the debacle that caused the Committee to be set up and which caused me some anxiety, I have to say. Do I have any views about its future? I think it is essential that the Leader and the shadow Leader are on it. I am not ill at ease with the notion that you might have other Back-Bench Members, who might be elected. One of the worst problems that I have ever had with the Clerks, and I have had it in a whole variety of ways, is that they have a natural tendency—to my mind, at any rate, although I am sure they would be horrified to hear me say this and would hotly dispute it—to feel that politics and political parties are really rather a nuisance, and would it not be lovely, and Jacob might agree with this, if we were all gentleman amateurs again? Needless to say, that is not a view with which I concur, so I think it is important that the political parties have a representation, not just through the Leader and the shadow Leader. I recognise that in a multi-party House that is not necessarily that easy. If there is a view that we should also have some non-execs—it happens all over the place—I would not be totally opposed to that.
Valerie Vaz
And the Chair of the Commission could be—?
Margaret Beckett
The Chair? The Speaker has always been the Chair of the Commission. That ought to work, it seems to me. If you don’t have the Speaker in the Chair, I am not quite sure what the relationship between the Chair and the Speaker is, or what the relationship of the Commission to the House is. I think that is a genuine difficulty. I am open to ideas, but I think it is a genuine difficulty.
Mr Tyrie
I haven’t given evidence on reform of the Commission, which is a whole big challenge in itself, Chairman.
Chair
Thank you. It is a big challenge—I was saying thank you for the absence of evidence.
Mr Tyrie
In a sentence, look carefully at the idea of introducing non-execs. They will have more continuity. Politicians will come and go, but non-execs may be there for 10 years, so paradoxically, it will be the opposite of the experience that you often get in the private sector, where it is the executives who have a better grip because the non-execs are only around occasionally. Election to posts—at least some of the posts, and more transparency over what they do, wherever possible and sensible. May I add a couple of points on the previous question, which I did not quite get to? How can I put this? The role of this unified House service is largely, or at least partly, a myth, in the way the House is run at the moment. Go and talk to any of the clever people who are not from the Clerks, or who were not recruited through the Clerks’ department, and they will tell you that they feel there is a glass ceiling, and whenever they apply for a job, there is a procedural bar—the bar being that you need knowledge of the House or “Erskine May” or some kind of procedural issue. So there isn’t an integrated service at the moment and something needs to be done about it, and they perceive, whether rightly or wrongly, that the Clerks have a vested interest in protecting monopoly access to these jobs. That is another respect in which we are wasting talent. I keep coming back to this point: we need to remember that we do not want to start trying to recruit loads of Clerks who are good at management. It strikes me as a silly thing to do. We want the best possible Clerks we can find to do the job they are doing now, because they are doing it extremely well—amazingly well—with huge dedication. I see that on the Committee Corridor. So we should meddle with that at our peril. I propose we bring focus back for Clerks to do that role, and not in any way dilute it.
Chair
Any other questions? I have some. We have heard evidence about Member Committees and the Member Committees of the House. One comment was that the Finance and Services Committee, which John Thurso chairs, is working well.
Margaret Beckett
Nobody knows what it does.
Chair
He knows what he is doing, and he is also a member of the Commission. He did not have to be, but he is. So he is directly connected with the Commission. The other one, the Administration Committee, is composed of 16 people, and I think only two or three are the same as four and a half years ago. There is a constant churn, and they are not entirely clear what they are there for. Do you have a view about the Administration Committee? I knew virtually nothing about it until I came on to this Committee.
Margaret Beckett
I don’t really know much about the Administration Committee as such, but with regard to its prior Committees, from which, as I understand it, it was constituted, there have always been rows and difficulties about them and what they were doing and why they were doing it. I spoke before about making all sorts of what should have been minor reforms when I was Leader of the House—for example, allowing journalists to take a tape recorder into the Press Gallery so that they did not have to rely on their notes, which the relevant Committee had resisted staunchly, because this was a modern device that ought not to be allowed to intrude into the Press Gallery. If they were caught with a tape recorder about their person, they were censured and disciplined and threatened with losing their lobby pass. Bringing the TV point into Central Lobby and allowing Members to have photographs taken in their offices—all the things that Members much wanted—were hotly fought by the relevant Committees. So my feeling is that there has always been criticism and that they do not really represent the views of Members. I cannot honestly say whether they have improved out of all recognition and it is no longer true, but I can certainly say that historically it has been a problem.
Chair
That surely argues, in the case of the Administration Committee, for it to be smaller and more genuinely representative, because at the moment a lot of the people who go on the Administration Committee are junior Whips, and they churn. I remember some of these arguments and not being allowed to take a photograph in your own room.
Margaret Beckett
Exactly.
Chair
And it was enforced.
Margaret Beckett
Yes; vigorously.
Valerie Vaz
And what happened if you took two photographs?
Mr Tyrie
You went before the Privileges Committee.
Chair
I thank you both very much indeed.
Margaret Beckett
May I add one thing? We have not touched on this for understandable reasons, but one of the reasons for the points of view that I have expressed is that I think the challenges before us in the future are going to be enormous. There is the EU referendum and all the aftermath of that. There is all this thing about English votes for English laws. As you and I both know, Chair, there is no such thing as an English law. Whatever comes out of that, and if we move towards a more federal structure, there will be enormous implications in the House. An outsider from the world of business trying to deal with these things is a concern. The other thing that nobody seems to talk about is the strong desire in the political world, which I do not at all share, for an elected upper House. I do not mind not having an upper House, but I will never vote for an elected upper House, no matter what my Whips tell me.
Chair
I am aware of your views.
Margaret Beckett
However, the minute you have an upper House with any form of election—you will remember, because you and I were in Cabinet when this came up and there was talk about it before—immediately you will have the very vexed question of whether or not the Lords is precluded from dealing with finance and the Budget, and if it cannot any longer be precluded, because it is in some way elected, how does that relationship work? When people talk about the relationship with the Lords, and whether it matters if it is Clerk—because there is a Clerk in the Lords, and so on—they talk about things like what happens to the rooms, and so on. Never mind the rooms, although God knows that has been enough trouble over the years. The big problem is going to be on the relationships, the links, the powers between the two Houses, if ever we have two Houses with anything remotely like parity. The notion of somebody with managerial and executive responsibility from the world outside politics dealing with those issues frightens me stiff.
Mr Tyrie
Three points. First, solve the problems of our House first, worry about our relations with the Lords afterwards: so difficult. Secondly, don’t work out what to do in a steady state for the management of this place on the basis of the one-off problems that will come with the project of completely refurbishing and rebuilding this place. Project managers build hotels; they almost certainly make terrible hotel managers. Third point: I cannot do better than commend to you the evidence of a Clerk who has been put in this position in a very similar jurisdiction—the one that I proposed, from New Zealand—who gave you quite an extraordinarily clear view on the whole subject: “We were able to develop procedural and substantive advisory services to support the House and its committees without the distraction of having to worry about matters such as the administration of…services and the maintenance of a historic building. This was a great advantage in building a strong and resilient Clerk’s Office.” And so it goes on. The evidence is extremely powerful. They were very nervous about what they did, and they are very glad they did it.
Chair
Thank you very much. On that happy note, order. Oral evidence: House of Commons Governance, HC 692 22