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Lorna Fitzsimons: Does my hon. Friend agree that a prime example of the policy and management confusion that he has described is the decision by the Select Committee on Administration that 259 requests for on-site child care facilities amounted to insufficient demand?
Mr. Soley: I was not aware of that decision. As an aside, I can say to my hon. Friend that I do not think that it is a good idea to give responsibility for the media to the Administration Committee, as the report states that there should be a media department in the chief Clerk's office--the office of the Clerk of the House. That would be another example of duplication of effort.
The old local authorities worked quite well in their day, but the more complex decisions get, and the more intense the demands on management become, the more likely it is that that model will break down. Above all, the need for a central, focal point where people can complain becomes increasingly necessary. That is vital: hon. Members from all parties feel that there exists no such central point to which they can resort for help.
Ms Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent, North):
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is extremely important to have one person who has complete and utter responsibility for all the arrangements in the House? Does he also agree that the difficulty is compounded by the fact that hon. Members also have constituencies elsewhere in the country? Many of us have to run two offices simultaneously, yet in the past the administrative arrangements in the House have not acknowledged how important that is for our work.
Mr. Soley:
I am sure that hon. Members must retain overall political control of the management of the House. We must not lose that power, and I shall suggest how that might be achieved in due course.
I felt that it could not be accidental that so many hon. Members should ask me--especially since I have been chairman of the parliamentary Labour party--about whom to contact about problems in the House. Over the past day or two, I have asked more than 40 hon. Members from all parties to tell me whom they would turn to if they had a problem with the management of the House.
Of the hon. Members that I approached, 25 replied that they would contact the Serjeant at Arms. Another 15 came into the "don't know" category. They were the closest runners up, but the trend was all in their favour and I suspect that they would have ended up leading the field if I had asked the same question of more Members. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House will be pleased to know that she led the field among the also-rans. She had four nominations. You, Madam Speaker, had two. I, as chair of the parliamentary Labour party, had three. The hon. Member for Roxburgh and Berwickshire had one--that was because I asked a Liberal Democrat Member who knew that the hon. Gentleman was on the Commission. The regional Whip and the Chief Whip were also mentioned.
The most important thing about the question was that, with one exception, nobody gave the right answer, given what the report recommends and says is happening
already. More important, with the exception of the person who mentioned the regional Whip, everybody hesitated, paused and struggled to work out the answer. They did not say "The Serjeant at Arms" or even "I don't know" immediately; they would pause first.
I was reminded by the report that the chief Clerk has been the chief executive for the past two or three years. I said to some people--I did not ask everyone--"If you were in any other organisation, whether it was public, private, a local authority or a hospital, whom would you contact?" Without hesitation, they answered, "the chief executive." But when I asked just a few whether they knew that there had been a chief executive here for two or three years, I received replies like, "You must be joking," and "I don't believe you." Rather more worryingly--perhaps because I misphrased the question and asked someone in a slightly conspiratorial manner, "Did you know the chief Clerk is really the chief executive?"--the reply was, "You look tired. Why don't you take a break?" I am all for taking a break; I think that I need one at times in this game.
The essence is that no one knew whom to write to. Yet the report clearly shows that the person to write to is the chief Clerk. Paragraph 9 of the summary states:
A hospital is in many ways similar to this place--because we have to respect the sensitivities of the staff, both doctors and management, but when we have doubts, we do not ask who is head of the oncology department, or who is in charge of the midwives--we write to the chief executive, who then takes the matter up.
Mr. A. J. Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed):
I am having difficulty with the hon. Gentleman's analogy, because he is in danger of loading the wrong kind of function on to the person with the senior position on the management board. We often write to chief executives of organisations, but we know very well that consumer relations departments draft their replies for them. We hope that chief executives of organisations are looking to the management priority questions in the longer term, not dealing with every complaint about every department.
Mr. Soley:
The right hon. Gentleman is right, but he is not disagreeing with me. I do not expect the chief executive to deal with such matters. I am saying that,
Lorna Fitzsimons:
Does my hon. Friend agree that this is a matter of accountability, and not just of responsiveness and the ease with which Members may correspond with a single figure who can field any inquiry? We need to know who is accountable for running this place.
Mr. Soley:
I agree, and I am troubled to feel that we may take a wrong turning. There is a lot of repressed demand among Members for knowing how the place works. At present, they--particularly new Members--ask someone such as myself, as chairman of the PLP, or the Leader of the House or their Whip. However, many of the people of whom I asked questions had 15 years or more of service, and they were among the "don't-knows". We are not getting the message across about the management structure. We need a system that people can see and understand so that they may refer to a central point if they are not sure of where in the management structure they should go with a query.
The President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mrs. Margaret Beckett):
I hope not to make a speech because, as a member of the Commission, I am here to listen to Members. My hon. Friend and I have previously discussed my reservations about his approach, but I entirely agree, as does the Braithwaite report, that our arrangements are not sufficiently well known. That problem needs to be addressed, and one reason for proposing a proper office for the Clerk is the attempt to find a means of doing so.
I share the view of the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) that we may be in danger of taking the wrong route. This is a special, if rather peculiar, place. My hon. Friend will observe that annexe G of the Braithwaite report draws attention to the fact that the Canadian Parliament tried a divided system but has brought it all back together. In addition, the Swedes experimented with a divided system, but have brought it back together. My anxiety is that only one person will be in charge. With the utmost respect to the Clerk's Department, there are occasions on which Members are not entirely sure that the Clerks appreciate our problems as much as we would wish. If we bring in an outside professional, we shall see the same problem in spades.
Mr. Soley:
I understand my right hon. Friend's view, which we have discussed. I suspect that our differences are not too great because I certainly do not believe that all that we do now is wrong or that the direction in which we are going is entirely wrong. However, the evidence of my questions to Members has demonstrated that we are failing almost entirely to get across the message about how the place is managed. If my right hon. Friend or the
I am aware that the report considered experience overseas, and it would be rash to ignore that experience by going our own way. I am cautious about the approach that we should take. It is important that someone at Member of Parliament level--an individual or a Committee--should have overall charge, which is why the Commission is vital. However, as I said in my evidence to the review--I cannot say that my views are shared by the whole parliamentary Labour party, but can say categorically that there is strong dissatisfaction with the management structure--although I should prefer a system that recognises the special nature of this place, the same arguments were used in hospitals before chief executives were brought in. It was said that hospitals should not have chief executives because doctors should make clinical judgments. In this place, people say, "You can't have a chief executive because we are politicians and we have to relate to our constituents."
However, the two are not incompatible. There could be a chief executive who deals with straightforward general control of management and who is accountable--whether for leaky roof, the overall running of the catering department and so on. On the other side, there would be the Clerks doing the things that they do so well: the servicing of Members' work--the all-important core work of the House, in the Chamber, in Committees and so on. We should still need some domestic Committees, although we are all agreed--including the Braithwaite team--that there are too many of them. They are too varied and sometimes it is unclear whether they are making policy or solving day-to-day problems.
If we set up the system that I described, we would have a senior parliamentarian--who is, at present, rightly you, Madam Speaker--as Chair of the Commission. The members of the Commission would be crucial to the system. I do not propose that as a perfect model, but it would be a way of bringing together the roles of a chief executive and the Clerks.
We are in danger of taking a wrong turning in this matter. Paragraph 9 would inevitably drive us towards--as it indeed confirms--a much more powerful Clerk's Department, which would be responsible for the management. However we dress it up, that would be true. The hon. Member for Roxburgh and Berwickshire and other members of the Commission should think about that. If people ask me whom they should contact and it is not immediately obvious, I tell them to write to the chief Clerk. If that becomes the thing to do--especially if there is, as I suspect, some repressed demand--the chief Clerk will have to do much more such chief executive work.
Paragraph 9 points out that the Clerk's Department will have to be expanded--so it will. If we all took the approach that I described, the chief Clerk would quickly demand those extra resources that the report states are necessary. In a year or two, the chief Clerk would have so much to do to ensure the proper management of the House and to check--as required under paragraph 9--that other Departments are doing their job properly that he would have too little time to give to the all-important work of the Clerk's Department, not the least of which is reading up, and constantly keeping
on top of, parliamentary procedure. That work is incredibly demanding. We should not be asking the chief Clerk to undertake both forms of work.
In a few years' time, we shall have come full circle. The chief Clerk will ask for a deputy to deal with the managerial side. We might as well call that person a chief executive. That is why I say that there is a danger. It is as though the report has set up, almost by accident, the model that I described; matters will drift in that direction, if the chief Clerk is treated as a chief executive as the report recommends.
"The Clerk of the House was seen by Ibbs as the chief executive; has assumed this role to a much greater extent over the last two to three years".
The report then compliments him on improving the service. I agree--I think that he does a very good job. The report continues:
"The Clerk needs better support; there should be a small but high-powered Office of the Clerk, which should also co-ordinate the decision-making process and provide support for the Commission, the Finance and Services Committee and the Board of Management."
In all other structures, such a person is treated as the chief executive. Someone who knows to write to the head of the catering department will obviously do so. A matter about the service in a dining room, for example, might be addressed to the manager of the catering department or even to the Catering Committee, but many questions are not so clear cut.
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