Examination of witnesses (Questions 80
- 99)
MONDAY 18 DECEMBER 2000
SIR JOHN
BOURN, KCB, MR
BRIAN GLICKSMAN,
MR ROBIN
YOUNG and SIR
MICHAEL PEAT,
KCVO
80. It just seems sensible to me that if you
take in money from visitors' fees and the taxpayer is paying X
million a year in a grant then you reduce your grant, by including
all of the visitors' fees. That seems logical to me. Is that what
you are saying?
(Mr Young) It is also what is said in the financial
memorandum between the Household and the Department.
81. It could not be realistically used for anything
else unless the Queen was going to use it for her own purposes.
(Sir Michael Peat) The Queen could use it for something
else but the Queen has said that she would like to use it to offset
grant-in-aid.
82. How could she legally use it for something
else?
(Sir Michael Peat) Because it is not part of the hereditary
revenue. How it works is that the Queen as Sovereign is entitled
to the income from the Crown Estate, which is called hereditary
revenue, and which she surrenders at the beginning of her reign
in return for the Government paying the Civil List and meeting
other costs in support of the Monarchy, one of which is this grant-in-aid.
The Queen gives a certain amount of money to the Exchequer, £130
million last year, in return for which the Government pays out
certain money to fund costs in support of the Monarchy. For technical
reasons the revenue from the charges at Windsor Castle is not
included in that money surrendered by the Queen, that is the law,
and it never was surrendered. The Queen has said that it does
not matter that it was not included in it legally, I shall assume
I have surrendered it and I will use it to offset the grant-in-aid.
I am afraid it is a legal nicety.
Mr Steinberg: I bet you are delighted Mr Williams
cannot come back on that one. I am not going to be tempted to
because I might end up in the Tower.
Mr Gardiner: You should have been there years
ago, Gerry.
Mr Steinberg
83. I read paragraph 3.6 and it was a bit confusing.
It appears to be saying you did not have to keep a record of the
visitor receipts to Windsor Castle. Is that right?
(Sir Michael Peat) No. We keep a very close record
of visitor receipts. I think the point here is that we do not
know precisely what they are until the end of the financial year,
and the Department have to determine our grant before the end
of the financial year, so there is a timing difference, that is
all the issue was.
84. There is nothing there to get my teeth into.
I read this report and I was delighted I could not find anything
to have a really good go at. I read the report and it seemed that
since the Royal Household has taken over running the Palaces the
taxpayer was getting better value-for-money. Perhaps I do not
know enough about it to be able to go down any other track. If
it had been the privatisation of Railtrack it would be a different
matter, we are not doing that, unfortunately. In Figure 7 we see
the grant-in-aid has fallen from 29 million in 1992 down to 15
million in 1999. The obvious question that I wanted to ask here
is the same question you would ask local government, if you have
reduced the grant-in-aid quite considerably from 29 to 15 does
that mean the same amount of work is being done for less money
or is less work being done for less money?
(Sir Michael Peat) It is a mixture of the two. I would
like to think we have made our pounds work harder and we are more
efficient and now get better value-for-money. I think that is
the case. I am pretty confident that is the case. Part of the
answer is that the same amount of money is working harder. Part
of the answer is that there are a number of large projects that
needed to be undertaken, have been completed and we have caught
up with the maintenance backlog.
85. So that means presumably that if you have
caught up with the maintenance backlog and the programme is not
as big then you do not need as many staff?
(Sir Michael Peat) We have been through this one.
We do not need as many staff on the architectural and the building
side but we need as many fire surveillance officers and telephone
operators.
86. Being an ex-member of local government I
can always remember senior officers always arguing for the retention
of staff. I can remember, for example, getting rid of a whole
department, a whole responsibility, but nobody lost their jobs,
they were put into other departments.
(Sir Michael Peat) We have reduced staff substantially
and we would be delighted to reduce staff a lot more. We want
to make the grant-in- aid as low as possible. However, you do
have to have telephone operators and you do have to have people
to change light bulbs and things and it is difficult. There are
a thousand people working in the Palaces and, just like here,
there are routine tasks that need doing.
87. Again, in figure eight, if I actually read
it properly, the expenditure on maintenance projects since 1991-92
has reduced dramatically from nearly 19 million down to just over
£7 million. So, again, what does that actually mean in terms
of the amount of work that is being done? Does that mean that
there is less maintenance being done, less need for maintenance?
(Sir Michael Peat) Yes. It is the same answer as before,
it is a mixture of the two. There is less work to be done because
we have caught up with a lot of the backlog and the work that
is done is done more efficiently with better value for money.
88. If there is less work to be done because
most of the major projects have been done and gradually the cost
of maintenance has come down quite considerably, the grant aid
appears to be coming down quite considerably as well. The thing
that strikes me is that the number of visitors to the Palaces
may well increase considerably. You said they are slightly down
but they could increase.
(Sir Michael Peat) They are, yes.
89. What happens when we get a situation where
the amount of visitors' fees being paid eventually becomes bigger
than the grant aid that is needed?
(Sir Michael Peat) I am very much looking forward
to that day. Whether I will live to see it is another matter.
It would be marvellous, we would not need the grant-in-aid. The
Queen has always said that she wants to take as little financial
support from the taxpayer as possible. This was said in this July's
Royal Trustees' Report. The cost of the monarchy to the taxpayer
has come down by 55 per cent in real terms during the last ten
years. It is my job to do my best to make sure it comes down further,
while at the same time ensuring that the Queen receives the support
she must have to do her job and that valuable parts of the national
heritage do not fall to pieces.
90. In terms of the 1998-99 figures that we
have, and the only ones I can look at and compare, we are talking
about something like £3.5 million worth of visitors paying
fees. In the same year the actual maintenance is down to something
like £7.2 million.
(Sir Michael Peat) That is only the maintenance bit
of the grant-in-aid. The whole grant-in-aid is £15 million,
including telephones and electricity, etc.
91. So there could at some time in the distant
future be a surplus?
(Sir Michael Peat) Yes, in theory. However, you could
not fit that many visitors into Windsor Castle, it does have capacity
limitations. We do operate at capacity on certain days already.
The quality for the visitors is also very important and we work
on it extremely hard. Unfortunately, I think it is not a totally
realistic proposition but that does not mean that we will not
be trying hard to achieve it.
92. Do you ever envisage a time when all the
work could be done on visitors' fees, all the maintenance work?
(Sir Michael Peat) Not realistically, no. We could
not fit the number of visitors into the building to pay that amount
of money.
Mr Steinberg: Thank you.
Mr Davies
93. Just looking at the rudimentary issues here.
In general terms, the reduction in grant aid has been quite tremendous
from £29 million to £15 million in 1992-2000, something
like a £14 million reduction. If you compare that with the
reduction in maintenance projects that has gone down to £12
million, so there is a saving there of £2 million and that
£2 million is to be seen alongside the extra income you keep
from Windsor Castle. Where has the £2 million gone?
(Sir Michael Peat) Some things have gone up. We have
to pay business rates, they have gone up quite a lot. We have
invested substantial amounts of money in our health and safety
and fire precautions. Our fire surveillance teams now cost £1
million a year. Our minor maintenance has gone up. Minor maintenance
is problematic. We got it down from about £2.9 million when
we took over to about £1.9 million. Minor maintenance, jobs
costing less than £2,500, has now increased back up to about
£2.3 million. While we have achieved significant savings
in overall terms, we have not reduced every single item, you cannot
do it. In some areas, like fire and health and safety, we have
made deliberate decisions to increase the resources to both of
those areas. In other areas, like business rates, we pay what
we are required to pay and they have gone up at a considerably
faster rate than inflation.
94. So there is a sense in which you have taken
money out of maintenance to pay for the fire prevention and business
rates and small projects, is that right?
(Sir Michael Peat) I would phrase it slightly differently.
Because we have saved so much money on maintenance, we have not
had to ask for an increase in our grant-in-aid to fund increased
expenditure in some other areas but have nevertheless managed
to maintain a downward trend in the overall grant-in-aid.
95. Do you feel, following the awful fire at
Windsor, that there is any sense of over-reaction? Obviously we
are spending much, much more now on fire prevention than we were.
Is that a case of closing the door after the horse has bolted?
Are we spending much more on that sort of area than other comparable
buildings?
(Sir Michael Peat) It is a good question. We have
spent in today's terms, over the last ten years, about £19
million on fixed fire precautions, which is fire compartmentation
and automatic fire detection systems. We spend about £1 million
a year on fire surveillance officers and maintaining the automatic
fire detection equipment, renewing fire extinguishers, etc. The
real question you are asking is is £1 million a year too
much to spend on running costs in terms of fire precautions in
such important buildings? Obviously my view is that it is not
but, on the other hand, our standards of fire precautions are
extremely high.
96. Fires are often caused by bad electrics
and that sort of thing, do you include electrical installation
as part of maintenance or part of fire prevention?
(Sir Michael Peat) You are right, rewiring is often
undertaken as a result of the fire risk. The major rewiring at
Windsor was shown separately. Minor rewiring is included under
fire precautions if it is essentially done for fire precaution
reasons, if it comes out of the fire side telling us that they
are worried about it.
97. Can I ask you, I am right in saying that
you are the Peat in Peat Marwick, that is correct, is it not?
(Sir Michael Peat) I used to be the Peat in what used
to Peat Marwick, yes.
98. So when people say KPMG, you were the Peat,
were you not?
(Sir Michael Peat) Yes.
99. And you are the Peat, as it were, in KPMG
who are the external auditors of your accounts?
(Sir Michael Peat) Not any longer. It stopped being
a family firm in 1965 before I joined. My grandfather was, yes.
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