House of Commons - Administration

Select Committee on Administration Third Report

2 Facts, figures and a brief history

7. The House of Commons part of the Parliamentary Estate consists of seven owned buildings within a secure perimeter (including approximately 60 per cent of the Palace of Westminster), and two leased buildings outside the secure perimeter. The buildings with their names are shown on the map on the next page. In addition, the House has a short-term lease on part of a tenth building (4 Millbank) which is currently being used for decant accommodation.

8. Of the 116,000 sq m on the House of Commons part of the Parliamentary Estate, 60,300 sq m is usable space which can be assigned to occupant groups; of this, 37,500 sq m is office accommodation.[2] Different buildings on the Estate have different ratios of usable to unusable space: the Palace is particularly space-inefficient in this respect.[3] Usable space not set aside for office accommodation is used in a number of different ways: some of the most important are for the Chamber, Committee and meeting rooms, for kitchens and storage, for Library space, and for dining and café areas.[4]

9. Of the office accommodation, Members (646) occupy 25 per cent and Members' staff (estimated at 1,230) occupy another 30 per cent. Staff of the House (1,735) occupy 35 per cent. The remaining 10 per cent of office space is occupied by third parties such as the Press Gallery and security personnel (916 in total).[5] The following charts (Figures 2 and 3) illustrate this graphically. The densities shown are notional rather than real for staff of the House and third-party occupants as not all are desk-based. 1,257 staff of the House are desk-based, giving a more accurate density figure of 10.5 sq metres per person.

10. Members and their staff are based in five of the nine buildings on the Estate, all within the secure perimeter. The chart below (Figure 4) shows the number of Members' offices available in each of these five buildings (721 in total), and the number of Members actually located in each building (645 in total, excluding the Speaker).[6]

11. Members' staff are also based in these five buildings, usually but not always in the same building as the Member for whom they work. The Serjeant at Arms has 228 Members' staff desks to distribute; in addition there are 194 desks in suited rooms in Portcullis House, as well as six suited staff rooms in 1 Parliament Street and one suited staff room in Norman Shaw North. Some Members' staff are also accommodated separately from Members in rooms which are nominally Members' rooms.

12. The following pie chart (Figure 5) shows the number of desks occupied by Members' staff in each building, as estimated by the Serjeant on the basis of a manual desk count. This count includes not only designated Members' staff accommodation, but also additional desks for staff for which space has been found in Members' offices themselves at the request of those Members.

13. As the following graph (Figure 6) shows, there is substantial variation in the number of Members' staff present in each building in proportion to the number of Members, from little more than one member of staff per Member in the Palace to more than three members of staff per Member in Norman Shaw South. The situation in the Palace is in fact even more difficult for back-bench Members than the statistics suggest, as a large number of the staff desks in the Palace are occupied by Parliamentary Resource Unit staff, Whips' Office staff, Ministers' staff and Opposition and third party front-bench staff.

14. Staff of the House have a presence in every one of the buildings on the Estate, but desk-based staff are concentrated in 7 Millbank (the building furthest from the Palace), the Palace itself and 1 Derby Gate, with smaller outposts in 1 Canon Row and Norman Shaw North.

15. Third-party occupants include police and security (474 staff), who have accommodation mainly in 1 Canon Row (with additional accommodation in the House of Lords part of the Palace); and the Press, who occupy 174 densely occupied desk spaces in the Palace (shortly to fall to 152). The Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and Inter-Parliamentary Union also occupy a small amount of office space within the Palace. Contractors' accommodation within the Palace is often in the basement.

OWNERSHIP AND ALLOCATION

16. All of the buildings except 7 Millbank and 2 The Abbey Garden are owned by the House through its Corporate Officer, the Clerk of the House. As Corporate Officer and Accounting Officer, the Clerk of the House is legally responsible for acquiring, managing and disposing of accommodation on behalf of the House and for accounting for its use. The Serjeant at Arms, another senior official in the House Service, has charge of all accommodation and associated services in his facilities management role. Even where the Serjeant has no control or overview of how individual rooms are used (Members' accommodation being a case in point), he is responsible for works, maintenance, furnishing and cleaning. In practice, most of these functions are carried out by staff within the Serjeant at Arms Department or by contractors managed by them.

17. The broad division of office accommodation within the precincts (and associated facilities, such as photocopying rooms and storage) between the principal occupant groups is based on long-standing occupation and decisions of the House and its Committees. Recently, in more important and contentious cases, decisions on accommodation have been discussed and ratified by the House of Commons Commission. It was, for example, a decision of the Commission to redesignate Norman Shaw South as Members' accommodation instead of accommodation for the Clerk's Department. We (like our predecessors) advise the Speaker, the Serjeant and the Commission on accommodation: Norman Shaw South, for example, was redesignated on the recommendation of one of our predecessor Committees. Minor adjustments to space allocation are made by the Serjeant at Arms, acting on behalf of the Speaker. Any such adjustments affecting Members or their staff are discussed and agreed with the Accommodation Whips.

18. Once office accommodation has been allocated to an occupant group, it is largely left to managers in each group to decide on the detail of room occupancy and layout, advised as necessary by professional staff from the Serjeant at Arms Department. It is generally a matter for each Department of the House how it arranges the staff offices within its control. Contractors' accommodation is controlled by various Departments of the House. Accommodation within the Press Gallery is allocated by its Honorary Secretary.

19. The Labour and Conservative Accommodation Whips have for some time been the Deputy Chief Whips of those parties; there is also a Liberal Democrat Accommodation Whip. Members' accommodation is divided shortly after every general election by agreement of these three Whips, in proportion to the number of Members belonging to each political party, with information and assistance available from the Serjeant at Arms. Once this overall division has been agreed, each Accommodation Whip has the freedom to allocate the rooms within their control to individual Members as they see fit. In general, Members who have been re-elected to the House have been able to keep the accommodation they occupied before the election, where they have wished to do so. Accommodation for the minority parties is allocated by the Government Accommodation Whip. Further adjustments in the party allocations are made as necessary in the course of a Parliament, for example, following a by-election.

20. Members' staff desks in rooms and areas designated for Members' staff are allocated by the Serjeant at Arms Department, which seeks to allocate one desk to every Member who applies for one, except for Members in suited accommodation. But Members' staff also have desks in Members' rooms, which are, as already mentioned, allocated by the Whips. In many cases, Members' staff share rooms with the Member for whom they work; in some cases, they occupy separate rooms designated as Members' rooms and allocated as an additional office by the relevant Whip to the Member for whom they work.

21. There is no single effective overview of where individuals have desks on the Estate. The dispersal of responsibility for allocating accommodation (see Figure 8 above) is part of the reason for this. The Serjeant knows which rooms have been allocated to individual Members for their own personal use and to which Members particular staff desks have been allocated, but he does not hold a record of additional desks in Members' rooms, nor is any central record maintained of which named individuals are actually using which staff desks. Figures provided to us by the Serjeant on the number of Members' staff based at Westminster are based on a manual desk count, rather than on centrally held information. Data on House staff accommodation is also patchy and out-of-date, with only local knowledge of who works where, and the Serjeant has no clear information on who occupies Press Gallery accommodation.

22. The House has infrastructure and facilities management software which could in theory be used to manage this information, but only the data on Members' accommodation is kept current and accurate. Other occupants, in particular some Members' staff, are a rapidly changing population. To manage information on their accommodation tightly and to a similar standard to that occupied by Members would require additional resources. To date there has been no perceived requirement to achieve this goal.

23. The dispersal of responsibility for allocating accommodation among a number of different delegates with different priorities is bound to make a co-ordinated approach (for example, the application of a space standard) difficult to achieve, particularly given the lack of central information as to how accommodation is currently being used. This lack of information may also make it difficult for the Clerk of the House to meet his legal responsibilities to account for the use of accommodation on the Estate and to provide working conditions which meet statutory requirements in areas such as health and safety.

Current strategy

24. In July 2005, the House of Commons Commission adopted an outline strategic plan for the House Administration in the period 2006-11. In this plan, the Commission identified accommodation and works as a priority area:

Space on the Parliamentary estate is at a premium. During the planning period it will be necessary to take a strategic look at how space is used to ensure a good alignment with the delivery of primary objectives. It will also be necessary to develop a long-term investment strategy that will provide accommodation that is fit for purpose and is maintained to an appropriate standard.[

25. In December 2005, the Board of Management agreed a Corporate Business Plan for 2006, reflecting the priorities set out in the Strategic Plan, but going into much greater detail as to the constraints identified and as to how the Administration intends to address these priorities. Two of the constraints identified are that:

a) "there are currently no plans for more than a very limited expansion of the overall size of the parliamentary estate, primarily to provide decant and contingency space", and

b) "there will be continuing pressure from Members for increased support services provided by the House … there is insufficient accommodation to meet current demand for Members' staff to be located at Westminster".[8]

26. Solutions suggested include "a need to develop a clear and impartial system for space allocation according to functional need", involving "clear, agreed and open standards for all accommodation and required occupants of the estate", "workplace planning standards of 6, 7.5 and 12.5 sq m" and "5% contingency office space".[9] The Business Plan explicitly seeks our advice on "agreed minimum room and furnishing standards" for all occupants of the Estate. We provide advice on this and other matters in this Report.

History

27. The Palace of Westminster was not built with Members' office accommodation in mind. Pressure for such accommodation first became obvious towards the end of the Second World War, when the rebuilding of the Chamber was under consideration.[10] This pressure grew through the following decades.

28. In the 1950s, Committees were considering "the possibility of providing more individual desks if Members desire them" and noting that there was "need on the principal floor for more room for Members to read or write".[11] By the 1960s, demand for proper office space for Members was well established and towards the end of the decade, a Committee set out the aim of providing "a room of his own" for every Member, with additional accommodation for a secretary for each, on the assumption that "by the end of the century or probably earlier, every Member will have his own secretary".[12]

29. The site immediately to the north of the Palace on the other side of Bridge Street was soon identified as having potential for expansion; a number of plans for its redevelopment were proposed in the 1960s and 1970s, but none came to fruition.[13] Meanwhile, accommodation within the Palace was being extensively remodelled to provide office accommodation for Members, but was clearly never going to be sufficient to provide a room for every Member. Efforts to make progress were hampered by the fact that the House did not have control over budgets for works and maintenance; control over these areas finally passed from the Government to the House of Commons Commission in 1992.[14]

30. During the 1970s the Norman Shaw Buildings were made available to the House, and Members were also accommodated in a variety of other outbuildings at varying distances to the Chamber, none of them purpose-built. But most Members had little more in the way of accommodation than a desk and a locker. A more holistic solution began to emerge in 1978, when the Select Committee on House of Commons (Services) reported that "working conditions for Parliament and those who serve it have failed lamentably to keep pace with the greatly increased and still increasing volume of activity at Westminster" and recommended "an entirely new approach to the Bridge Street site".[15] The Report was approved by the House, an architectural adviser was appointed, and, after some delay, a phased approach to the redevelopment of the site was undertaken, with work beginning in the 1980s and finally reaching completion with the opening of Portcullis House in 2000. In 2003, on the advice of the Accommodation and Works Committee, the House of Commons Commission approved the occupation of Norman Shaw South by Members, after which, for the first time, all Members were accommodated within a single secure site.

31. Thanks to the work of our predecessor Committees and others, the quantity and quality of accommodation available to Members has improved substantially over the last fifteen years. Almost every Member now has a room of his or her own; as recently as 1991, more than 350 Members—more than half—did not.[16] Some Members have more than one room for themselves and their staff. A substantial number now work in suited accommodation with their staff.

32. Demand for accommodation remains strong, however. This is, as we discuss below,[17] largely a result of increasing demand for space from staff employed by Members and located at Westminster. There are also a number of Members who remain in substandard accommodation, some of it windowless; and a small number who share an office with one or more other Members—some do so by choice, but some do not, as is shown by evidence we have received.[18]

ACCOMMODATION REVIEW

33. In the face of this demand for space, the Serjeant at Arms appointed HOK International Ltd to conduct a review in 2002 of the accommodation within the Estate, with terms of reference "to assess the House of Commons Estate in terms of the following: how space is used; current working practices; what accommodation and services are essential for each group to work effectively". The review produced four reports, amounting to several hundred pages:

a) A report of Phase 1 of the review (September 2002) containing detailed information about the Estate and those who occupy it;

b) A benchmarking study comparing space allocation and working practices in the House with other Parliamentary and Government offices as well as selected examples from the private and corporate sector;

c) A report of Phase 2 of the review (January 2003) containing recommendations centred on two objectives: achieving optimum use of existing space on the Estate, and providing mechanisms for managing demand for office accommodation.

d) An Estate Occupancy Report (May 2004) reviewing staff of the House and third-party occupants against criteria designed to assess whether they needed to be located within the Estate in order to carry out their functions effectively.

34. These documents have informed the Commission's strategy and the Board of Management's Corporate Business Plan, and we have examined them in detail as part of our inquiry. A senior member of the HOK project team also gave evidence to us alongside the Serjeant at Arms. Copies of the Phase 1 and Phase 2 reports have been placed in the Library of the House.

2 Ev 48, paras 5 and 6. Space which is 'unusable' includes hallways, lobbies, corridors, plant rooms, stairs and lifts. Back

3 Ev 49, para 7 Back

4 Ev 48, Figure 3 Back

5 Ev 48-54. All statistics on occupancy represent a snapshot at a given moment in time and are likely to have changed slightly by the time this Report is published. Back

6 The 721 offices are all of those offices in the control of the Party Whips, with the exception of suited rooms for Members' staff. Back