Select Committee on Administration Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)

RT HON BOB AINSWORTH MP, RT HON PATRICK MCLOUGHLIN MP AND SIR ROBERT SMITH MP

25 APRIL 2006

  Q1 Chairman: Welcome gentlemen and thank you for coming along to give evidence today, and welcome also to Mr Sanders, I gather you are taking on the responsibility of Liberal Democrat Accommodation Whip. Before I open it up to questions I do not know if anyone has any opening remarks or points they want to make to us before we start?

Mr Ainsworth: I would like to make some brief remarks, Chair. First of all, on this issue that has been raised in the various representations in evidence as to who should do this job—is it properly a job for the Whips' Office or should it be taken away and done by someone else—let me just say to the Committee that it is not a job that I particularly enjoy but I have tried to think, ever since I have had responsibility for it, and since I was in the Whips' Office before I had personal responsibility for it, who else could and should this job. I have to say that it is extremely difficult to think of who else is capable of doing it, and indeed the Labour Whips' Office took it away from a specific Accommodation Whip because of the problems that we had and gave it to the Deputy Chief Whip some years ago. There is nothing that excites Members more than their accommodation, and you all know personally of the kind of difficulties that Judy Scott Thomson has with Members when she is dealing with two controversial areas, one of which is staff accommodation and the other one is furniture, and look at the bother that that fairly robust lady has in dealing with Members. Give her the Members' accommodation itself, or anybody else, and you can imagine the difficulties they would have. While I am saying that, I would like to say that I think she is due for retirement, I understand, very soon, and I know she is not the most widely loved member of staff in the House but I find that she does a robust job to the benefit of Members and has done over a long period of time, and that is hard to understand until you actually work in this area. But there is a need for somebody with something about them. So if the Committee does contemplate taking this job away from the Whips they had better think very seriously about who they want to give it to and whether or not anybody else is capable of doing it because I frankly cannot see it myself. There are also some issues in the papers about Ministerial accommodation and I see that the Board, in their submission, raise the under-use of Ministerial accommodation. I have to say—and I say it fairly robustly—that I think the Board has done that as part of a smokescreen because they know that Members are concerned that there are Members of the Administration in this place who enjoy better accommodation than some Members do. Broadly speaking, with the exception of, if you like, the grand positions, Ministers do not enjoy salubrious accommodation in the House of Commons. I do not believe that they did under the Conservative regime; they do not under the Labour regime. Generally speaking, when you get made a Minister you get thrown out of whatever accommodation you get and if you are a Junior Minister you get put into a cubbyhole. That does not hurt the Minister as much as it hurts the staff of the Minister sometimes, and sometimes because the Minister has more staff than will fit into the cubbyhole it does give rise to some small anomalies because you have to try to find ways and means around that problem. But I always take the view that Ministers have grand offices in their departments, they do not need grand offices here and they therefore have to give way to Members of Parliament, for whom the accommodation in the House is their main accommodation. However, to suggest that Ministers can do without—when you listen to the Board's submission, giving the impression that they think that they can—a place in the House I think is naive beyond belief. Ministers may not work in their offices all day but invariably they are there in the evenings; they have Red Boxes being delivered there; they have to make private telephone calls and they are slaving away in their little cells for the most part. The other thing that I wanted to say about the main report we have here is that I think we have to be very careful about getting into, if we are not careful, some naive solutions that are not necessarily there. I see that it is flagged up that we do not appreciate the capability of working from home; we have an office-led attitude towards our place of work. We all know the problems that we have, not only working from home but working from constituencies as well. The IT backup in this place is scandalously poor and it is very, very difficult to work from outside of the House. If the House Authorities could get their act together so that we had proper facilities in order to work away that might be a different area, but to suggest that there are easy ways of moving Ministers or Members of Parliament out of offices to work away from home then you would have to be able to provide new IT equipment in a little less time than the year it has taken to replace mine since the last election, and we would have to be able to have it operating at speeds at which it clearly does not operate at the moment. You would have to change the whole dimension of the backup that you actually give to Members of Parliament. I think that the Administration Committee has to look seriously at improving accommodation for Members in the House. It is an area that needs to be worked on. We still have Members—one or two, not too many—who are in small, windowless accommodation and it is a scandalous situation which I think we ought to seek to improve.

  Mr McLoughlin: I echo quite a lot of what Bob has just said. I did the job of sorting out accommodation for about eight years and during that period I was lucky enough with Keith Hill to secure Norman Shaw South as a building for Members of Parliament. Originally that was not going to be Members of Parliament, it was going to be for the Clerks' Department and there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing as to who should have that particular building. In the end it was agreed that we, as Members, would have it. I think the truth of the matter is that if there were 500 offices all of equal size or Portcullis House could accommodate 500 or 600 Members then every Member would have the same accommodation and there would be no question about it, it would be easy to do. But unfortunately that is not the case we are in and therefore there are going to be some people with better offices than others and somebody has to decide who is going to have those offices. I think there is, I am afraid, part of the fact that the more senior you are here the better office you are likely to get. In the main it works that way—I can see Mr Dobson may have a problem with his accommodation at the moment! I do not want to trespass on that ground; there will be some other of my colleagues that would be likely saying the same thing. I would like, however, to echo what Bob has said about Judy Scott Thomson because there has always been an equivalent Judy Scott Thomson ***. So I think Judy has been very, very approachable through two General Elections. Of course, the difficulty does come when you get significant changes at a General Election because that is when the allocation of offices becomes a bit more problematic. If you take the last General Election, I did not necessarily want Bob to give me all the windowless offices that he could have dispersed and I wanted a fair share of the variety of accommodation that was available, and there is no doubt it caused problems. I think the other thing is that we have, whether we like it or not—and people may have different views on this—substantially increased the resources available to Members of Parliament. What we have not done is substantially increased the amount of staff accommodation available to Members of Parliament. I have been in the House for almost 20 years and when I first arrived here Members of Parliament got £13,000 for everything. We are now getting £85,000 basically for staff, £20,000 for an IEP budget and we do not even buy our own computers. One of the things I have always tried to suggest that we do is to encourage people not to base all their staff here. Parliament only sits for 180 days a year and yet a lot of Members of Parliament still try and base all their staff here. I would also re-echo, as someone who does not have their main Parliamentary staff based here, that the backup to the constituency offices is still appalling, and the new rollout of these new computers is beyond a joke as to the time it is taking to get some of the things transferred across. The problem is that all the facilities are here and no wonder Members want to base their staff here to a degree because you have accommodation, you have phones that you do not pay for, you have photocopiers that you do not pay for and everything else, and those are extra costs. That is where in the Top Salaries Review Report last time we did make an allowance for that because we said that Members ought to be able to use a certain amount of their staffing allowance to base themselves in constituencies, but I am afraid that the computer backup is still so appalling that any Member who takes on extra responsibilities would probably have to have somebody else, an extra employee, to try and look after the computers. I would like to draw the attention of the Committee to the Accommodation Inquiry evidence from the Serjeant. I think it is fascinating that staff of the House offices have 22% of the accommodation and Members' and Members' staff offices account for 34% of the accommodation. I do not quite know how support services, for instance, at 16%, is broken down into who and what support services are; and third parties, 6%; Members' support, 5%. So I do not think we necessarily get an overall fair view. I have had a number of people and letters—and I know have been sent to you, Mr Chairman—talking about where the Post Office is; the Post Office has been allocated and what has happened to that sort of accommodation. So I think there are a number of issues there. It would be nice to find a great system that meant everybody was satisfied with their office accommodation; but I do not think we are going to find such a system and although the present system may not be perfect I think it would be hard to improve upon it.

  Sir Robert Smith: I would first like to echo the thanks to Judy Scott Thomson, who I know individual Members may have had dealings with obviously in dealing directly with accommodation, but who, in terms of working with the Accommodation Whips and facilitating their work in terms of resources and advice, has been extremely helpful. Patrick is right that this is not a uniform building, it is not a brand new building, it has a variety of offices and spaces to be used. But actually even if it had been uniform we do not have uniform MPs, we do not have uniform lifestyles or uniform ways of wanting to work either, and so there is a bit of mix and matching to be done, which maybe whips round some of the rough edges of the different accommodation and different people's way of working. Certainly in our case seniority has been the only way. Occasionally the party debates whether to find another route but past Accommodation Whips have preferred seniority to having to actually make the decision themselves as to who is going to get what, but if there is some kind of objective rule that they can point to and manage the intake at each election then I think that does facilitate it. I think from the point of view of the Liberal Democrats, in this report here, it is not just the staff accommodation problem but possibly the resource accommodation problems: the party's short money has increased, the need for more space for its resource centre and obviously the party has increased in strength here, but the increasing responsibility on the Leader's Office and the resources necessarily available to support that Leader's Office is now under strain within the current allocation and it may be something that the Accommodation Committee has to look at as to how those other facilities are located to the parties as well as the general allocation of Members' desks and staff desks. But I would echo the same point, that the barrier now, the trouble for people who do not have large space is accommodating the staff support and I would echo Patrick, that if anything can be done to level the playing field with constituency offices I think would help with accommodation.

  Q2  Mr Donohoe: Can I ask you, Robert, as you have just spoken, if you think that the Liberals get a fair share of allocation of offices against the other parties?

  Sir Robert Smith: I think there is a concern about the allocation, as I say, for those facilities that support the other infrastructure of the parties, the Leader's Office and the resource centre. We used to be within the Palace of Westminster until the building we were in fell down and then we were moved to Abbey Gardens for our resource centre. That has not been able to grow because the House Authorities want to use that for decant accommodation and there is a demand there for some extra space.

  Q3  Mr Donohoe: If you were to take your own Members and the Members themselves and the accommodation that they have, do you think that the Liberals get a fair allocation of offices among that of the other parties?

  Sir Robert Smith: Reasonably fair in the overall allocation of place, but because of the history of how the building has been allocated those who maybe would like to be closer to the Chamber miss out because you do not get the same ratio within the actual Palace; but within the other buildings we then get the ratio that helps to counteract that in terms of overall space.

  Q4  Mr Donohoe: What about you, Patrick?

  Mr McLoughlin: I would like more; I do not have enough.

  Q5  Mr Donohoe: Patrick, have you ever sat down and tried to go through the Estate plans and work out what your allocation is against that of the other parties, because there is nothing in the paperwork here? I have tried to find something within the paperwork that shows that there is an allocation of 10,000 square metres to you, 12,000 to Labour and 4,000 to the Liberals and there is nothing here that suggests that. Have you ever done anything or have any of your predecessors?

  Mr McLoughlin: There is some paper around that does that, so I am surprised if the Committee has not seen it. There are certainly some documents available that do that, and I think the old Accommodation and Works Committee did see that. I think the trouble with doing it on square footage, if I may just say so, square footage in a way is not the best way to do it because there are some offices which are very grand and very smart and there are some that are very dingy, but people may be prepared to go into them because they are bigger offices although they are dingy.

  Q6  Mr Donohoe: Patrick, just to treat it on the basis of a star system, if you were to rate it, as in an hotel business, from five star to three star, we can then extrapolate from that and work out whether or not it is fairly done. I did that in a previous situation. Has that ever been done, as far as you are aware?

  Mr McLoughlin: Yes, to a degree.

  Q7  Mr Donohoe: What was it?

  Mr McLoughlin: To a degree it was not unfair to the parties.

  Q8  Mr Donohoe: Was it unfair to your party?

  Mr McLoughlin: No, it was generally overall fairly done.

  Q9  Mr Donohoe: What about you, Bob?

  Mr Ainsworth: There were some figures done at the time of the General Election. Let me say, there was an intervention by the House Authorities at the time of the General Election which added to the length of time it took us to allocate offices and put me in a very difficult position. Because you are absolutely right, I think in the past the Conservative Party has done it to us, dumped the poorer accommodation on us as the shifting electoral fortunes have occurred. But the House Authorities this time made an intervention and suggested that that ought not to be done that way, and that obviously found favour with both Patrick and Robert and I found myself in a very difficult position to be able to stand out against it. They did some figures at that time that effectively wound up with me trying to move people out of their existing offices because of that proposal, which proved to be enormously difficult, as you plainly remember. I am not so sure that we have a fair allocation. I think that Patrick has done a superb job on behalf of his party over the years and I have nothing but admiration for him. First of all, there are a few things that have happened over a period of time. The old allocations on the basis of positions have gone away, have they not—the Administration Committee Chair, the Catering Committee Chair, there is no office allocation for those people now, and most of those happen to have fallen to the Conservative Party rather than to the Labour Party because of who was in office at the time that the system changed. Patrick also has—and this will create problems the other side of any change of power that could come at some General Election at some time in the future—a very good opposition facility now, and within our allocation I do not know how we could ever create such a facility. So I think Patrick has done a superb job over a period of time and has more than his share of the grand offices in the House and he has a fair share in the other buildings and he is a man much to be admired, but probably at our expense and the other parties'!

  Q10  Mr Donohoe: What you are saying on the basis of this evidence, that we should be looking more closely as a Committee at that and try to do something more to refine it, to make it look as though it is more open in terms of having a five star office or four star, whatever, and not by allocation. One of the things you will recall because you came in at the same time as me, 1992, was we were told that when Portcullis House was brought into being it was going to overcome all these problems, but I feel there has been a significant shift in the occupancy within Portcullis House. At the last election people were told that they were to get out of their offices because obviously the Opposition wanted a whole floor of Portcullis House, and so that must have in some part skewed the figures as far as the occupancy of Portcullis House.

  Mr Ainsworth: Portcullis House is allocated on a fair basis and that is what caused the difficulty. We lost seats at the last election and therefore the House Authorities came up with the proposal, which was supported by Patrick and supported by Robert, that we ought to give up a share of Portcullis House, and we did, and that created a lot of difficulties for us. But Portcullis House is allocated on a fair basis.

  Sir Robert Smith: Can I just say that one of the things that made the difficulty is the historic decision with a new building to try and get all the parties together, and maybe if the decision had been X number of offices change hands but it ends up more like Norman Shaw North, where it is a complete jigsaw—

  Q11  Mr Donohoe: I have a final question, if I may, in a more general sense. One of the Members—I think it was Ann McKechin—made mention of the fact that she had been promised that the office she was in was going to be decorated. What input, if any, do you have in this? What is the democratic input? 1 Parliament Street, for instance, looks tired, it needs investment in it, and is there anything that you do or should there be anything that you do collectively or as an individual to try to do something in terms of the health and safety obligation?

  Mr Ainsworth: That is your job as the Administration Committee.

  Q12  Mr Donohoe: So you would not be bothered with that aspect?

  Mr McLoughlin: That is the fabric of the House; that is the House maintenance programme, is it not? It is not for us.

  Q13  Derek Conway: I have some sympathy with the Whips' evidence as to what system would work. One of the things that intrigues me—and I have never got to the bottom of it—is the system between the re-designation of rooms between what is a room for a Member of Parliament and what is a room for somebody else. Some figures that the Board have put before the Committee and the witnesses show that there are 721 rooms nominally for Members of Parliament but only 646 Members of Parliament. I wondered if the balance of those rooms had been reallocated by the Whips to other people—the researchers, the secretaries, whatever—or whether that is just the House doing that? Secondly, whether the Whips themselves are consulted when offices are changed for Officers of the House? For example, the rooms behind the Chamber used to be occupied by Members of Parliament; Geoffrey Howe had a room that the Librarian is now in. I have never got to the bottom of who decided that that would no longer be an MP's room and would become a room for an Officer of the House. Can I ask if the Whips are consulted about this by the House officials in any way?

  Mr Ainsworth: There are a couple of anomalies that lead towards the figures that are in that. First of all, we lost some seats at the last election and I have not yet given up any accommodation on the basis of that, but what I have done—it is still on my books—is I have lent it out to the House for all kinds of things, and it was my intention to take it off. I have been loath to give it over to the House until I got my own accommodation in shape and my own Members out of the small windowless rooms on the Upper Committee Corridor. So I have been hanging on to it but allowing other people to use it, so it is not a case of inefficiency. Other of Patrick's Members have used it on a temporary basis, House Authorities have used it and I have just allowed people to move in and everything else but I have kept it and I have not given it up yet. So that is part of the figures. There are also, as I have said, some anomalies where you have Members with two offices, and that is because when they have been made a Minister and they have had what we describe as "less than desirable" accommodation, let us say over in Norman Shaw North, and I have wound up allocating them some tiny little office as a Minister in the official accommodation I have not chucked them out of Norman Shaw North because nobody else particularly wanted it and their staff were up to their eyeballs over there. So there will be some Members with dual offices. There are one or two anomalies in the system. I cannot quite get it up to those figures though and I do not quite understand the gap.

  Mr McLoughlin: One of the things I think is a disgrace is that we are still allocating Members of Parliament to rooms where there is no natural light and I think it is a disgrace to allocate them to Members of Parliament. We have managed above the tearoom to actually substantially improve those rooms above the tearoom; there used to be two corridors down there and a lot of people had no light, and I would very much hope—and I made the point in a question to the House of Commons Commission on the floor of the House—that we should during this Parliament set ourselves a target that at the next General Election no Member of Parliament will be allocated a room for him that did not have natural light, and I think that would be a very positive move if the Committee could put that as a recommendation and get the Officers of the House working on proposals, so that that does not happen come the next General Election because we are already a year on. We are perhaps three or four years, certainly no more than four years away from the next General Election and I would certainly like to see that personally as a recommendation. Just on Portcullis House, it was originally stated that each of the corner rooms that overlooked this corner here were going to be tea areas and I said right at the beginning that I did not want the tea area and I wanted it making into an office. At the time there was a certain Member of Parliament who put down in the Parliamentary Questions attacking us for doing that because it cost an extra £4000. Since we have done it other people have cottoned on to the job and it has cost a lot more than the £4000 when it was being originally constructed. Those are the ways in which we looked at accommodation, I would say, to try and find extra accommodation on the site and to use it, because I am very much aware myself that there are a lot of Members in what I would call substandard accommodation and still in substandard accommodation, and the way around that is to actually find more decent accommodation.

  Q14  Derek Conway: Could I ask the Whips, do they think the way that the House is developing now that Select Committee Chairman are being paid, whether or not there is a case, if that is merited, for the sort of titular heads of these Committees to be co-located with the clerks who run that particular Committee, as some Select Committee Chairmen have been talking about? In addition to that could the Whips tell us whether they have a view about whether the Foreign Affairs Committee staff and the Select Committee staff who are still on this corridor require to be in this building rather than located elsewhere?

  Mr McLoughlin: It is very grand accommodation. Whether they need to be here is something presumably for the Administration Committee to take a view on. I do not think I would like to take a view on it. It is very smart accommodation but not being a Member of that Select Committee I would not like to say. I think it is Defence and Foreign Affairs, is it not?

  Mr Ainsworth: I am not sure about the need for Select Committee Chairs to co-locate their staff. It would be enormously difficult with the changes of membership to do that. Most Select Committee Chairs have reasonable accommodation; they are, in the main, senior Members and the fact that—and I am sure the other parties do the same—they are Select Committee Chairs you take that into account when trying to find something for them, that they have those additional duties to carry out—they may have meetings and everything else -and you make sure that they get an office that is big enough, that has the facilities to enable them to do the job. I think one of the things that grates with me is that there are Members of, let us say, medium seniority in pretty poor accommodation, and there are staff of the House who enjoy a lot better accommodation than those Members, and I think that the Administration Committee ought to be looking to make sure that Members are properly catered for.

  Q15  Pete Wishart: I want to talk about allocations and I think you are also edging towards saying that allocation of offices is based on seniority. Would that be a correct assumption about how you do your job?

  Mr McLoughlin: In the main but there will be some Members who have special needs, for whatever reason. They may find themselves with exceptionally good accommodation which may be the envy of other people, but they have exceptional needs and that is why they are thus given that kind of accommodation. So I would not want to say that it was all done on seniority, but that is a guide.

  Q16  Pete Wishart: That is helpful because what I sense by reading some of the evidence that has been given to us and the written evidence is the frustration with the transparency of this. If it is seniority I think it is best to say that, or what is the criteria of allocation. I think there has to be that type of clarity, and I think that Members have a right to expect what sort of accommodation should you therefore get in your second term, what should you therefore expect to get in your third term. I think if we were to put forward that type of transparency about what Members should expect to have in terms of accommodation, would that be a useful thing so that people know what they could roughly expect?

  Mr Ainsworth: I think it would be very hard to do and it is not as simple as that. What Robert said about every Member is different as well as the shape and grandeur of every office is different.

  Q17  Pete Wishart: But would you agree that there should be some sort of criteria, that Members have an expectation to look at that?

  Mr Ainsworth: There is an ideal for that but you have to take seniority, needs and sometimes—although the Committee might not like this word—you have to take status into account as well, and it is very difficult to be transparent about how you mesh those. There is one Member who has written to the Committee complaining about his allocation of office and he is a fairly senior Labour Member who wanted an office next door to where he was that was twice the size of that which he had. Basically, if you go and look at his office it is like a garage—what he needs is a garage, he does not need a big office, he has so much stuff climbing up the wall he needs a garage. When you look at the numbers of staff that people have and what they are actually using their office for, you have to try and get your head around whether or not there is a genuine need.

  Q18  Pete Wishart: That concerns me a little because what we are getting here is you guys deciding who has status and who has seniority; it is solely you and you are not getting any assistance from anybody else. It is the Whips of the parties who are deciding this criteria and you are deciding who should get allocation. Seniority we can all understand, one term, two terms, three terms. Now we are getting into areas of status if people are to be given offices. Is there not a temptation to punish recalcitrant Members and give them substandard offices and reward those who are the loyalists?

  Mr McLoughlin: It comes down, if I could say, Mr Chairman, to how do you define seniority? If you define seniority solely on the basis of length of service that is a criteria you could use.

  Q19  Pete Wishart: But that is straightforward. You are deciding seniority and status.

  Mr McLoughlin: I am not so sure that you can solely judge, and I am not prepared to say that you can solely judge seniority on length of service.


 
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