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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