Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-35)
RT HON
BOB AINSWORTH
MP, RT HON
PATRICK MCLOUGHLIN
MP AND SIR
ROBERT SMITH
MP
25 APRIL 2006
Q20 Pete Wishart: That really reflects
my central question. You guys are deciding these things on seniority
and status.
Sir Robert Smith: If I can just
clarify? We do tend to go mainly on seniority, but it would be
difficult to say what kind of accommodation you would expect because
it would depend on the turnover and also again on what people
want to give up or whether people want to move, because actually
you can have a very senior person who, most objective observers
would say, should be moving to better accommodation, who decides
that the disruption of moving is not worth the candle and they
stay where they are.
Mr Ainsworth: Can I mention some
of the complexities? Let us say that the Prime Minister had a
reshuffle and both the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary
lost their jobs. The Foreign Secretary has been a Member of Parliament
for a very, very long time and the Home Secretary for not as long
as me. I would seek, I would want to provide some decent accommodation
for both of those individuals and I think having been a Secretary
of State who has come out of this grand and salubrious accommodation
over at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office it would be a hard
blow if I sought to put that individual in a cubbyhole. I would
not necessarily want to say, "Oh, one has been here since
the 1970s, one has only been here since the 1990s", so it
is more than just years and there are a lot of complexities.
Q21 Pete Wishart: One last thing,
Chair, if I may? The windowless offices. I have done an investigation
of my own and in my examination I looked along Upper Committee
Corridor North in the windowless offices and the only Members
who are now in windowless offices up on Committee Corridor North
are minority party Members. One hundred% of our new SNP Members
are in windowless offices, 100% of new SDLP Members have windowless
offices. Can anybody tell me the percentage of Conservative and
Labour Members in windowless offices—new Members?
Mr Ainsworth: I have two Members,
I think, in windowless offices.
Q22 Pete Wishart: That is one hundred%
of our new Members in windowless offices and I find that unacceptable.
Mr McLoughlin: In fairness you
are playing with figures. If you only have one or two new Members
it is possible to make percentages look grand. I cannot give you
the answer. I have not been doing this job now for five months
and I have not missed it very much, but I would like to see us
move and actually have a resolution to say that nobody will be
in those offices, irrespective of whether it is 100% or whatever;
I would like to see nobody in those offices.
Q23 Mr Harper: Since other Members
have commented on the method of dishing out the offices I think
I am tempted to agree with the testimony so far, that having the
Whips do it is probably, in Winston Churchill's definition of
democracy, the worst system apart from all the others. I do not
think that there is a way, given the multifarious nature of the
accommodation on this Estate, that any individual is going to
be able to do it in such a way that everyone is going to think
it is a fair system. So I do not envy those who do the job. Just
looking forward, since that is what we are really looking at,
there are two things that occur to me. One of them is the point
that Patrick brought up that as staffing allowances grow, as they
have done, and the encouragement that Members are given to move
their offices and staff offsite, I think we probably do need to
comment in our report about the IT facilities because they are
a real issue and the facilities available offsite are pitiful.
There is a real issue, having investigated this both for my own
staff and for other colleagues who have spoken to me, about having
people being located offsite, particularly if you are using IT
facilities and casework management, which have all the data processing
capabilities. So I think that is a serious point. If we are going
to look at, particularly if staffing allowances grow over time,
the fixing of some of these issues, particularly the staff, then
the IT facilities and how easily people can work offsite are key,
and they are as integral as providing more work accommodation.
The second thing, which has come up, I think, in the number of
the letters and reports that we have had from Members, goes to
style of work, perhaps amongst newer Members. It struck me, and
I was quite surprised, that amongst more longstanding Members
it seems to have been a way of working that the Member would be
located in an office and either their researcher or secretary
would be some distance away and would maybe only talk to the Member
once or twice, and certainly from my business background, talking
to a number of colleagues, that seems to be reflected certainly
from the new Members. That is not how people work in the modern
business environment and, certainly for myself, having one's staff
physically located either in a next door office or in your office
is a popular move with a number of Members—not with everybody—but
that is certainly a problem that a number of Members have identified,
that their own office, they have said, would be perfectly adequate
for themselves but trying to locate themselves and one or two
staff is what has been problematic, and being given accommodation
elsewhere in the building does not necessarily fulfil that need.
That is obviously one of the huge advantages for certain Members
in Portcullis House, where you have not just good accommodation
for Members but much better accommodation for their staff, co-located.
So that is something we would be very interested in the feedback
that you have from Members, and whether you think that is an atypical
comment you have had from Members or whether that is something
you have picked up.
Mr Ainsworth: It is a problem
with the system. We allocate the Member's office and then the
House Authorities do their best to put Members' staff as near
as they can. I do not know whether either of the other Accommodation
Whips would like to take over the allocation of Members' staff
offices because I would be absolutely appalled by the thought
of it. As I have said, whether the House Authorities would seriously
want to take over the allocation of Members' offices, I think
they would be equally appalled by the prospect of that. It is
a problem but it is about the nature of the building and the changing
nature of Members of Parliament as well and changing attitudes.
Sir Robert Smith: It may be needed
to look at how the building can evolve to try to get staff of
Members or distribute them on site because there are actually,
slightly strangely, Members rooms that are allocated by the Whips
and then obviously some of those Members' rooms automatically
allocate staff because they have an adjoining office and staff;
but then there are one or two anomalies where the room is dedicated
to staff even though it is not physically linked. So there is
a little bit of flexibility in the Whips' Office on the margins
to sort out some of the Members' staff accommodation. Then there
was the informal sorting out that used to be done before I was
Accommodation Whip, where old hands to new hands would say, "You
have just been given staff desk so and so and if you swap that
with so and so and give that to so and so they could then create
a little complex near to where they are working," and the
House Authorities went ballistic when they discovered that all
the extensions were going to the wrong people, but that was how
informally Members adapted this place to try to get their staff
nearer. But maybe there does need to be more thought about how
we can get staff and Members co-located or at least closely located.
Q24 Mr Harper: I do not know, not
having been here for very long, how difficult juggling acts Accommodation
Whips have. There certainly is a trade-off in terms of size and
quality of accommodation and proximity and I do not know to what
extent—and I do not know to what extent you want to comment
on it—but it strikes me that there may be Members who are
prepared to have a smaller office or a less grand office and have
it here, and other Members, I know, have moved from here to Portcullis
House, partly either for themselves or for their staff, and there
is some flexibility. Given the nature of the Estate and the fact
that it is not going to become uniform ever, probably, I do not
know whether we use that trade-off as best we could or whether
there is perhaps a better way we can do that, to suit individual
Members. As you have said, Members are different and what may
be a great office for one may just not be appropriate for another.
Mr McLoughlin: These things have
all taken place over time. One of the factors that is true is
when you have been here for a Parliament a number of people will
start going up to their Accommodation Whips in the six months
before an anticipated General Election and say, "By the way,
come the great day when we take 300 seats off our opponents I
would like so and so office," and you say, "Yes, I will
bear it in mind," and you bear a lot of things in mind and
then you wait for reality and then you try and accommodate those
people that you accommodate. That sort of thing does go on and
there is a lot of horse-trading which goes on between Members,
which is fine. I know that one of the things the Committee has
looked at in the past is this horrible sort of period where we
kick Members out almost at 24 hours' notice and they are not allowed
on the premises and not allowed to use phones and so on, but one
of the problems that we have as a Parliament, different to the
United States, for instance, is that we are basically meeting
the next week. You have a General Election on the Thursday and
Parliament reassembles the following Wednesday. On that Wednesday
you get a number of new Members of Parliament coming up and saying,
"When can I move into my office, where is it and can I have
the phones switched on straight away?" Although I can understand
the desire to be a bit more sympathetic to somebody who has lost
their seat I am afraid there is also the desire on behalf of the
new Members to say, "Can I have my office next week, please?"
They have to be cleaned, sometimes they have to be smartened up
and sometimes the offices get into a right state and a bit of
work has to be done on them before they are able to be reoccupied.
So I think that is part of the difficulty and in the United States
you get eight or nine weeks before you take over your position.
Q25 Mr Harper: Just a very quick
question. It was only really the comment that Bob made about expectations
of use of office, whether there is an expectation or whether we
ought to set an expectation in terms of what Members can expect,
not just in terms of size but facilities available in an office,
storage, things like that, just so that it is balancing what Members
can expect.
Mr McLoughlin: There are rules
about that, there are rules about how many filing cabinets you
are allowed, and all that kind of thing, but they are really a
thing of the past now with computers and so on and so forth. And
you do come down to this different point. Some Members have constituency
offices very highly visible on the High Street. For some other
Members, it would not be appropriate. So it is all about the way
in which individual Members of Parliament tend to operate.
Chairman: Just for the record, I have
an urban constituency and all my staff, apart from one, are in
the constituency.
Q26 Frank Dobson: Can I say that
I feel we have been devoting our time to talking about dividing
up the cake without considering whether the cake is big enough,
quite frankly?
Mr Ainsworth: The size of the
cake.
Q27 Frank Dobson: Since I came here
in 1979 I have had an office in New Palace Yard, Norman Shaw North,
Norman Shaw South, Norman Shaw North again, the main building,
1 Parliament Street and Portcullis House, and until I got into
Portcullis House I did not have an office which compared favourably
in any way with the one that I had before I was an MP, about 200
yards from here, and I think by and large our accommodation is
a disgrace for a very large number of people, and I think we should
start at the beginning and ask what do we think is the minimum
office requirement in this building for every MP and those who
want to have their staff ensuite with them, which most do, I can
assure Mark. When I was in New Palace Yard I never went to New
Palace Yard, I worked in an office full of Tory researchers because
it was across the corridor from where my secretary was. So I was
working in her outer office in effect, and it worked like that.
I do not think very many people want to be separated from the
people who are working for them, they would like them nearby;
that is how it is arranged in any sensible organisation, except
that this is not a sensible organisation, as we all know. I really
think we ought to start at the beginning and say, "What do
we want? What can people reasonably expect?" and then set
out to provide it, and I think the discussion is starting at the
wrong end, quite frankly.
Mr Ainsworth: I totally agree
with Frank; we ought to be looking for opportunities to decant
people out of these buildings in order to provide adequate accommodation
for Members of Parliament and I think that has to be part of your
report.
Mr Jones: I agree with Frank but the
other issue is around whoever gets the job of Allocating Officers,
I would keep with the Whips. If you want a really good read over
the summer read Robert Caro's book on Master of the Senate:
Johnson, his allocation of offices. I am sure that these three
will have perhaps read it. I think in terms of Frank's point what
I find appalling, having been in local government, is not just
the way that offices are allocated or the type of accommodation
that we put up with, but also getting anything done in this place.
*** I think the other thing we need to do is to look at this building
and look, as Frank says, at what is in here and why are people
here in the first place, because I think—and clearly the
report says here—that there are 646 of us but there are
721 offices. That should really match up, but then you add into
the layer, which has been described, about different sizes and
different accommodations. But it would be interesting to see how
many people who are in this building really need to be in this
building, and also in accommodation far superior to the accommodation
that certainly I have had in this building. In terms of the issue
around windowless offices, I agree totally with that. The starting
point is Frank's point, which is what we actually need to do,
because you also have the situation whereby if you get into the
arguments about who has what the House Authorities are going to
divide and rule, which I think they have done for many years,
very successfully, frankly, in this place, and the key thing they
have done for many years is look after themselves very well but
not us. Going back to basics, to use that word, the basic thing
is that Parliament is here because we are here and I think that
should be the starting point, and I know that is a radical statement
in these terms. I was in a windowless office, as Bob knows, along
the corridor there and they are absolutely dreadful. Just to correct
Pete, there are some Conservative Members along there in those
windowless offices, but Mr IDS, who has a very nice grandiose
office along here also has all his staff on the other side of
the corridor with offices with windows. So there are things like
that that need to be sorted out as well. I think it is basic and
I think this graph here sums it up for me just in one.
Q28 David Lepper: What I have not
quite understood yet, despite all that you have said about the
difficulties of the decision-making, is about Members sharing
offices. I know some Members choose to share offices and they
quite like to do that, but we have also had evidence from Members
who obviously feel it quite difficult to share, however well they
get on with other colleagues. Why is it? I have not quite understood
why, when there is a surplus of rooms over numbers of Members,
we have to have some Members who do not wish to share sharing.
Mr Ainsworth: We do not, as far
as I am aware.
Q29 David Lepper: Yet some of the
evidence suggests that it is happening.
Mr McLoughlin: I must admit that
I am staggered that there are 741 Members' offices. I just do
not recognise it, to be honest.
Mr Ainsworth: There is some accommodation,
which is empty.
Q30 David Lepper: Members' accommodation?
Mr Ainsworth: Members' accommodation.
If you think about it, if the puzzle was completely full you cannot
move anybody. I have one or two offices—and Parliament has
not been reshuffled since last autumn—that I have been thinking
about allocating and I have been wondering whether or not is he
going to do it, and I have not moved and I did not bother to move—it
was just before Easter—because the pressure became too great
and I had to accommodate one or two people who had some viable
concerns. As far as sharing offices is concerned there is, as
far as I am aware, on our side nobody sharing an office who is
unhappy with sharing an office. I made a suggestion to a new Member
that they share an office because I have a very large two-Member
office half full and they were kicking up about the amount of
. . . And this is a big problem. London Members in particular—and
I know how much I pay for my constituency office is astronomical
and it gives me a huge problem with my IEP—there are London
Members now who are closing their constituency offices because
they cannot afford to pay the rent. It is a major problem. If
I have that problem in Coventry then I can imagine what people
have in London. This was a London Member who wanted to base all
of their staff here and because they were new Members I was not
going to give them a great big grand office. I had a great big
half a grand office but they did not like the idea of sharing.
So there are those issues that come up. It would have been a lot
more space for them but they would have had to have shared it
with someone else. The issue has already been raised, that people
are different, are they not? Some people are happy to share and
some people are very unhappy to share, and this person was not
happy to share. But I am not aware of anybody other than that
being asked to share who is not happy.
Mr McLoughlin: I have nine people
sharing offices; I have a four, a two and a three, off the top
of my head.
Q31 Mr Donohoe: Page 11 of this report
has two new Members.
Mr McLoughlin: I have nine Members
altogether sharing: one in a four, one in a two and one in a three.
Sir Robert Smith: There is a history
of how some of these offices have come about, that they were so
big and open plan that it was difficult to see them as a one-person
office.
Q32 David Lepper: One other question,
if I may? Frank has raised the issue that if accommodation in
this building—I have never been based in this building—it
is not suitable then we need to think about decanting people.
What do you anticipate would be the reaction of some of those
Members who have been long established in these offices if that
suggestion were made?
Mr Ainsworth: I am not talking
about decanting Members from the building I am talking about decanting
non-Members from the building. I do not see how a Member can work
without a member of staff nearby. There are Members who happily
do that, as has been said, but I need my staff nearby and yet
I have Members in accommodation, whether they have a window or
whether they have not, and their staff are way over in the Norman
Shaws, or wherever, a tiny little room on Upper Committee Corridor
North or Upper Committee Corridor South. It is a scandal to me.
If the offices are that small they should have two next door to
each other so that they can have their staff in one and be in
the other by themselves. There should be minimum standards that
are fit for purpose and allow the Member of Parliament to do the
job they were elected to do.
Mr McLoughlin: If I could just
say on that, when we talk about changing Members here we are talking
about when the rooms are being changed and not actually kicking
people out, in the main, and I think that would be generally welcome
as opposed to frowned upon.
Q33 Neil Gerrard: I would not welcome
having your job. I remember talking to one of your colleagues
a few years ago, after two weeks in the job, saying to me that
it had made him realise that size actually did matter! What Frank
has said I think is absolutely right and I think there is this
other issue of making sure that the best use is being made of
what accommodation there is. I just wonder how far you become
aware of accommodation that has been allocated but is either not
being used—and I have seen incidents of that, where there
is an office that has been allocated either to a Member or their
staff that sits there unused, in some cases for years—or
is being grossly underused. We have this figure here of 70 rooms
allocated to Ministers in the House and I suspect that some of
those are never or very, very rarely used, and yet we have all
this pressure on elsewhere, and when some of us had a walk round
the building a week or two ago I remember a room we saw on the
top floor that was being used for lobby briefings—a big
room that is virtually never used and sits there unused 99% probably
of every week on average over the years. How far would you be
aware of accommodation that just was not being used? Not just
for Members but maybe other accommodation as well that sits there
unused or very little used.
Mr Ainsworth: I think it is an
enormously difficult area to get into with Members. Let me first
of all repeat what I said about Ministers. I think there is an
exaggeration of the under-utilisation of Ministerial accommodation.
I think there are Ministers in their cells at 8.30 at night when
the people who think that they do not use their accommodation—
Q34 Neil Gerrard: There are some
who obviously do.
Mr Ainsworth: . . . who are working
there, and they are probably not working there during the day.
When I was a Minister I had a very small office up on Star Chamber
Court and my member of staff used it nine to five and I used it
six to ten. We sat in the same chair because there was not room
for another chair. Anybody who went to look at that would be unaware
of the fact that effectively two people were working in there;
so there is that side to Ministerial accommodation as well. But
the hard area for us to get into is once you have allocated an
office to somebody can you just chuck them out because they do
not need it? I think you are right, it is a big issue. You wind
up with a fairly senior Member with a fairly decent office who
really does not need it but he is not going to give it up, and
yet you might have new Members who have staff crawling up the
wall, interns coming out of their ears, who think, "Why can
I not have that space there that they are not using?" How
can we get to a situation where we as Accommodation Whips, or
anybody else you give this power to, throws a senior Member out
because they have decided that they do not deserve the accommodation
that they were once allocated any more. It is almost impossible
to go there.
Mr McLoughlin: This may sound
strange but I would like to say on the Ministers' accommodation
front that the government enjoys even now a relatively healthy
majority. That does not mean to say that governments will always
enjoy a healthy majority and there may be times where the government's
majority is not as huge as it currently is, although they think
it is fairly tight. They have a very comfortable majority and
those such times you will have Ministers working in their offices
whenever the House is sitting and not in their departments and
that has to be borne in mind. You can get over complacent because
the last three Parliaments have had very comfortable and healthy
government majorities, but that will not always be the case.
Neil Gerrard: I think the other part
of that is probably more a question for the Serjeant because there
is also an issue with Members' and staff accommodation which does
not get allocated and sits there unused.
Q35 John Thurso: On this question
of size it seems to me that part of the problem is that the papers
we have very much say that size equals quality, with which I would
disagree. I think I am the senior Liberal Democrat mentioned in
the papers, but the "senior" in front of it put me off!
I have two rooms, one of which has the staff in and one in which
I work, and that is a suitable arrangement if you do not have
a constituency office and, given the 3400 square miles of the
constituency, I do not think anybody begrudges me that. But if
you look at some of the other papers they talk about what the
minimum is for City law firms most of whom, of course, are in
brand spanking new modern buildings that have been built very
recently and therefore are purpose built and so on. I would just
ask you to comment that it is not actually about the number of
square metres but the effective use of the square metres, and
a small suite, which is not a lot of square metres, can actually
be a very effective working space and a large room like this with
one person in it can be very ineffective. So should we not be
looking for more effective accommodation all across the piece?
Mr McLoughlin: I think I would
say definitely yes to that. One of the things that is true is
we have got to be slightly careful because we build ever more
accommodation in this place and find ever more uses for it. Portcullis
House gave us a huge variety of new select committee rooms and
one of the things I rather hoped would happen, when we managed
to do a bit of a survey, is that the select committee rooms up
here, which hardly any select committee these days ever use because
they prefer to be over in Portcullis House, could have been turned
into some very, very smart Members' accommodation for some senior
Members. I would have liked to have seen those cut in half, a
bit like Committee Room 20 is now, Peter, and made into two offices
for Members and staff. They would have been for very senior Members
of Parliament. However, it seem we have a never exhausting use
of committee rooms. We seem to have a lot of all-parliamentary
groups at the moment ***. To me it is a regret that we have not
managed to utilise some of those which would have been very good
parliamentary offices available for Members.
Chairman: Thank you very much, gentlemen,
for giving us your time. It has been an extremely useful session.
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