Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
MR PETER
GRANT PETERKIN,
MR PAUL
MONAGHAN AND
MR GREG
UNWIN
25 APRIL 2006
Q60 Mr Gerrard: You are talking about
the Estate as a whole so that would include buildings like 7 Millbank,
in which there are no Members at all at the moment. I have seen
suggestions that that could accommodate considerably more people.
How long have we got the lease for on that building, do we know?
Mr Monaghan: We have a 20-year
lease on that building.
Q61 Mr Gerrard: As from now?
Mr Monaghan: As of now we have
about a 20-year lease.
Q62 Mr Gerrard: So we have got about
20 years, but if we were to think in terms of moving people who
are currently situated in this building to other parts of the
Estate, is there any significant spare capacity in other parts
of the Estate at this moment, or would that imply having to do
some work, say for instance the refurbishment of 7 Millbank?
Mr Grant Peterkin: I think it
is right that there is no spare capacity. The House authorities
have just taken out a lease on some decant accommodation. If there
was one plea I would make to this Committee it would be that decant
accommodation, which is going to be absolutely vital in terms
of carrying out some very major works—the cast-iron roofs
which this Committee has heard about already, the replacement
of the M&E systems which are getting fragile and the potential
for a Parliamentary Visitors' Centre are the three such works.
Q63 Mr Ainsworth: What are the M&E
systems?
Mr Grant Peterkin: The air-conditioning
and cooling systems for which there is no redundancy and they
are not going to go on for ever.
Mr Monaghan: The main services
in this building are very old.
Q64 Mr Ainsworth: I just wanted to
understand the terminology used.
Mr Grant Peterkin: My plea would
be, Chairman, that the decant accommodation is not seen as the
creation of an opportunity to move officers of the House there
and then create more opportunities for Members' accommodation.
That would not achieve the strategic aim of decant accommodation.
There is no doubt, however, that we can make better use of the
accommodation. If any of you have time to look at the new arrangements
in both DFA and the new PICT organisation, you will see open planning
and small cellular use of space by teams has created the opportunity
to put many more people into the same amount of space once that
area has been refurbished. I have to suggest to you whether this
is a working model for Members' staff of the same party working
in common areas, because that would again optimise the space if
you accept that we have only a finite amount of space.
Mr Gerrard: A final point there, the
figures that you quote on this gap between numbers you think could
be accommodated and the numbers actually here is quite significant,
and yet we are being told as well that outside this building we
are pretty well at capacity, which suggests that actually the
under-occupation and under-use is in here. Is that right?
Mr Ainsworth: I think he means the Estate
not the Palace.
Mr Gerrard: In the Palace but if the
buildings outside the Palace are at capacity—
Derek Conway: Are they?
Q65 Mr Gerrard: Are they? That is
the question.
Mr Grant Peterkin: I think we
are being honest with you. There are areas of under-capacity that
I have recognised. Mr Ainsworth has raised already some ministerial
offices. There are other areas which your tour will take you to,
and some of them are attractively near the Chamber where space
seems to be under-utilised. There are areas where departments
could be better congregated rather than being split as they are
at the moment. It is exactly that sort of guidance from this Committee
that I am hoping to get.
Q66 Mr Gerrard: That lobby briefing
room upstairs; how often is that used?
Mr Grant Peterkin: That is formally
used once a month during term time, but again I am faced and the
accommodation whips know it only too well, with what is the historical
state here, who owns what. The times I need to come to this Committee
are when we make a change of use between one department and Members
or one department and another, but until somebody gives that direction
the press gallery will continue to occupy that very inefficiently.
Mr Unwin: I think the second set
of figures that I quoted about the gap between supply and demand
suggest that on paper at least that there is sufficient accommodation
to accommodate Members and their staff within existing Members'
and their staff space. The problem is one which the whips quite
rightly highlighted which is the changeover period at the time
of an election. Even though you can do a desk-top exercise to
show that it is possible to provide reasonable space per person
across the Estate, without a longer period of decant and an appropriate
process whereby you can actually reallocate that space in time,
perhaps through a more transparent process as has been addressed,
there is very little opportunity to effect that change without
causing considerable disruption during a time when the House is
in session.
Q67 John Thurso: I wanted to look
on the back of that paper ACC8 and section six on the Estates
Strategy. It seems to me that a lot of what we have been discussing
comes back to there being a strategy which actually includes an
understanding of what the objectives are. I am slightly concerned
having listened to evidence that there are lots of statements
that are popped out that may not necessarily reflect what it is
that the average Member really wants. Just to pick up where you
left off, Serjeant, with the question of common space and the
suggestion that members of staff of the same party might like
to work together. Other parties one is in opposition to but one
may be in competition with one's own party and in the opposition
one has friends! I think the model is that Members of Parliament
and parties are not a big business where you have a hierarchy
and you can look at it like a firm of law partners with big cheeses,
little cheeses, and the people doing the work. The business is
the individual MP and his or her team, and those are all little,
discrete businesses with variable space demands. I think we need
first of all to start from that as the objective point, that you
are actually talking about 600-odd individual businesses, as it
were, if you want to put it in those terms. The other things is
I hear a number of people mentioning the need to be close to the
Chamber. That is probably dating back to work that is some four
or five years old. The interesting thing to me is I think the
centre of gravity of Parliament has shifted and it is now in Portcullis
House. I would not trade my Norman Shaw South offices for anything
anywhere on Millbank because the place I meet people is the coffee
shop in Portcullis. I think that goes for almost everybody else.
There is therefore a bit of a change there. It seems to me therefore,
possibly coming back to the point about the strategic plan, that
there is an awful lot of change and water gone under the bridge
over the last few years and we really need to get back to the
question that Mr Dobson first raised, which is the cake, before
we start deciding how to split it. Having a strategy in a big
company is fine. The chief executive says we will have it, sorts
out a team to do it, consults, charges it through, and that is
that. You have the unenviable task of having that responsibility
but then having a lot of other people like us who say you have
got it wrong or whatever. How do we take this forward and who
are the decision-makers in the process? In other words, are the
Members making decisions or are they really making recommendations
and are other people making decisions?
Mr Grant Peterkin: John, is your
question relating to the Estate strategy or to the decisions that
come out of this Committee?
Q68 John Thurso: It is two-fold.
It is saying it is good to have a strategy but the current strategy
is based on data amassed some years ago. All the evidence I have
listened to and the fact that Portcullis has now been going for
a few years and other things makes me think that maybe there is
a need for some reassessment. Ultimately as a member of this Committee
I do not believe I have any power or ability to make decisions.
I am merely reflecting, as my colleagues are, my own thoughts
on the comments of other Members. Who actually in Mark McCormick's
phrase from his book, "buys the balloons"? Who is the
fellow who signs the docket that spends the money?
Mr Grant Peterkin: If I can start
by explaining the sequence of what I think will happen. We are
developing a strategy with a new Director of Estates and a newly-formed
Estates Board with outside experts on it. This relates to both
the House of Commons and the House of Lords because the budget
is a shared one. We are about to develop for the first time a
25-year Estates strategy which will identify, I accept very largely
from a funding purpose, those peaks and troughs, for example,
when does 1 Parliament Street interior need refurbishing, when
does the interior of Portcullis House need refurbishing, when
does the exterior need refurbishing, so you can iron out those
peaks and troughs against the constant cost of the cast-iron roofs
which have been introduced to this Committee once and the other
high ticket items that are going to occur over the next 25 years.
The dilemma that I have is how do we feed in what I expect to
be some quite expensive aspirations and recommendations from this
Committee, in relation to the internal fit of the Palace of Westminster
in particular but the Parliamentary Estate as a whole into that
strategy and who sets those priorities? The Commission pays for
all of this but I see it as a strategy that is agreed by the Estate
Board and which goes to the House of Commons and its Lords equivalent
board of management, but that that board of management at the
same time gets some very clear recommendations from this Committee,
and the key members of this Committee of course have the entrée
directly to the House of Commons Commission and the Lords equivalent
because they buy the balloons.
Q69 John Thurso: That is what I was
driving at. It seems to me the strategy is a strategy for managing
a set of parameters and what we are challenging is the parameters.
Mr Grant Peterkin: I hope you
are contributing to them, yes.
Q70 John Thurso: For example my own
suggestion was that the ideal should be that every Member of Parliament
had a small suite which contained a discrete space for themselves
where they could meet two or three people and have a little room
next door where two members of staff could work in comfort, which
is effectively what most of the suites in Portcullis House are.
In other words, that was the right that every Member of Parliament
had. You cannot accommodate that within the Estate Strategy. That
is back to who buys the balloons. That is the Commission.
Mr Monaghan: We can address that
in the Estate Strategy if that is what you want. We could obviously
change the Estate strategy to meet that requirement.
Q71 Mr Ainsworth: How?
Mr Monaghan: We would have to
look at the Estate and make changes in order to accommodate that.
If you wanted to have more staff as has been explained, we would
have to move people around and there would be difficult decisions
made, but things could be changed obviously to accommodate different
requirements. It is about priorities at the end of the day. It
is about who has to be where and it would mean probably acquiring
more accommodation elsewhere.
Mr Grant Peterkin: This is a very
possible outcome in the sense that the first inquiry led to 1
Parliament Street and the second inquiry led to Portcullis House.
What is this going to lead to? If everybody follows your point
that is it, but then I have got to fight initially for the resources
to support it, and there would be both the resources for the internal
fit, which would be considerable, and then there are the opportunity
costs of what effect that has on the works programme over the
next 25 years and the human relations impact of who moves off
the Parliamentary Estate and does their work or support to all
of you from elsewhere.
Q72 Pete Wishart: But that is such
a far-off ambition from where we are just now when there are still
Members in windowless office. If we follow John's model and want
to see that aspiration, we are a long, long way from even starting
to achieve that.
Mr Grant Peterkin: I have to observe
that I think the windowless offices have been quite overplayed.
I know the predicament of your own party, Pete, but there is spare
Members' accommodation and there is a situation today where if
we said no Member should be in a windowless office, we could find
an office that is designated on the HOK data as suitable for Members
to put people in that. There are penalties for the Government
accommodation whip, I accept that, but we are not in a dire situation
and I think that this is perfectly achievable, there is an opportunity
cost to it, if there is a clear consensus from this Committee.
Q73 John Thurso: That dialogue would
be from this Committee presumably to the Commission and you get
stuck with all of the battle over there.
Mr Monaghan: You set the parameters.
Mr Unwin: I would advise in thinking
about those parameters, as you have rightly pointed out, that
there is a lot of variability in demand in each of those different
businesses and how each Member chooses to run their operations.
Some of those variables are whether or not they co-locate their
staff in the Estate or the constituency and whether they have
a team working model or segregation between themselves and their
staff, some of the use of technology may change and filing. There
is a lot of variety in the demand. There is a lot of variety in
the supply. So a first step might be to try to define perhaps
two or three profiles rather than having a single solution that
should be right for all Members and seeing how closely the space
available matches that. So a model for a Member co-locating, et
cetera.
Q74 John Thurso: What I was driving
at is that effectively if you go and look at—and I have
not been for many, many years—what is provided for a senator
or congressmen in America or in Australia or wherever—they
have all got a suite of offices. Interestingly, none of them move.
When you lose that particular congressional district you go out
and the new guy goes in that. That is it, it is simple and straightforward.
They have got the luxury of being relatively modern in their construction.
Maybe the answer is to hand this building over to the tourist
industry and build a new Parliament somewhere, preferably higher
up so it will not go underwater in 75 years.
Mr Grant Peterkin: All I can say
in response is an early indication from this Committee of where
some sort of consensus is becoming apparent would be very helpful
for us to do that supporting work to give you some of those outline
opportunity costs of that particular proposal.
Q75 Mr Ainsworth: Before we get sold
something let us understand exactly what is being said here. It
seems that it is being said by Mr Unwin, and to some degree supported
by the Serjeant, that you can accommodate within the Members'
allocation the kind of aspirations if only you do it fairly.
Mr Unwin: You can accommodate
the numbers in terms of the number of Members and a certain number
of Members' staff subject to a tradeoff on the occupancy of larger
rooms. So if rooms over a certain size become multiple occupancy
with a Member with staff or staff sharing.
Q76 Mr Ainsworth: Exactly. The only
way that can be done is if you ignore the complexities of the
building. For instance, we have got some huge offices at the top
of Portcullis House, four or five of them, you would have to put
two Members in there. I have got a massive office over in Norman
Shaw South which is the old Director's office and I would have
to have two Members in there. Members would be forced to share.
You are putting a mathematical model to us that says that within
those maths you can do what John Thurso says he would like and
have a small suite for each Member of Parliament but you are ignoring
the complexities of the way Members of Parliament work and the
amount and kind and shape of accommodation that you have got.
It is maths, that is all it is, it is maths.
Mr Unwin: The first point is I
am not saying that suited accommodation for all Members would
be possible in the existing Estate. I do not think that is possible
for architectual reasons. A lot of those rooms are not sub-divisible
in the way that would be desirable.
Q77 Mr Ainsworth: That is the point,
they are not sub-divisible.
Mr Unwin: Exactly so that is the
first point. The second point I agree it has not been fully validated
against the requirements of Members and it is a theoretical exercise
so I am not trying to push it as the final solution.
Q78 Mr Ainsworth: Within those you
are taking into account occupancy rates and therefore you are
saying that Members only occupy their space for 38% of the time
in your documentation. That is part of your mathematics?
Mr Unwin: No. Part of the mathematics
in that particular equation is in the scenario whereby you can
accommodate 1.5 staff per Member, that is on the assumption that
all Members have their own singly occupied office. So on that
basis you can accommodate every Member in a singly occupied office
so long as the number of staff is below a certain point. To achieve
that I think the one thing that was addressed is that those large
rooms become multiple occupancy and it is the concept of these
staff of different Members sharing a large space.
Q79 Mr Ainsworth: It means large
rooms handed over to staff accommodation so that mixed Members
of the same party can go into the same room?
Mr Unwin: And that is where the
solution might be deemed unacceptable. There are some areas where
staff are currently sharing such as lower secretaries.
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