Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-129)
MR ROGER
SANDS
9 MAY 2006
Q120 John Thurso: The Estate strategy
takes as a given that the current Parliamentary Estate will not
be enlarged. If we start with that as the first given start point,
the answer I got from the consultant indicated to me that, with
that given, if it was our wish that each Member should have the
discreet space that we describe as desirable that could be delivered.
In other words, without building any more, what we were after
could be delivered—which I think took some of us by surprise
because the assumption had been that it could not be. If our recommendation
was that, within the constraints of no further building, that
is what we would like to see, the Commission would then look at
that and would presumably be content to authorise the experts
and the Estate Board to come up with a strategy that delivered
those objectives.
Mr Sands: I cannot speak for them,
but they are in a position to agree to that. It would be a big
step because it would cause a lot of turbulence. One of the problems—and
I am very sympathetic to the problems which the Accommodation
Whips face—is that Members get attached to their own accommodation.
They do not want to be moved around: they get set in their habits
and they do not want to be disturbed. I can entirely understand
that. Deciding that we were going to launch an exercise like this
which would involve inevitably a degree of disturbance would be
quite a big decision to make. But if we were not to explore those
options and were to go immediately for saying, "There is
an unmet demand, therefore we have to hire another office block
or something down the road", I think that would be difficult
to justify publicly.
Q121 John Thurso: It may be that
I have misunderstood. I think what you are talking about there
is how the cake of offices for Members is sliced up between the
parties, which is one thing. What I am talking about is the size
of the cake that is available for the Members to be parcelled
out. Nobody could hold the Commission or yourself in any way responsible
for how the Accommodation Whips want to do their slicing. That
may well involve difficult discussions.
Mr Sands: A basic thing which
has to be settled is the point that Mr Harper was making to me:
how many Members' staff should the House Service aim to accommodate
in future? I know that the SSRB caused a lot of unhappiness with
what they said last time round about incentives for Members to
locate staff in their constituencies. We had exchanges about that
when I first appeared before this Committee and I tried to explain
how that had all happened. But it is an issue that will not go
away. In addition to the permanent Members' staff who are paid
through the Department of Finance and Administration—and
we know who they are and we can track them and their numbers—we
know that there are constant incomings and outgoings, from interns,
from people on work experience, from volunteers. How many of those
should we expect or be expected to cater for at any one time?
That is probably why you went round and found that there were
people with five members of staff.
Q122 John Thurso: I watched the DVD
last weekend of Jim Hacker when he has the hospital that he discovers
is fully staffed with administrators, gardeners and everybody
else but it has no patients or doctors. There is a sort of circular
argument that goes on about keeping the thing open. We are the
patients here, as it were. It seems to me that it is a wonderful
red herring to start arguing about how many staff a Member should
have. If you look at Portcullis House, there are a number of those
suites which are discrete, where there are two basic rooms in
a suite—quite small—one where the Member can work
and one where staff can work. There are none that cannot take
two comfortably. As Mark was saying, if you want to stuff four
people in there, that is your problem, but I think it would be
very easy to say, "That's what it is. That is the square
metreage. It comfortably fits a Member and two staff or a Member
and one staff or whatever. If you want to go jamming people in
and you can do it in your budget, that is your problem."
But my focus is on how we get to the ability to deliver that ideal
of that kind of accommodation to Members. My understanding from
what the consultant of the Estates Board was saying was that it
could be done. If we recommend that, then I suppose I am really
asking: Is that a realistic recommendation and would it be done?
Mr Sands: We would do our best
to do it if you recommended it. I was quite surprised by what
Mr Monaghan said.
Q123 John Thurso: Not half as surprised
as I was when he said it.
Mr Sands: I could understand a
bit of Mr Ainsworth's reaction to it. Let us face it, Portcullis
House is not typical. It was the first occasion we had a real
opportunity to build a purpose-built building for Members.
Chairman: I think I should stop you there.
We have got you on the record! I am conscious of the time.
Q124 Mr Ainsworth: This is most difficult.
You really cannot get away from the notion that this is an enormously
difficult job that the Whips will continue to have to do. But
is it not awful when politicians, allocated space, wind up accommodating
political activity. One will follow as night follows day. That
is the reality of it. It is the most difficult area, I make no
bones about it, but, unless the Committee approach it in a fairly
systematic way, we are going to get nowhere, we are going to produce
a report that is not worth anything at all. There are two issues.
One, first of all, is the size of the cake. The second issue,
just as important, is how that cake is managed.
Mr Sands: Yes.
Q125 Mr Ainsworth: One Member plus
one member of staff is all the standard is. Despite the fact that
it has grown—it has grown in a messy way—that is all
the standard is that a Member of Parliament is allowed. Do you
believe that in the modern age that is sufficient and we can genuinely
hold our Members to that?
Mr Sands: No, I do not think you
probably could. We know that there are, on average, about two
members of staff per Member who are regularly here on the Estate.
Q126 Mr Ainsworth: Are you genuinely
saying to us—there is the Clerk's Department, the Serjeant's
Department, all the other people—that there are few people
who can be decanted from the buildings in order to create more
space if further accommodation was available?
Mr Sands: I have promised to do
the exercise for Mr Harper and we will do that.
Q127 Mr Ainsworth: What is your ball
park feel? Do you feel that there are not numbers of people who
could be decanted if we had the space?
Mr Sands: I think it would depend
how far they were being decanted to. The people who are occupying
space in the Palace—and there hardly are any in the other
parts in which you are now interested—in general, are not
occupied with the functions that were identified in that exercise
as being the ones we could move out. In general, the staff who
are involved in those functions are already in 7 Millbank. The
question therefore would be raised: Could we split up functions
which are now more or less together and move some of them out
of 7 Millbank? For example, I noticed there were something like
66 Serjeant at Arms staff who are in the Palace now. My guess
is that those are people involved in daily maintenance and office
keeping and that sort of function, and they probably could not
be moved out, even if accommodation were freed up. But we can
do that exercise. What I am just suggesting to you is that the
amount of accommodation made available as a result of that is
not likely to be sufficient to solve the sort of problems that
I know you have. You raised the question of political activity.
Of course any Member of Parliament is engaged in political as
well as parliamentary activity. I was trying to focus on party
political activity. Two examples flag it up. My understanding
is that the Chairman of the Labour Party recently asked for six
extra offices. What is that for? I know for a fact that the Conservative
Party recently came to the Serjeant and asked to locate, on the
Estate, members of staff who are engaged in the current policy
reviews that the Conservative Party is undertaking. The argument
for that was that they were being funded from the Electoral Commission's
budget. I have reservations about accepting that that is part
of the House's function.
Q128 Mr Ainsworth: There are surely
only two ways of dealing with it. One is that we lay down a complicated
set of rules and then we seek to police them. I do not know whether
that is what you would see as a way of going forward. The other
is that you have a clear and fair allocation, not just an historic
adjustment at the time of election, and then, having given it
to the parties to distribute, you leave it largely within the
parties to distribute. Which way would you favour? Do you seriously
think we can have the kind of rules that would be imposed that
would examine what the Leader's Office of the Opposition is up
to on that floor in Millbank or what the Chairman of the Labour
Party is up to in those offices?—and they were not six that
they were given, but they have more than one.
Mr Sands: I think it would be
quite possible to have quite straightforward standards about this.
If staff are funded from Short Money—and currently I cannot
identify which staff are funded from Short Money, because nobody
tells me who they are: there is no obligation on the party to
provide that sort of information—or from the Member's staffing
allowance, both of which are parliamentary funds, then perhaps
we have an obligation to accommodate them. If they are not, we
have no obligation.
Q129 Chairman: I think it is probably
best that we stop there because we have run over quite a bit.
Thank you, Mr Sands, for your evidence. That has been extremely
helpful.
Mr Sands: Thank you.
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