Westminster Hall
Thursday 18 October 2007
[Mr. Mike Weir in the Chair]
Management and Services (House of Commons)
[Relevant documents: Review of Management and Services of the House of Commons by Sir Kevin Tebbit HC 685 and 29th Annual Report of the House of Commons Commission HC 708.]
Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—[Mr. Watson.]
2.30 pm
Nick Harvey (North Devon) (LD): It is a pleasure to be in the Chamber and to open the debate on the 29th report of the House of Commons Commission. This is the third year in which the Commission’s annual report has been debated. Two years ago, there were calls in various parts of the House for a review of the way in which the House was run and a year ago, in this debate, I announced that Sir Kevin Tebbit had been appointed to review the management and services of the House. Many hon. Members—certainly several of those in the Chamber—will have met and spoken to Sir Kevin and his team during the course of his work. We are grateful to Sir Kevin and his team for the work that they did and for the full and comprehensive report that he presented just before the summer recess.
The debate is an opportunity for the House to express its view on the Tebbit report. The Commission will listen carefully to what is said before we take decisions on how to implement the report and the recommendations that it makes. I hope that all hon. Members, whether they are taking part in the debate or not, will let the Commission know what they think of the review and the recommendations and what they think should be the priorities for change.
The Commission has already agreed to some preliminary steps towards the implementation of the report, including, in particular, to merge the estates and works functions, which will be headed by a new parliamentary director of estates from next January; to appoint a new director-general of facilities, who will supervise not only estates and works but accommodation, office services and the full range of services within the House; to reorganise the Board of Management on functional lines to try to strengthen the corporate sense of work in the House, as Sir Kevin’s report expressed the feeling that some of the Departments operated somewhat on their own and that there was not a sufficiently corporate sense of purpose; and to strengthen the office of the chief executive.
Full implementation of all the recommendations in the report would clearly take considerable time, and we will focus on those that are most significant to the delivery of services to Members. I am pleased to say that, in general, Sir Kevin found that the way in which the management of the House operated was encouraging and reassuring. He did not think that the systems were broken. The performance of the service is generally well regarded, and its reputation with other parliamentary
services is high. In only one area—the management of estates and works—did he feel a clear need for remedial action, and that is why I have flagged that up as the one that the Commission latched on to first and that we thought ought to be a priority.
The report is not the only measure this year of how House services are performing. The Board of Management, with the support of the Select Committee on Administration, which we thank sincerely for its work in the House, conducted a survey of Members and Members’ staff and produced a report in May 2007. There was a good response rate to the survey, as 45 per cent. of MPs and 54 per cent. of their staff responded, a significant increase from the responses the previous time that the exercise was conducted. Broadly speaking, those who responded were representative of the political mix and other mixes in the House. One MP told the survey that
“given the nature of the main inhabitants”—
“the place works remarkably well.”
Broadly speaking, that is a summary of the conclusions.
One thing that the Commission stopped to ponder was the fact that only a fifth or so of Members thought that the Commission was working very or fairly effectively, while a third or so thought otherwise. We had to ask ourselves whether we should be alarmed by that, but, if we consider the combination of the findings of the survey and the recommendations from Sir Kevin Tebbit, we think that broadly speaking perhaps the fairly low-profile way in which we do our work is not something that is likely to communicate itself to Members and necessarily strike chords with them. The definition of a good club committee is that often nobody notices what it is doing and we think that a better measure of the work that we are doing is the level of Member satisfaction with the services that the House provides rather than their having noticed us making headlines or doing anything very eye-catching, which it is not, in truth, our purpose to do.
When asked how the services of the House had changed recently, most MPs and staff said that they had not changed significantly, but well over a third said that they had become more effective. Only one in 10 Members felt that services had become less effective. That is no cause for rejoicing, but nevertheless it shows that some satisfactory progress is being made.
Most respondents felt that the emphasis on providing advice and services for the House and Committees as well as for individual MPs and their staff should broadly remain the same, but the survey does suggest that more attention should be paid to promoting public knowledge of the work of Parliament. That is certainly something that we have discussed on previous occasions during debates such as this.
The Board of Management is also drawing on the survey to make improvements to particular services and to ensure that the services that work well continue to do so. I want to say a few words about promoting public knowledge, which is an important challenge for the House. A recurrent theme in such debates and the Commission’s work throughout the year is explaining the role and work of Parliament to the public. Over the past year, the 17 visitor assistants have completed their
first full year and my impression is that that service and system has got off to a good start. We have sent out 265,000 copies of the new voters’ guide since July 2006. The radical overhaul of the parliamentary website is still a work in progress. Parliament has had 891,000 visitors, and the outreach visits by the education service teams to support MPs in their work with schools when the pupils are not able to reach Westminster are also gathering momentum.
One recognises that some schools that are a long way from Westminster, such as those in my seat of North Devon, struggle to organise regular school visits. We do not want to restrict access to Parliament to children who are educated in the south-east. There is a limit on how far school parties can travel in a day and often a financial limit on their ability to organise extended visits to London. We are interested in helping school parties to visit and the Administration Committee has recommended financial support for that. We have asked the group that works on informing the public to try to work up some proposals on how we might do that, and they will come back to the Commission for consideration later. The Select Committee on Finance and Services will want to provide input, too. We will continue to talk to the parliamentary education service about the sorts of ways in which we can improve access to Parliament not only for school children but for other members of the public from around the country.
At some point in these debates, we usually turn our attention to information technology. This year has seen the passage of the Parliament (Joint Departments) Act 2007, which enabled us to put the Parliamentary Information Communication and Technology Department on to the necessary statutory basis as a Department of both Houses. PICT has been the subject of an inquiry by the Administration Committee, to which the Commission will consider its response shortly.
The survey of services shows low satisfaction in some areas, particularly with remote access, which many of us know to be less than satisfactory—IT installations, printers and one or two other detailed points. The Administration Committee said:
“The feedback we have received from Members since we were appointed in July 2005 has made us aware of a significant undertone of dissatisfaction with the ICT services provided by Parliament. We want to ensure that processes are in place to enable appropriate Members’ services to be delivered efficiently and to an agreed standard.”
I am sure that all Commission members would echo that aspiration and do what they can to help bring about an improvement. No one should underestimate the scale of the change that bringing PICT into being has entailed and nor should anyone underestimate the size of the challenge of providing services to Members, their staff and constituency offices, peers and everybody working in the Palace. If a new Department with new leadership of all these challenges is taking a little while to get on top of every last detail, I do not think it should be any great surprise. I want the House to understand that there is a determination to continue to work to make the improvements and to ensure that we get a service that everybody regards as satisfactory.
A useful development has been the PICT local offices, including the one in Norman Shaw South, which is in a sense an outreach post that Members can get to relatively easily from their offices in order to receive face-to-face help. I, myself, have used it and was very impressed by the service. A steady flow of Members have been making use of that new service—even, indeed, during the summer recess. Members have wanted help with mobile computing, remote access and other such points.
The Administration Committee recommended
“that PICT should commence market investigation so that we and other relevant bodies can be presented before the end of the year with a range of costed options for the provision of regionally based support units.”
Certainly, there has been a certain amount of dissatisfaction with support to constituency offices, and we will want to look at that when the financial implications have been worked through.
I answer parliamentary questions on behalf of the Commission. They cover many and varied topics, but the single most recurring theme relates to green issues and Parliament’s environmental record. I am grateful to Members for keeping those issues at the forefront of people’s attention. I think that it is right that they do so. I point to the Speaker’s introduction to this year’s annual report. He observed that
“all of the House’s electricity has come from renewable sources since February 2007—the full year effect will be to cut our carbon emissions from energy by 70 per cent, equivalent to an annual reduction of 3,400 tonnes of carbon”,
“40 per cent of our waste (equivalent to 850 tonnes) was recycled in 2006/07—up from 37 per cent in the previous year”,
“we reduced the total amount of water used on the estate by 15 per cent from the previous financial year (equivalent to more than 83,000 cubic metres).”
Although I readily acknowledge that, of course, further work needs to be done across the board on our environmental performance, those observations point to progress in the right direction. Over the summer, the management boards of both Houses held a joint meeting on that subject to co-ordinate their policies, and, recently, the House auditors carried out a review of the systems for environmental management, which will come before the Administration Estimate Audit Committee shortly.
There is no doubt that we can, and will, do more, to manage our environmental performance effectively and, certainly, as I said, it is the most popular subject for parliamentary questions to the Commission. As I have said once or twice in answers to oral questions, some colleagues could do a little more to help our environmental performance, by being slightly more diligent about switching off lights when they leave their offices. Quite often the totality of those individual actions is more effective than inventing smart systems to deal with the problem. Having said that, as a Member with an office in Portcullis House, I share the frustration of other colleagues with offices there with the heating and cooling systems, which are supposed to respond to the environment outside, but occasionally do so at a pace rather more leisurely than that at which the climate changes outside.
I shall touch on the international parliamentary bodies. The Commission will make a decision shortly on whether to accept the transfer, from the Treasury, of responsibility for funding the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body and the British American Parliamentary Group. The Finance and Services Committee has been considering that and is recommending to the Commission that the transfer take place, subject to conditions. The Commission will make a decision between now and Christmas, with a view to the new system, if there is to be one, coming into place from April of next year.
The Tebbit report recommended that the Commission take over responsibility for making grants in aid to those four inter-parliamentary bodies, at a total cost of £3.3 million per year. It is a finely balanced issue. We have to be careful about the extent to which a precedent might be set and we must attend to issues of proper governance and the reputation of the House as a whole. As a member of the Administration Estimate Audit Committee, I am conscious of the need for the House to be seen to be exercising proper oversight for internal, as well as external, activities. Certainly, where those are funded from the administration estimate, we will ensure that that happens.
Freedom of information has featured often on the Commission’s agenda in the past year, as well as on that of the Members Estimate Committee, when information has been sought relating to parliamentary allowances. Next Thursday, for the fourth year in a row, the House will publish details of Members’ expenses in the previous year. That is under the publication scheme introduced when the House chose to be covered by the Freedom of Information Act 2000—it did not fall under the original Act. The publication scheme was agreed at the time and is a comprehensive way in which to get the personalised expenditure figures for each Member into the public domain.
The Commission fully respects the fact that there is public interest in the disclosure of information about how public money is being spent through those allowances. It is understandable that from time to time journalists, in particular, seek information beyond that which is covered by the publication scheme. We have to strike a balance, therefore, between the public interest and the privacy of Members, not least where their families, homes and staff—they are entitled to privacy as well—are concerned.
The Commission or the MEC has to consider whether requests that go beyond the publication scheme should be agreed to, resisted, or if need be, appealed against to the Information Commissioner, the tribunal, or even ultimately, the courts, where a decision would have to be struck, balancing the public interest and data protection for MPs and for other public officials.
In the light of some controversy in the past few months, however, I make it perfectly clear that neither the Commission nor the MEC had any substantive discussion about the Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill. We did not take any view on it. We did not support or, indeed, oppose it, but we decided that, even if the Bill was passed, the House would continue to publish the same information about
Members’ allowances that has been disclosed under the freedom of information publication scheme every autumn for the past four years.
Looking ahead, the Commission is conscious that substantial work will be needed over the next 10 years or so on the historic building in which we work, and the cost of replacing the mechanical and electrical systems and repairing the roofs is estimated to be £200 million or more. We await detailed plans as part of the long-term estates strategy. They depend partly on the arrival of the new parliamentary estates director, which, as I mentioned, is scheduled for January. It will be the major task on the new appointee’s desk on day one in the post.
There has been some press attention this week about the following issue. The Commission has discussed very tentatively the possibility of partial closure of the building to enable the work to be carried out more cheaply and quickly. However, there is absolutely no view at this time about what the best options will be. It will be a matter for the new director to work up some proposals for how he or she thinks those huge tasks should be undertaken and to bring them forward to the Committees in due course for consideration.
I must say a few words about the sorry matter of the visitor reception building. Last year when we had the debate, I fully expected the building, which is just outside Westminster Hall, to be open by now. The Commission has received reports at almost every meeting over the past year, and it has been very dissatisfied with the delays, the reasons for which are many and complex. I cannot say much about them at this stage, because we are doing our best to unravel them, so that we can have the building finished and functioning as soon as possible. A recovery manager has been appointed and is doing a good job. For the first time, the Commission feels that somebody is getting on top of the complex issues to which I have referred. When the building is finished, I have no doubt that the Administration Estimate Audit Committee, among others, will have to examine what has happened.
Members know that the Senior Salaries Review Body has been considering Members’ pay and allowances over the past year or so, and we await its report, which may or may not lead to changes, and subsequently, to revisions of the Green Book. Members also know that a new communications allowance started in April, and the Commission and MEC have undertaken to review it in the light of experience.
I have probably said enough by way of introduction to the Commission’s report and work over the past years. I thank all the staff of the House, who work so hard on behalf of Members and Committees. They do their very level best to make the working of the House more efficient and the experience of Members undertaking that work as pleasant as possible. I particularly thank the Clerk to the Commission, Andrew Kennon, his secretary, Louise Sargent, who deals meticulously with all the parliamentary questions that come our way, and all the staff who support the Domestic Committees of the House. We are very grateful to them for their work in keeping us functioning as well as we can. I very much look forward to hearing what Members have to say about the report, the Tebbit review and the work of the House, and to feeding their comments back to my colleagues on the Commission in due course.
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