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18 Oct 2007 : Column 336WH—continued
Freedom of information has come up during this debate. I accept what my hon. Friend said about the Commission’s not taking a view on the Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill, which was introduced by the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (David Maclean). I am glad that it failed. It would be nonsense if Parliament were exempt from freedom of information legislation. We must be as accessible and as open as any other legislature in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world. I hope that my hon. Friend, the Commission and other authorities will ensure that we always have as open a system as the most open in the United Kingdom. The Scottish Parliament has a very open system, and I hope that we will model ourselves on the best and the most open and not on anything that is more restrictive.
We should do more joint working with the House of Lords. I know that we are two different Chambers, but we are one Parliament, and there is every logic, financially and otherwise, in working together wherever possible.
The Tebbit review is a business-like set of proposals about structures of management. It is not a radical document. It is a relatively conservative document, responding to a relatively conservative brief. There is nothing wrong with that. Assuming that it does not propose ripping up the system and starting again, I hope that the Commission and the authorities will be positive about adopting it and not water it down. It contains some good proposals for streamlining, having more accountable management and ensuring that the system works better.
It is a privilege to work here. There is always a challenge to work better, and all of us, staff and parliamentary colleagues, try to do that. We try to do it so that we can reflect the views of those who send us here. I am grateful for the opportunity to thank those who help us in our important work.
I end where I began: we are the people’s Parliament. The test of how well we are doing is how well other people think we are doing, how accessible we are and how responsive we are to the issues of the day and people’s desire to inter-relate with us. That will always be the test, and I hope that we will go on doing better and better in the years ahead.
3.48 pm
Hugh Bayley (City of York) (Lab):
I have not been a Member of this House as long as my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House of Commons, but I have seen a substantial improvement to the management of the services and facilities for Members during the time that I have been here. In fact, I remember when I first arrived 15 years ago asking for House of Commons stationery printed on recycled paper. The Sergeant at Arms Department was absolutely aghast and said that that was completely impossible because archived parliamentary papers had to last for at least 200 years, and no recycled paper had ever lasted that long. I suppose that we had had recycled paper for only a few decades. It took months of argument, but eventually recycled letterheads were produced. They were overprinted with a massive recycled logo, just to warn the grand old men of this place that they should not write their speech notes on it because the paper would self-destruct years
before historians had come to realise the true import of what they had to say. I was pleased to hear what the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) said about the environmental attention to detail that the Commission now has. That is a welcome change indeed.
I chair the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association UK branch, and I have come to make some arguments on its behalf. The CPA UK branch is a parliamentary body, but it is funded by grant in aid from the Treasury. The hon. Member for North Devon made the point that the Finance and Services Committee of the Commission has been considering the applications that have been made by the CPA UK branch and the three other similarly funded bodies: the British group of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the British-American Parliamentary Group and the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body. I was delighted to hear from him that, earlier this week, the Committee approved in principle the applications for a transfer of funding from the Treasury to the Commission, and I hope that the Commission will agree with that recommendation. The Tebbit report is firmly in favour of a transfer of funding for these bodies from the present arrangements to the Commission. Recommendation 56 says:
“The House of Commons Commission should take over responsibility for making grants-in-aid to the four inter-parliamentary bodies.”
I speak only for the CPA UK branch, but all four bodies applied in a joint application to the Commission earlier this year. Before we submitted our application, we had some informal conversations with the Second Church Estates Commissioner, my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell), who chairs the Finance and Services Committee. He wrote in February this year to the Father of the House, the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams), who represented the British-American Parliamentary Group, saying:
“Sir Kevin Tebbit is currently reviewing the administration of the House. You could suggest to him that includes this subject”—
the funding for the four groups—
“in his review.”
We were pleased that he did so.
There are three reasons why the House of Commons Commission should take over responsibility for our funding. I realise that there will need to be an apportionment of the expense, if the Commission were to agree, between the House of Commons authorities and those in the House of Lords. The three reasons why I believe our applications should be approved are as follows. First, as a matter of principle, we are parliamentary bodies involved in the scrutiny of the Executive, among other things, and we should not be financially dependent on them.
Secondly, in terms of accountability, we receive public funds to do our work. In the current year, between the four bodies, we received funding of £3.3 million. We should be fully transparent and accountable for how that money is spent, and we would be if we came under the authority of the House of Commons Commission.
Thirdly, the transfer should take place because our work is important; it involves many Members of Parliament and many members of the other place. The CPA UK branch has 749 serving members—432 Members of
Parliament and 317 peers—together with 509 associate members who are former members of either of the Houses of Parliament. The British group of the IPU has 779 current serving members and the British-American Parliamentary Group has 651. The British-Irish body is different; it is set up, in effect, as a Joint Committee of the UK Parliament and the Irish Dáil and has a limited membership of 25 full members from our Parliament and 20 associate members.
Let me say a little bit more about the three reasons for the transfer taking place. First, the principle that parliamentary bodies should be financially accountable to Parliament not the Executive is important; but, sadly, it is not just a point of theory. Our decision to apply to the Commission for grant-in-aid was prompted by the Treasury’s decision, taken unilaterally without consultation, to cut the budget of each of our four organisations by 5 per cent. in real terms in each year over the coming comprehensive spending review period. We met the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Mr. Timms), who brooked absolutely no negotiation and presented this to us a fait accompli, a done deal. Naturally, we wanted to defend the budgets of our bodies, but we are not seeking funding from the Commission because we think that it will be more generous to us than the Treasury, although we hope that, if it were to take us on, we would retain funding at our current level and get the same sort of inflation uplift from year to year as other parts of the parliamentary estate.
We recognise that the House of Commons Commission, if it took us on, will scrutinise our work and may press us for savings or changes of policy, but funding decisions by the Commission would be decisions taken by parliamentarians about the usefulness or relevance of our activities to the work of Parliament. That is different from the Executive taking unilateral decisions about how Parliament should do its work. So, in a way, we are not just seeking money from the House of Commons Commission, but protection from the power of the Executive.
Secondly, on accountability, the Commission, after we submitted our applications for grant-in-aid, sent back to us by return a series of penetrating questions, as follows. How did each of our groups set our budgets? Would we accept that we would have to be subject to value for money studies by the House of Commons Administration Estimate and Audit Committee? Of course, the answer was yes, we did accept that. We were asked whether, if the House of Commons had to make reductions in spending, we accepted that we too would have to receive reductions in our grant-in-aid. Yes, of course we do; there is no question. In all, 13 questions were asked and each of the groups provided detailed answers to them. If we were taken under the wing of the House of Commons Commission, we would comply fully with all its requirements and we would be more accountable, publicly and transparently, as a result, which we would welcome.
Thirdly, may I say a few words about the work of my group, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association? Our group, like the others, has the active participation of more than 50 per cent. of hon. Members of the
House of Commons and, indeed, more than 50 per cent. of the members of the House of Lords. The CPA works to spread parliamentary democracy and good governance throughout the commonwealth. Our work is respected, not least by Sir Kevin Tebbit, who includes as Annex 2 in his report extracts from the 2006 Commonwealth Parliamentary Association publication by our study group on benchmarks for democratic legislatures. He uses the benchmarks that we developed as a kind of quality standard against which the independence, financial and otherwise, of our Parliament ought to be measured.
In 2005, among other things the CPA UK branch and the British group of the Inter-Parliamentary Union collaborated during the year of Africa, when the then Prime Minister took to the G8 Gleneagles summit and the UK presidency of the European Union proposals for a radical change in the relationship between the developed world and Africa. He commissioned the Commission for Africa report, and we two inter-parliamentary bodies responded by organising a conference with two representatives from each G8 country, each EU country and each country in Africa—one representative from the Government party and one from the Opposition—to discuss how we would ensure that our respective Governments met their side of the bargain: that is, how the donor countries would meet their side of the bargain in terms of additional funding and how the African recipient countries would meet theirs, as set out in the new partnership for Africa’s development, in terms of strengthening the rule of law, dealing with corruption and tackling conflict in the continent, and so on. We were doing work that is directly relevant to the aspirations of our Parliament. Last year, our CPA branch held the first parliamentary seminar on gender issues.
This year, we are holding four seminars, and the one in February was on restoring trust in the political process. Each seminar is held in the UK, and we invite representatives from other Commonwealth countries. In March, we held a seminar on Westminster parliamentary practice and procedure, and in June it was on the governance of the United Kingdom. A major seminar in November will be held on climate change when we shall seek to produce a toolkit to guide Members of Parliament in both developed and developing Commonwealth countries through the issue in their own Parliaments.
The CPA UK branch recently joined a consortium made up of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the National Audit Office, the House of Commons Overseas Office, the International Bar Association, and other bodies in bidding to provide parliamentary capacity-strengthening services to the Department for International Development. Hon. Members will know that we also arrange inward and outward delegations to and from other Commonwealth countries, and in recent years we have changed the focus of those visits more clearly and directly to address more political issues that are of concern to Members of our House and of the House of Lords in their work in this place.
All those activities are important to Parliament. Like some of the inter-parliamentary bodies that the House of Commons already funds, such as the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly,
the CPA UK branch is expected from time to time to take its turn in hosting the international organisation’s annual conference. The year 2011 will be the CPA’s centenary year, which is the next year when it is our turn to play host to its annual conference. There will be an additional cost in that year of some £1.7 million at 2006 prices. When it is the turn of the NATO and OSCE Parliamentary Assemblies to host conferences, they must also put in unusual and supplementary estimates to cover the cost of those events. We have, naturally, told the House of Commons Commission that that cost is on the horizon. We were asked to reveal any large expenditure that might crop up in the next three years, and the centenary year is slightly beyond three years, but as we knew about it, we wanted to tell the Commission. I hope that it will support our application for funding that conference.
The four groups are independent and different from most, but not all, the functions and services that the Commission funds. We want to preserve our independence for many reasons, not least because we want to remain independent of the party Whips. We think it would be a bad thing and not in Parliament’s interest if the Whips took decisions on, for example, who represents those associations on foreign visits and if those decisions were made on the basis of patronage. That independence is important.
The CPA UK branch is a registered charity, and there is a question about whether the House of Commons Commission should fund independent groups, but there is a precedent in the History of Parliament Trust, which is a charity and is independent of Parliament, but receives grant in aid of £1.6 million a year from the Commission. Page 68 of the report states:
“There remains one area where the House does not have control over all the resources necessary to achieve it purposes. In 1990 the Ibbs report recommended that a number of Votes should be consolidated on the Parliamentary budget, including the annual grants-in-aid from the Treasury to the History of Parliament Trust, the British-American Parliamentary Group, the United Kingdom Branch of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the British Group of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. In the event the Commission took on only the grant-in-aid to the History of Parliament Trust; the Treasury still makes the grants to the international bodies, now including the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body.”
At that time, there was no funding threat to our bodies from the Treasury, and their view was that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. However, the vulnerability of grant in aid from the Treasury has been made clear, and I hope that the House of Commons Commission will provide the protection that we need. The Tebbit report recommends
“that the House of Commons Commission should take over responsibility for making grants-in-aid to the four inter-parliamentary bodies.”
My right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House is a member of the House of Commons Commission. She was present earlier, and I hope that my hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House, will ask her and let me know whether the Leader of the House will support the application of the four inter-parliamentary groups to receive funding and financial scrutiny from the Commission. She may have already have put the question, and if so, I hope that she will be able to reply during her response.
The right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), who represents the Conservative party on the Commission,
was in the Chamber earlier, and I ask her hon. Friend the Member for North-West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara) to talk to her to see whether he can persuade her to support what would be a right and sensible decision by the Commission to take responsibility for our bodies. That would be in the interest of Parliament, and it would certainly be in the interest of the bodies. I hope that a favourable decision will be made in good time before Christmas, so that we are aware of the financial situation that we expect to be in next year and can plan our affairs accordingly.
4.8 pm
The Deputy Leader of the House of Commons (Helen Goodman): It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr. Weir.
I have been a Member of Parliament for only two and a half years, and it is only six months since I was asking what I hope were difficult questions of the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) about the House’s environmental performance and giving evidence to Sir Kevin Tebbit in preparation for his report. When I did so, I did not expect to find myself in my present position with its ensuing responsibilities.
I am reminded of someone I knew in the Foreign Office who sent an instructing telegram to someone who was conducting trade negotiations in Paris. The person who was supposed to undertake the negotiations fell ill, so the person I knew had to fly to Paris, undertake the negotiations, send a reporting telegram home to London, fly back, read the reporting telegram and thank the person who had done the negotiations. His final telegram began, “You spoke well.”
I shall begin with green issues, which are one of hon. Members’ main concerns. Clearly, it is important that the Commission take a balanced approach to green issues. The hon. Member for North Devon described significant improvements in recent years that were made against the difficult background of an awkward building that was not designed to cope with modern technology and the ever-increasing demands placed on it. There are some excellent statistics at the back of the 29th report, and the Commission will notice that, over five years, despite significant improvements, the estate’s energy use per square meter has increased and that levels of waste recycling have not changed significantly. I am sure that it will take those things into account.
When we look at the work of the Commission and the responsibilities of the House authorities, we can see how different issues interrelate. I see that much more clearly than I did was an ordinary Member. Several hon. Members mentioned the importance of improving IT and the improvements that have been made following the establishment of the Parliamentary Information and Communications Technology Department. Improvements in off-site IT and communications support for Members will be beneficial, because the pressure to provide more staff in the Palace will be reduced. Improvements on a number of fronts can be made by pulling only a small number of levers.
We heard about the increasing number of people who work in the Palace. Again, at the back of the report there are some interesting statistics on Members’ staff and the staff payroll. Hon. Members may wish to learn
about the detail underlying those numbers, and I have secured some information that may further inform the Commission’s considerations. The latest estimate for the number of people occupying the estate is 4,700, including 646 Members, 1,850 House staff, 1,250 Members’ staff and 950 other individuals, who can be disaggregated into 475 policemen or other security staff, 175 members of the press, nearly 80 people who work on other services, 120 contractors, and a small number of members of other groups including, for example, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. When we look at the pressure on accommodation and what can be done about it, it is helpful to consider all of the groups that contribute to it.
Simon Hughes: I assume that the figure for contractors includes everyone who is not directly employed by the House, although I do not expect the Deputy Leader of the House to confirm that now. I hope that she agrees that we should, as far as possible and as a matter of principle, directly employ as many of our own staff as we can, as opposed to using agency staff or individuals employed by other people. I realise that financial considerations sometimes make such arrangements impossible.
Helen Goodman: In all honesty, I am not in a position to respond to that because, clearly, the most important thing is that the Commission should use its resources efficiently. I do not know whether it would decide to employ all estate staff directly.
Many hon. Members spoke about the importance of engaging the public. It is important that the most disengaged group—young people—are given priority. That has happened now following the work by the Administration Committee and the investment in educational facilities. My constituents are in a different situation from those of the Leader of the House of Commons, or those of the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), because my constituency is 250 miles away. Last winter, five young people—they were about 15 years old—came down to London to attend an event organised by No. 10. Of those five young people, two had never been to London. Indeed, not only had they not visited Parliament before, they had never travelled so far from their homes, which is why we must consider the needs of people from faraway constituencies.
My hon. Friend the Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) spoke eloquently about the work done by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the British-American Parliamentary Group and the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body. His words and his persuasive case will be listened to intently by members of the Commission, who are aware of the upcoming 2011 conference. I am not in a position to speak on the Commission’s behalf, but I shall report what he said to the Leader of the House. The Commission’s decisions are collective—they are not made purely by the Leader of the House, so it would be wrong of me to make any commitments, but I repeat that my hon. Friend made a persuasive case.
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