Westminster Hall
Thursday 3 December 2009
[Jim Sheridan in the Chair]
House of Commons Commission
[Relevant document: 31st Annual Report of the House of Commons Commission, HC 912, Session 2008-09.]
Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.-(David Wright.)
2.30 pm
Nick Harvey (North Devon) (LD): It is a pleasure, Mr. Sheridan, to introduce the 31st annual report of the Commission. It covers the period from April last year to March this year.
As always, the report gives some idea of the complexity of the running of the House and, contrary to the impression sometimes given, of the willingness of the House-Members and staff-to do things in new ways. We are always keen to hear Members' views; it is important that there is good communication between the Commission and Members of the House.
I should point out that the report does not cover Members' pay and allowances, which is essentially a matter for the Members Estimate Committee rather than the Commission, nor the period when allowances became continuous front page news. However, that has had an impact on staff and services, and I shall touch on that aspect in a moment.
Last year's report described greater changes in the internal organisation of the House service than in any year since 1978 or earlier, including the new structure of four Commons Departments and one joint Department with the House of Lords, namely PICT. The vision behind the reorganisation was
"to create a unified parliamentary service which provides first class advisory, executive and support facilities to the House, its Members and the public whilst maintaining a world heritage site."
In the year now under review, changes resulting from the Tebbit review have continued-for instance, filling posts in the reorganised Parliamentary Estates Directorate and unifying human resources and finance teams in the House service-but the emphasis has been on making the new structures work. The most visible example of what a unified service can do is the increasingly popular Members Centre in Portcullis House. Another good example was the handling of the recent sitting of the UK Youth Parliament in the Chamber.
The highlights of the year include the following. There was a pilot for the transport subsidy scheme for school visits, something suggested in Westminster Hall debates on previous Commission reports; all 300 slots for the first two terms were taken up on the first day. There have been improvements to the website, including better search facilities and the addition of the YouTube channel. We have also seen the opening of the visitor reception building, progress on improving the technical infrastructure of the parliamentary network, and the technical achievement of publishing a mass of information
on Members' allowances within a very demanding time scale. There has also been progress on the 25-year estates strategy.
There are some significant challenges. One is handling the transition to IPSA, the new Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, which is now coming into operation. We hope to see the smooth transfer of many of the House staff now working on allowances to new jobs in IPSA. The Commission recognises the uncertainty faced by those staff, and hopes that it can resolved as soon as possible. It will be important, and difficult, to maintain services to Members during the transition period, but it is also important to establish a good working relationship with IPSA staff.
We have continued the task of trying to make the House more environmentally friendly. In particular, a major environmental assessment has just taken place. That should lead early next year to demanding but we hope achievable reductions in carbon emissions, something in which the House's recent performance has been poor.
The task of maintaining and improving the main building is always a challenging one. The cast-iron roof project is the most visible major project at the moment, as Members will gather from the scaffolding and covers on parts of the building.
A much larger job, but one likely to take place over a longer period, is the replacement of the mechanical and electrical services of the Palace. Members will be aware that a study has been made of whether the two Houses would need to be decanted so that the work could be carried out continuously and efficiently, rather than in recess-sized chunks. The study concluded that the best option would be to decant for some years, but further analysis has established that tackling the main problems and risks aggressively over a number of years means that the larger project could be put off for a period, providing a breathing space for us to plan a more general refit of the Palace, to make it more suitable for a modern Parliament.
The final challenge to be flagged up is that of greater financial stringency. The Commission is likely to insist on substantial savings in the administration budget in the next few years, reflecting expectations on the rest of the public sector. Hard choices will therefore be increasingly necessary, especially if the House decides that it wants additional services.
During the past year, I have answered parliamentary questions on a range of the Commission's responsibilities. They have included questions on freedom of information requests, bottled water, child care, the visitor reception building, encryption software, the countries of origin of meat served here, the recharging of electric vehicles, the restoring of Cromwell's statue and moths in T block.
I conclude by thanking the staff of the House for all the work they do on behalf of Members. This year, I thank particularly those who have had to deal with FOI requests; they have been under continuously heavy pressure and have faced demanding deadlines.
I also thank the staff who handle Members' allowances. They have had to cope with numerous changes in the allowance system. We had a completely new Green Book and set of allowances on 1 April. That had barely bedded down when fundamental changes were made in May. Since then, increasing demands have been made of staff at exactly the point when the coming into being of
IPSA put the greatest question mark over the staff. We are indebted to them for keeping going through trying circumstances. If Members find at any point that things from the Fees Office are not quite as fast as they would like, I hope they will understand the immense pressure we have put on the staff.
I thank every member of the House staff. I pay particular thanks to the Commission secretary, Dorian Gerhold, who has coped with everything thrown at him over the past year with great calmness and efficiency. I also thank Louise Sargent, who handles parliamentary questions and manages to get answers posted to the right place at the right time. We are grateful to them all; they help the place to work better, and I hope that Members recognise the debt they owe them.
2.38 pm
Mr. David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD): This is not the best attended debate I have seen. It seems wrong that Members who every day, in their private conversations and correspondence, show a lively awareness of the work of the House of Commons Commission and of members of staff working in the House should not have sufficient curiosity to ask questions about the Commission's annual report. It is left to the representatives of the three parties to do so. That is regrettable, but perhaps understandable in the present circumstances.
The understatement of the year and possibly of the century is contained in the first words of the Speaker's foreword to the report:
"Recent months have been turbulent for the House."
They most certainly have. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) said, the report covers matters that largely fall outside those areas of turbulence. Nevertheless, we owe it to all the staff and Officers of the House to put on record our appreciation of the work they have had to put in under very trying circumstances. I hope that message will be transmitted to those involved.
I would also like to thank members of the House of Commons Commission. I do not always say that; I have had my differences with the Commission and with how it sometimes operates, but it has had a particularly difficult row to hoe in recent months.
The other specific issues that I want to cover are few. Some things in the report are good and my hon. Friend has already referred to them. One, the Members Centre in Portcullis House, is a huge improvement on previous arrangements. It has been convenient for Members and, I think, works well. Although, as a slightly old-fashioned Member I feel saddened that people are now corralled behind a glass screen when they visit the Chamber and never really get a sense of what the Chamber is like, I nevertheless recognise that the arrangements for visitors, with the new Visitor Centre at the entrance to the House, have been greatly improved. We should put that on record.
I am not convinced that the website is entirely user-friendly yet, and we need constant feedback on that process. I am sure that I am not the only Member who still sometimes has difficulty finding things they feel they ought to be able to get to, and quickly, and has to use a circuitous route through cyberspace to get basic
information about the business of the House, Hansardand so on. That may be a sign of my inadequacy in using systems, but if so, it is shared by an awful lot of Members and their staff. We therefore need a continuing dialogue to ensure that the website is improved.
One thing that my hon. Friend did not touch on is sharing video footage. He knows that there is some interest in that in the House, and that early-day motion 211 on the subject has been tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson). There seems to be an almost inexplicable obstacle to sharing material of the kind that is valuable to people and commonly shared in other legislatures. I would have thought that we want to facilitate rather than obstruct such sharing, and I therefore ask my hon. Friend to take that matter back to the Commission.
As far as the fabric of the House is concerned, it will always be difficult to maintain such a building. It is a singular, unique and fantastical building, with huge maintenance requirements. I am interested in what my hon. Friend said about the decanting contingency plans. Have he, his colleagues and the House looked also at the need to find ways of maintaining the fabric of the House that are consistent with the House's meeting for a rather longer time during the summer months or the early autumn?
The last time we had experimental meetings in September, it was farcical. It was farcical that so much of the fabric of the House was in a state of refurbishment that it was almost impossible to walk down a corridor, go into an office or even get into the Chamber without falling over something that was under repair. I have dark suspicions about that. I suspect that there was an agenda to prevent us from ever having the effrontery to suggest meeting in September again. However, there is common ground among quite a few Members that the long summer vacation is something that we want to try to avoid-I mean the recess, which is not always a vacation, of course.
There is a case for the House's being able to hold the Government to account during the autumn and before the party conference season. If that is inconsistent with the House's maintenance arrangements, I am afraid that those arrangements will have to change, and I do not think that it is unreasonable to suggest that, even with the constraints of keeping up the fabric of the building. It is possible without effectively closing for business for four months a year. I do not know of any large corporation, or stately home even, in the country that does that to carry out its routine maintenance.
My next point is an important one and was touched on by my hon. Friend. It is that the environmental performance of the House is simply not good enough. I was very disappointed that the House was not prepared to accede to the motion that I and my right hon. and hon. Friends tabled a few weeks ago effectively to sign up the House to the 10:10 campaign to reduce our emissions. I was disappointed that apparently we could not even make that an aspiration. We are moving in the wrong direction.
The figures on environmental performance on page 49 of the report show that energy use per square metre is going up, and has gone up substantially since 2004-05. We had a blip in 2005-06 and I am sure that there was a reason for that; there is a reference to a footnote that simply says "figure revised". However, the revised figure
is higher than the figures for subsequent years but lower than the figure for this year, which is 362.5 kWh per square metre. We ought and need to do better than that. I wonder whether a large part of the current wastage is related to thermoregulation on the estate. Sometimes we are very cold and sometimes extraordinarily hot; very rarely do we seem to be exactly right. Perhaps a small amount of investment could yield dividends in reduced energy use.
My last point is on IT for Members, and indeed on the IT systems' operation in the House. This is no criticism of the people who work in the organisation, but sadly it is a constant frustration that continual abuse by Members results in machines being put out of action and things not functioning as they should. There is a repertory company among those who work frequently in the House of Commons Library that feels that the machines there are less than we would wish for in terms of performance, and often seem to let us down, normally at critical moments. We can be working against a deadline and desperately need the machine to print something and it refuses to do so, and I think that that is symptomatic of House procurement policies.
We seem to have a gift in the House for buying equipment that is not very good or up to date, and which becomes rapidly not so good or up to date. I know that that is often done to save money, and I do not regret the fact that people are being careful to save money in contracts, but most of us are working on equipment that does not have as good a specification or performance as that which we could buy in our local computer store, or even in our local Tesco.
As part of what is provided by the House, we are forced into having equipment that often does not work in our constituencies. I have just taken delivery of a new PDA and because of the phone company with which we have the contract, it works in only a couple of places in my constituency-not in my home as I get no phone signal there-and it frequently breaks down. If I went to a phone shop, I could buy a phone for a lower price with a higher performance. Regrettably, however, if I do that, I cannot have the parliamentary software that I need to maintain contact with the House. That is just a small moan, but one that is commonly shared by Members.
My very last point relates to the report of the Members Estimate Audit Committee, but neither of the right hon. Members who chair the Committee is here today. The report, I think, is less comprehensive than I have seen previously. There is less information in it about the audit activities of the Committee. The function of auditing is increasingly important in the context in which we now operate. I am afraid that one of the outcomes of the Legg review will be to throw into sharp relief some of the inadequacies of internal audit over recent years. It will suggest, I think, that a number of payments have come to light that could not be justified and that should have been picked up at audit. The House needs a comprehensive report of audit systems, and to be satisfied that when a specific topic for audit has been undertaken, it receives a full report, which will be available to Members. I put that as a suggestion to my hon. Friend and hope that it will be put in train.
I thank the staff of both the Commission and the House for everything that they do to keep this building and those who work in it in some semblance of order. It is a thankless and enormous task, and we are grateful.
2.52 pm
Mr. Shailesh Vara (North-West Cambridgeshire) (Con): I echo the comments made about the number of people who have taken the trouble to turn up for today's debate. Given that it impacts on everyone who works or operates in and around the Palace of Westminster, it is regrettable that on the one occasion that they have an opportunity to make their views known, they fail to do so. That being said, I thank the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) and the rest of the Commission, who, working with the Management Board, have carried out sterling work in producing this report.
As was mentioned earlier, this has not been an easy year, and to say that it has been challenging is to put it mildly. The media have dominated the headlines with comments about MPs' expenses and allowances and so on. That has directly impacted on the entire community that works in and around the Palace of Westminster. Some Departments have been more affected than others. For example, the people handing the freedom of information requests have had a hard time, as have people in the Department of Resources. It is noteworthy that we put that on record to recognise the enormous stresses and strains that have been experienced by the support staff in this place.
Sir Kevin Tebbit's reforms continue to have an impact on the management of the parliamentary estate, and it is good to see that the staff have managed the changes well. Given the economic climate, I was pleased to see on page 36 of the report that the House Service has broadly met its medium-term financial strategy for 2008-09 by ensuring that expenditure on core services was the same as in 2006-07.
I also welcome the fact that PICT and the House Service will be seeking Investors in People status, which clearly is recognition by this place of the need to adapt and to provide care and attention for its staff in the 21st century.
Clearly, one of the important functions that takes place here is support for Members. It is also noteworthy that the role of Members of Parliament in recent years has increased and become more demanding, particularly with the growth of the internet and the use of e-mails. Again, that impacts directly on all those who help us to do our jobs. Let me highlight three or four of those particular Departments. PICT has improved considerably. There is still a little bit to do by way of improvement, but it continues to strive to do better than in the previous year. In that, it has certainly improved compared to last year.
The Library staff continue to impress by meeting the ridiculous demands that we sometimes put on them, especially when they have to provide research and information at short notice. In my case, they have always delivered on time. That view, I think, will be shared by most of us-Members from all parts of the House. The service we get, at short notice, is excellent. I believe that some 99 per cent. of Members have used the Library services.
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