Examination of Witnesses (Questions 269-303)
MR JOHN BORLEY AND MRS SUE HARRISON
17 JANUARY 2011
Q269 Chair: May I formally welcome
John Borley and Sue Harrison? We have decided that the second
paper, which was delivered more recently than the first, on initial
catering and retail service savings, will be discussed next week.
There is quite an amount of stuff before us today, so we are concentrating
on paper 4.
Mrs Harrison, would you like to make an introductory
comment on what you have written?
Mrs Harrison: I want briefly to
say, Sir Alan, that paper 4 hopefully addresses all the questions
that the Committee brought back to us after my last evidence session,
and that I am very happy to take any further questions in today's
session.
Q270 Chair: Am I right in saying
that you appear to be making remarkable progress towards savings
of £500,000 on the subsidy, with which you were charged by
the Commission?
Mrs Harrison: Indeed. In the four
months since we implemented the price increases, we have so far
taken an estimated £480,000 of additional income. That has
all converted through to the gross profit level and at the net
contribution level, which means that we have £480,000 towards
our end-of-March target of £500,000.
Q271 Chair: Looking at footfall,
it appears that, in most outlets, we are not achieving the numbers
that we had in a comparable period a year ago.
Mrs Harrison: In terms of overall
covers, most of our venues have not seen a reduction. Some, in
fact, have seen an increase against last year. Just looking at
that very briefly, we have seen fewer transactions in the cafeterias
involving customers wanting teas, coffees—what we call counter
lines: the Kit Kats, the bags of crisps, the things that are easily
purchased in a retail shop and brought into the workplace. But
we have seen no downturn in the number of cooked meals and salads
and those core things that people cannot easily make or bring
into the premises themselves. Although there is that downturn
overall from the cafeterias, despite the downturn in certain types
of sales, we are still banking more money at the bottom line.
We have not seen any downturn in the total number
of people using the banqueting services. What we have seen is
an ongoing trend and this is not just since the price increases:
customers who previously may have had a sit-down lunch or dinner
are starting to have a reception; people who previously may have
had a more expensive reception menu are trading down to the lowest
price point that is offered. I think that is partly to do with
the external economic circumstances as well because most of our
banqueting is sponsored by outside organisations.
In the last three months, the Members Dining
Room has traded 14% above its budget, but I think that just serves
to indicate that the greatest determinant of business levels in
the Members Dining Room is the activity in the Chamber. If the
Chamber is busy with debates that are of interest to a large number
of Members and Members are here and present, then they will, in
my experience, make more use of the Members' Dining Room. There
has been a little bit of switch in usage of the Strangers' Dining
Room and the Churchill Dining Room. We have brought the prices
in the Strangers more closely in line with the prices in the Churchill,
and there has been a growth in the use of the Churchill Room,
offset by a slight decrease in the use of the Strangers' Dining
Room.
One area that I am concerned about is the use
of the Adjournment. We have not yet determined whether that is
a factor of the price increases or whether it is a more general
trend. But the Adjournment is about 17% below its budget for the
last three months—the three months since we put the prices
up. We have noticed that some of that is on a Thursday evening
when it was previously well utilised by other passholders because
it was a night when it was open to all passholders. Some of that
business has moved into the Churchill Room, but there is evidence
that fewer people are using the House services for dinner on a
Thursday evening. That is a trend that we will look into in far
more depth.
Q272 Chair: Specifically on the
Adjournment, it is noticeable that it is trading better in the
evening than it is at lunchtime.
Mrs Harrison: It is, but overall
it is a venue that we are concerned about. There is a marked trend
that it is trading at a lower level than it was in the last Parliament.
Q273 Bob Russell: I have no doubt
that Members of Parliament will continue to purchase items here
despite the price increase. My questions relate to the several
thousand low-income people who are employed in the House of Commons
area. Members will appreciate that these questions are not mine,
but I put them on behalf of those who raised them with me. For
example, I am advised that if jacket potatoes and sushi were available
in the Strangers' Cafeteria there would be quite a market for
it. I am also told that if there was a real sandwich bar where
customers can determine the content of their sandwich then that
also would be more popular than the plastic box sandwiches that
are available now.
Last, but not least, and this is perhaps where
I come in, could I mention pie and chips or fast food—the
occasional McDonald-type burger—or pizzas? While the first
two categories are perhaps not me, the third option—the
pie and chips—is very much mine. Lastly, Mrs Harrison, you
will recall that in a previous incarnation I was a member of the
then Catering Committee and one of my great triumphs in Parliament
was to have peas and carrots made a staple vegetable in the Strangers'
Cafeteria. In view of some of the concoctions of vegetables we
have down there such as spinach and that fried cucumber, can we
have some real British food?
Mrs Harrison: I'm not sure
whether I can cover all of Mr Russell's points. The first one,
concerning the pricing and how it affects low-paid staff, we took
very seriously into consideration. We recognise that there are
a lot of staff—both Members' staff and staff of the House—who
are low paid, and that is why the benchmark organisations that
we looked at in our selling price were Government Department staff
restaurants and the devolved Assemblies' staff restaurants, which
have a similar profile of staff using those venues. We have found
it very difficult to justify why our prices should be markedly
below those levels, so without doubt there has been a very considerable
price increase for those people.
What we tried to do was to minimise the price
increase to hot food—as I have said previously, in my most
recent evidence, the sorts of food that staff and Members cannot
easily bring in to the premises and provide for themselves—and
to put higher prices or a greater percentage increase on the prices
for teas, coffees, Kit Kats and other snack items that people
have the choice to bring in or make for themselves. There are
tea and coffee-making facilities in large areas of the estate,
and people can bring in such things at a very reasonable price
from supermarkets. That's how we have tried to address low pricing.
Regarding the sort of food that you are talking
about, if I go to your third point—I remember your days
on the Catering Committee, Mr Russell—we try to differentiate
our product. I would say that the Terrace Cafeteria very deliberately
attempts to have fairly traditional food. The pie-and-chips scenario
is more likely to be found in the Terrace than it is in the Debate
in Portcullis House. Having said that, we have to listen to our
customers. There are large numbers of customers who do not want
to have pie and chips or food of that nature on offer every day,
so there is always one hot dish of the day that is supposed to
be a traditional dish and a low-value dish. You and I have talked
over the years on many occasions about the vegetables.
Bob Russell: And also the other Members.
Q274 Mr Watts: Can I ask about
the numbers compared with last year, and the income compared with
last year? We had an election last year. Does this period cover
that? How have you gone about accounting for it?
Mrs Harrison: Yes, it does, and
that is why in analysing the sales increase we have only looked
at that sales increase in the past four months. If we look at
our year-to-date performance against budget—our budget is
set historically on previous years' performance—in the first
two months, April and May, understandably we had very low levels
of trade, which meant that we had high levels of cost in relation
to those trades, because a lot of our staff cost is fixed cost.
As happens with most new Parliaments, the early
months—May and June and to some extent July—were a
little bit of a slow start, particularly in the areas of banqueting.
Banqueting is a profit contributor to the net catering subsidy
before we allocate all the central costs, so if we have less banqueting
and more of the more highly subsidised staff restaurants it changes
the mix of business. Year to date, we are at the moment running
slightly below last year's, but we have reforecast our year end
in the light of the price increases and we should, if we continue
the trading of the past few months, end this year ahead of last
year, but certainly ahead of targets that we have been set.
Q275 Mr Watts: I wasn't entirely
sure; your financial year runs from when to when?
Mrs Harrison: It's from April
through until the end of March.
Q276 Mr Watts: You would expect
your income and your numbers to increase this year doing nothing
because you've no election this time round.
Mrs Harrison: For next year?
Q277 Mr Watts: Yes. Your predictions
are based on what they're based on. I'm trying to see whether
you are doing a quarter by quarter comparison to a certain time
of year.
Mrs Harrison: Yes, we do.
Mr Watts: It's not just the election.
There are peak times, I should imagine, in the catering world
in this place: at certain times it does well, and at other times
it doesn't do well.
Mrs Harrison: Unlike the other
departments of the House, in the catering and retail service,
we have a trading week that starts on the first Thursday of April,
and then we have a system of monthly periods at four weeks, four
weeks and five weeks. That is so we can precisely do that comparison
from one year to the next, because, if not, the calendar month
ends can fall on a weekend, a public holiday and so on. We have
done that for 18 years, where we compare like with like on any
trading day, week or month.
Q278 Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: There
are two parts to this question. If you were running a commercial
organisation, you would look very carefully, which is what you
have done, at your pricing, and you have seen an increase in profits.
Are you considering any measures to increase turnover further
by flexible pricing—maybe including specials—in order
to try to increase the usage of the facilities, which appears
to be dropping year on year? That was question 1. Question 2 is:
are you considering any measures to cut your costs? Clearly, any
organisation like yours has to continually examine whether its
cost base is appropriate or not.
Mrs Harrison: Indeed, and in the
other paper that the Committee is taking evidence on next Monday,
I believe, we have put forward a raft of cuts and income-generation
ideas that, commercially, we suggest could be looked at. We are
not saying they should all be done—there may be other ways
of raising more income or taking less of the cuts—but we
are looking at those who do that. The key costs in any catering
business are the cost of staff and the cost of the food and drink
that are consumed. Those are our prime costs and we are always
focusing on them.
Q279 Chair: Could I follow that
up? There is also the possibility of increasing access. Presumably,
if we chose to recommend that, it would be seen as a source of
boosting business.
Mrs Harrison: Indeed, Sir Alan,
and part of the income generation is to generate additional income
through widening access to people who are not able to use the
facilities at certain times at the moment.
Q280 Mr Jones: On that note, could
increased income be used to keep prices down? Will it be ring-fenced
in the catering budget or will it go back into the main budget?
Mrs Harrison: The current pricing
remit that we have was agreed by the Commission, and its remit
is that our benchmarks are set in relation to certain external
prices. The external benchmark is different for the self-service
versus the restaurants and versus banqueting. This Committee could,
of course, make a recommendation to the Commission to change that.
Q281 Mr Jones: What I am trying
to suggest is that it might incentivise your income generation.
If you get some benefit out of it and Members thought they were
getting some benefit out of it, they might look at using it more.
In terms of income generation, on the issue of souvenir sales,
how many lines do we have? It's not in the paper.
Mrs Harrison: I could guarantee
that a Member would ask me a question to which I don't know the
answer. I don't know. I would hazard a guess that it is probably
about 50 or 60.
Q282 Mr Jones: According to your
paper, 36% of it is sales of the top 10 lines, which is not surprising.
There are 13,400 Big Ben pencils and 6,100 diaries. What is done
to look at those lines to say that, if these are the top 10 that
generated most of the income, there ought to be some that, frankly,
are sat on the shelves for a long time? Do we have a cull of those?
Could you also explain something? I am confused
by paragraph 11 about the St Stephen's shop. One line says that,
unsurprisingly, given its customer base, guidebooks are a very
popular line, and 6,300 were sold last year. It also says that
gross profits from sales of guidebooks and some other product
lines are transferred to the Speaker's Art Fund. How does that
work in practice?
Mrs Harrison: The profits from
the guidebooks and one or two other product lines that we sell
go to the Speaker's Art Fund, so a financial transfer is done
at the end of each period. What that means is that, in our figures
that you have in front of you, you do not see any profit or, indeed,
the sales of those. We have taken those out of our figures, so
we are transacting some business that is not reflected in the
figures that you have in front of you.
Q283 Mr Jones: So you say that
the House of Commons guidebooks are in the top 10 sellers, but,
although they are, we are not actually getting any benefit from
them?
Mrs Harrison: The House is getting
a benefit from them, but the catering and retail service is not.
Q284 Mr Jones: Could you just
explain what is being done to cull, because—let's be honest—when
you go down there, there is stuff that has been on the shelves
for a long, long time?
Mrs Harrison: There is indeed,
and, for some of it, we have been trying for a long, long time
to move the stock through.
Q285 Mr Jones: The 80-odd-quid
cushions always get me. They seem to sit there a long time.
Mrs Harrison: They were bought
a number of years ago. We have, over the last three months in
particular, been having a cull, as you call it, of some of the
slow-moving stock, and we have been trying to sell those through.
We want to start looking at the entire range and to bring some
new products in, but, before we do so, we actually want to get
rid of some of the old ones.
Q286 Mr Jones: Can I make a suggestion?
You have actually done this before, because I remember that you
once had a sale of out-of-date chocolates down there, which seemed
to go very well. One year, they suddenly discovered that they
had ordered too many, and the sell-by-date was coming up, so they
had a sale. Honestly, wouldn't it be good to clear some of it
out? Other businesses would. I have been a Member for nearly 10
years, and I have always seen those two cushions there. I haven't
seen anyone buy one in 10 years, and, at 80-odd-pounds a piece,
I'm not surprised. We could do a deal—two for one or something
like that.
If we are going to look at the serious point
of trying to increase sales, quite clearly you concentrate on
the top sellers. Frankly, rather than carrying stock for long
periods of time—the little prime-ministerial models seem
to have been sat there for many years without any takers—wouldn't
it be better to have more of a strategy in terms of saying that
if they are not selling, we should get rid of them?
Mrs Harrison: Mr Jones, in the
last three months, we have had some very heavy discounting on
those items that do not sell through. Sadly, despite that, they
are still not selling.
Chair: At risk of incurring the wrath
of the Chair—
Mr Jones: You bought some cushions.
Chair: No. I want to cross over to paper
5, which we would prefer, because there is quite a bit in there,
Kevan, about what might be done with income generation, dealing
with the whole issue of souvenirs and sale of merchandise. It
may well be that we want to have some more thoughts about that
in terms of a big effort on merchandising, because, at the moment,
we are very modest in the way that we do it.
With your first point, a question then arises,
because I think I perhaps earned the wrath of Nigel last time
when I said that income generation from retail sales could be
used to cover, as it were, the catering side. In a sense, yes,
the two have to be kept separate for accounting purposes, but
if the catering and retail services group is kept together and
not separated, there seems to be no reason why we can't meet overall
targets by the fact that we have managed to increase income generation.
Q287 Mr Jones: I like some of
the ideas. Let's be honest, I have criticised the shop before,
but there is the idea of having an off-site location. Clearly,
you need some advice on the range that you are covering—you
can get rid of the cushions and other things that aren't selling—and
perhaps look at the things that are selling very well.
You seem a bit reluctant to go down the route
of online sales. I accept you not doing it yourselves, because
it's a specialist sector, but have you perhaps looked at hitching
up with Amazon or somebody else to offer that line of sales? I
am sure that you would sell through Amazon. They would obviously
take a commission for selling, and I accept that we don't actually
want to get into the role of actually designing websites or anything
like that, but going into partnership with somebody like Amazon
or one of the other retailers would be an opportunity to actually
get those sales out there.
Mrs Harrison: Before putting forward
our proposals, I did actually take advice from retailers. As you
know, I am a caterer by background. I would prefer not to name
the particular organisation that I took advice from on this point,
but they had experience of exactly what you are proposing. Their
summary advice to me was that as long as they had a third party
fulfilling their e-sales they made no money out of it whatsoever,
because they found that the third party did not have the same
ethos towards customer service that they felt represented their
brand, which they felt was actually harming their brand and their
reputation; and, for the third party—and it may be the way
in which the contract was structured—that there was not
sufficient financial incentive for the third party to really try
and grow the sales.
They have taken that work in-house themselves.
As they said, it took a number of years of learning curve—how
to do it. They found going the route of the third party in the
first instance, even though they made no money, to be very beneficial
in terms of them learning how to do it and then, at the right
point, bringing it in-house to deliver that e-fulfilment themselves.
The strong advice of that organisation, and also two independent
consultants in the area that we sought, was very strongly that
we should first of all look to develop an off-site high street
presence shop, from that learn what products appeal to the public,
and then use that information to gradually then move into the
e-sales. But the consistent advice from all three was start
with high street presence.
Q288 Mr Jones: Yes, but how do
things like the National Gallery do it? You go on line and buy
things from there. I know you can't buy the entire range from
those organisations, but you can buy; it might be worth looking
at some of those similar things.
Mrs Harrison: I think in our proposals
here we're not discounting the internet sales; what we're saying
is, for it to come on stream and be producing a profit back to
the House within three years is, on the advice we've been given,
unlikely. What we should be doing is doing the research and starting
it up in a small way if we decide to go that route. And I think
it's a very complex area that the House itself has limited experience
of, and that we would be best to treat it cautiously and bring
that information back at regular intervals to this Committee,
if we decide to move into the internet sales area.
Q289 Nigel Mills: I will resist
continuing the debate about merging catering and retail, because
I think it is important that we get the catering budget into a
position where we're happy to be transparent and say, "This
is what it costs for us to achieve these objectives that we set."
But I think we're all a lot clearer, and certainly I'm a lot
clearer; we've got this variety of financial information, and
information on the footfall and everything, to understand exactly
how we're getting to where we're getting. Having been through
the exercise of producing all that, what do you think are the
key issues you need to address to be able to get down to somewhere
like the budget target that's sort of been set by the Commission?
Mrs Harrison: I'm not sure that
I understand your question, Mr Mills.
Q290 Nigel Mills: If there were
three big actions you needed to take to get the subsidy down to
the level that the Commission is targeting, what would those three
key things be? Is it income generation, is it closing outlets,
is it reducing certain costs? Have you actually gone through
the exercise?
Mrs Harrison: My previous experience
and my personal advice is you need to do a mixture of all of them.
You're unlikely to achieve the level of savings that we've been
asked to put forward as a package just by doing one. You could
not achieve a 50% reduction in the subsidy merely by putting up
the selling prices because the customers would vote with their
feet. That would have a dramatic impact on the number of customers
we were serving, so no commercial business would be wanting to
change their prices to that extent.
I think that we do have a very extensive range
of catering services that are open for long hours of the day,
and commercially I would always encourage considering the question
"Do we need to have as many services open as we do at all
the times of the day in the week?" and trying to consolidate
back. It does mean that customers may not be able to go to their
venue of first choice, but there will be a service provision which
is appropriate for the number of people who are typically within
the House.
On developing sales for new markets, hitherto
we have had about five or six years of doing that, trying to extend
more services to other passholders for the Members' services,
at times when Members are not around. Certainly, it has had a
benefit to us. Over the last seven years we have reduced the
bottom-line catering subsidy by £1 million, bearing in mind,
over the seven years, that's including swallowing the inflation.
There have been some very definite improvements in
that area, but there is a limit to the number of passholders.
Our experience is that when Members are not around, a lot of House
officials and members of staff themselves are also not around,
so the total market for catering services is reduced when the
House is not sitting and Members are not here. Therefore, to make
any radical change on the utilisation of our facilities is why
we are looking in our other paper at some of the income generation,
and whether it would be appropriate and possible to open some
of our facilities more widely to the general public, where they
are not currently available to the public.
Q291 Nigel Mills: I was trying
to lead you in an open manner towards the difficult question of
the level of staff costs compared with turnover, because of all
the things that are out of line with comparables, that is it.
Do you have plans to try to address that? Otherwise, in trying
to increase income, you're hitting a law of diminishing returns.
Trying to chip away at other things won't get you there. That
looks to be the kind of big issue.
Mrs Harrison: There is no getting
away from the fact that catering is a labour-intensive business.
It's far more labour-intensive than retail, which is why it is
not as profitable in many instances as retail. The numbers of
staff that we employ have been reduced consistently now for almost
20 years. Just to go back 19 years ago when I started here, we
had 340 staff providing about 4,000 meals a day just here in the
Palace and 1 Parliament Street. We now provide over 8,000 meals
a day. We also have Portcullis House and 7 Millbank, and there
are 280 staff. So we have made quite sizeable increases in our
productivity and at the same time reduced very considerably the
number of staff.
Some of the savings proposals put forward are
designed to be able to provide services that we hope would be
acceptable to our customers, but would be delivering services
that require fewer staff. Staffing is our biggest cost. Therefore,
like any commercial catering operator, that is the first line
that we look to, to see whether we can deliver our services more
cost-effectively. This is really where we want to discuss with
this Committee how far down that route to go. There are organisations
on the high street that have very low levels of skilled staff
within their organisations, and that is reflected in their service
offer.
We at the moment have got a high number of staff
in many of our areas because we are making very little use, I
would say, of pre-prepared foods. We are primarily preparing fresh
foods here on site to meet the demands of our customers. There
is no doubt there is a cost involved in that in terms of labour.
If you talk to many of the contract caterers, for many years now
they have been on a mission to—they may not use this phrase
with their clients—deskill their kitchen and deskill their
operations, making more use of goods that are bought in and then
just reconstituted on site. That is a route that we could go.
Q292 Bob Russell: A Tesco bakery?
Mrs Harrison: In simplistic terms,
Mr Russell, yes.
Q293 Chair: Before I call on Tessa,
can I just follow up on that? For example, dining room usage on
average would show—across the Members Dining Room, Strangers
Dining Room, Churchill and Adjournment—roughly 230 dinners
on a Monday night. There are 650 Members of Parliament, there
are staff, officials and guests. As we have capacity there, how
far could we improve those numbers by looking at the type of food
that we offer, by altering the mix and what we offer at the present
time? Do you believe there is any advantage in examining that?
Mrs Harrison: The best way in
which to examine that would be to have some structured interviews
with your colleague Members, so that we have some good quality
research into it. For many years, 150 has been about the maximum
number of Members who will use the Members Dining Room on a busy
evening. As you say, Sir Alan, there are 650 Members, which means
that 500 or so MPs are dining elsewhere. They might be elsewhere
in the House—obviously many are in places such as the Members
Tea Room; a number use the cafeterias; and some, depending on
the voting, are not in the House itself and return to it just
for the votes. That is why what is happening in the Chamber has
a direct influence on what is happening in our business areas.
I could make the general observation that Members
choose not to use the Dining Rooms because that reflects the trend
throughout workplace catering in the past 10 years or more towards
much more casual dining. From talking to many Members, I know
that if they are not in the Chamber and needed for votes, they
have jobs of work to do—they are in their offices working.
They may not wish to take the time to go to a dining room and
have a full meal. There are different motivators and reasons for
different Members, and the best way in which to investigate that
is to get some good quality customer research.
Q294 Tessa Munt: A couple of my
questions have been asked already, but there is one that I would
like to address. On the external visits log that you provided
us with, I am not able to see whether staff or management have
been to visit directors' dining rooms. If you go into the City,
there are any number of directors' dining rooms, which are run
in a pretty unembarrassed way by the commercial organisations
concerned as facilities for the equivalent of Members. They accept
that those facilities are not there to make money at all. A lot
of work has gone on to look at the grab-and-rush and recession-buster
meal end of things, which is absolutely right. Have you planned
for—or could you envisage—doing research on directors'
dining rooms?
Mrs Harrison: Indeed, a number
of the venues that are listed on the log are contract caterer-operated,
and there is a mixture of staff restaurants and directors' dining.
One of my operations managers and I visited a number of sites
in Canary Wharf with your Committee's adviser about two years
ago, I think. That visit was specifically to look at those sorts
of areas, but we would look at the staff restaurants at the same
time. It is not restricted to me; supervisors and staff who are
working in the Dining Rooms go out regularly, but we do not log
every single one of those visits. This log was compiled from our
Outlook calendar records. Many of my staff do not use Outlook,
so we were not able to pull together the information that the
Committee asked from us, but I assure you that our staff do go
out.
Q295 Tessa Munt: That's good.
It's just that it is clear that it is helpful looking for a nuanced
notion of subsidising meals—
Mrs Harrison: No, we are aware
of that.
Q296 Thomas Docherty: Moving away
from Members' provision to that for the other 12,500 pass holders,
your helpful and detailed paper mentioned Moncrieff's, the Adjournment
and Churchill. I have a couple of observations about the bar charts
and so on. Moncrieff's café bar seems to be phenomenally
popular on a Friday, which might relate to Mr Russell's point
about good British fish and chips. Although the Press Gallery
had said that it was interested in access to other facilities,
that was not supposed to be at the expense of Moncrieff's. There
is spare capacity in Moncrieff's, the Adjournment and Churchill
during their current opening times and, as Mr Borley has mentioned,
there is a possibility of a more commercial operation at weekends
and during recess. Your own comments have been that, ultimately,
the key is increasing footfall, otherwise we are simply chasing
an ever-decreasing circle. What benefit do you see in opening
the facilities that we have to non-Member pass holders during
the week, and looking to try to raise a significant sum by using
the facilities at weekends and during recess on a more commercial
footing, whether that be through catering blue chip events, civil
ceremony receptions or whatever else? Is that something that you
are both looking at?
Mrs Harrison: Yes, indeed. Again,
the paper that we will be talking about next Monday includes a
number of suggestions that we have come up with as to where you
could extend the facilities to the general public. Some of those
may find more favour than others, but I have no doubt that there
are other sorts of facilities that could be open to the general
public as well. That is certainly our thinking, in terms of increasing
the footfall.
Q297 Thomas Docherty: To follow
up on my first point, because it was quite a rambling question
from me, as a starting point, is it fair that the premise should
be that, rather than closing existing facilities, there should
be a significant step towards making better use of them—such
as through members' dining clubs or running special offers—to
try to retain the width and depth of facilities that we have?
Mrs Harrison: There is always
merit in looking at ways in which you could introduce specials
or try to grow the business that you have. Looking at the table
service restaurants, however, there is so much surplus capacity
at the moment that we think that it is unrealistic to expect to
increase the sales sufficiently to fill it. That is why we have
put forward two options that could be looked at that would reduce
the stock of accommodation that would be used for table service
restaurants, and allow that space to be used for other purposes
or, if the Committee so recommended, to give it up from catering
purposes all together. There may be something else that the House
wishes to do, and that this Committee would like, that is not
catering or retail-related, if the space is appropriate for it.
Moncrieff's table service restaurant is part of the same room
as the self-service cafeteria, and I think that it was the self-service
cafeteria, rather than the café bar, that you were talking
about when you said that it was phenomenally successful on a Friday.
The fish and chips are served in the cafeteria. That is all part
and parcel of one room.
If we are going to look at alternative uses
for that room—economically, that is one of the things that
the figures suggest that we should consider—the table service
is restricted entirely to the press at the moment, and there is
plenty of surplus capacity in the other Dining Rooms. Therefore,
it would seem to us to be more of merit to look at allowing the
press to use those other Dining Rooms, where we have surplus capacity,
and consolidating the business into fewer areas. On top of that,
you can still do precisely what you are suggesting about offering
specials and other incentives to use those facilities.
Q298 Mr Jones: The reason why
you don't get many people who actually use the Members Dining
Room is because the service is so damn slow. That's the case in
quite a few of the restaurants, and there is a sense that there
is no urgency. I have stopped eating in Strangers' because, frankly,
I waited an hour between the courses of a meal, which is not acceptable
and is not the right way of doing it. Surely changing how some
of those restaurants are managed and structured, and the type
of food offered, would actually increase the numbers you would
get through them.
Mrs Harrison: I think it would
be fair to say that the Members', Strangers' and Churchill Restaurants,
in particular, are very traditional. The Adjournment is far less
labour intensive. Generally speaking, it has a faster service.
It still should not take an hour, in any of those restaurants,
for you to have the main course, Mr Jones. That is the sort of
thing that, if it happens, we need to know about at the time,
so that we can deal with it. As a general tenet, moving more towards
the style of menu and service that is offered in the Adjournment
would suggest that that is less labour intensive, and therefore
a less heavily subsidised area. But, it is just a question of
treating this with caution. We wouldn't want to suggest having
four Dining Rooms that were clones of the Adjournment. It's a
question of finding restaurant concepts that meet the needs of
Members, and other passholders, and appeal to them so that they
want to use them, and are less labour intensive than they currently
are.
Q299 Mr Jones: It's not just that.
Compare the Members Dining Room in the evening with the carvery
on Wednesday lunch time, which seems to get a bigger flow of people.
I think that has increased, even though this place—this
is the other thing I've always said about it—doesn't advertise
what services are available and where people can eat. It would
be better to go to the level where people can go in, have something
to eat and at least not wait an hour or more for it.
The lunchtime trade at Moncrieff's is pretty
dire, isn't it? Appendix C.1 says that there is a capacity for
30 covers, and this year you have been doing four on average on
Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. That is on page 5 I think.
Mrs Harrison: There is no doubt
about it—it is not a heavily utilised service. That is
why we are suggesting that that business could be accommodated
in one or more of the other Dining Rooms.
Q300 Mr Jones: Have you done any
analysis? When I was last on the Committee, a justification for
spending £7 million on the Press Gallery was that we'd open
Moncrieff's to other passholders. Who are these people? Are they
members of the press or other people?
Mrs Harrison: The table service
area is still restricted to members of the Press Gallery and their
guests. The rest of Moncrieff's—the self-service restaurant
and the café bar—is open to all passholders.
Q301 Mr Jones: When you say, "Moncrieff's
bistro lunch covers", what is it?
Mrs Harrison: That's the table
service.
Q302 Mr Jones: So we have an entire
restaurant that is catering for four people on most days.
Mrs Harrison: That's only one
small part of the restaurant behind a moveable screen. The rest
of the room is used for the self-service restaurant. With the
agreement of the Press Gallery, because it has recognised that
the cafeteria is very popular, we don't offer the table service
restaurant in Moncrieff's on a Friday lunchtime, so we can use
the entire seating area for self-service custom.
Q303 Mr Jones: So is Moncrieff's
the most heavily subsidised?
Mrs Harrison: If you were to look
at it for table service, I think that the cost per cover for Moncrieff's
is the most expensive, but that is purely by factor of the very
low level of sales they are doing, and their share of the allocated
central costs is what pushes it up very high.
Mr Jones: There is
always a lot of press interest in subsidies paid for our lunches
and dinners, and, quite clearly, the most expensive one is the
Press Gallery itself.
Bob Russell: May I ask a supplementary
question? I think, Sir Alan, it's fair to say that Press Gallery
catering is subsidised. However, my understanding is that most
journalists, if not all, are then able to claim the costs of that
subsidised meal anyway.
Chair: That may be so.
I think, colleagues, that we should wind up
there. We have had a very elongated session. I apologise to Mrs
Harrison and Mr Borley for keeping them so long. We ran over,
but this has been interesting stuff. We will come back to these
matters—both the initial catering and retail service savings.
I think we need to examine the whole retail side of things more
carefully, because I suspect that there is great potential there.
Thank you very much indeed.
| 
