House of Commons Governance — House of Commons, 2015-01-22
Topic: Government Operations
John Whitaker Straw (Labour, Centre-left): I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his intervention and for his evidence. We did come to the issue from different perspectives, but the fact that this is a unanimous report does not reflect any sense of it coming from a search of the lowest common denominators—rather, the highest common factors. I will come on to the issue of implementation in a moment A second reform that we propose to the Commission concerns non-executive members. At the moment, there are external, non-executive members, who have great outside professional experience, who sit on the Management Board, but not on the Commission. We thought that this was a rather eccentric arrangement not consistent with the principles of governance outside, and that it ought to be the other way round. We therefore proposed that two non-executives should sit on the Commission and, in addition, so too would the two senior officials of the House, a matter I shall come on to in a moment As I have indicated, the evidence we received showed clearly that the relationship between the Commission and the Management Board was opaque. So alongside the strengthened Commission, the Management Board will be replaced by a streamlined executive committee The potentially trickiest issue for us to deal with was the senior leadership of the House service. As the House is well aware, not least from the debate that we had on 10 September and from the evidence that we received, there is a wide range of opinion on this issue. Some favoured the status quo, some wanted a chief executive above the Clerk, some wanted a chief operating officer under the Clerk, and some thought the two functions should be separated entirely, with a Clerk and a chief executive of equal status. We thought hard about this. There are, as we all recognised, advantages and disadvantages to each proposal. In the end the Committee responded to what it heard from staff and from many others by endorsing the objective of a single unified House service This was significant because the House service is often portrayed as being divided into parliamentary and non-parliamentary elements. Asserting that the service should be unified is important both for rejecting the perception that some parts of the service are second class, and for emphasising that the primary purpose of the whole service—all parts of it—is to support the House’s parliamentary functions. But we also accepted that there had to be a strengthening of the leadership of those functions and of the hundreds of staff beyond the direct work of the Clerks. It is not accidental, in our view, that although in the whole time that I have sat in the House there have rarely been any complaints or concerns about the standards of service provided to this House and its Committees in respect of our core functions, there have been myriad complaints about the way our employers—the public—have been treated when they try to get into this place, and from Members about the IT system, room bookings and many aspects of the maintenance of this place I have already spoken about leaks in the Members’ Lobby. I hope Mr Speaker will allow me an excursion into the bowels of what was the cell block of the old Canon Row police station, which has housed the House of Commons gym for some decades. My hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), the shadow Leader of the House, and I are often to be seen there ensuring that we remain trim and fit. The refurbishment of the Commons’ gym may seem a second-order issue to those who do not use the facility, but for those of us who do, and for the dedicated staff of the gym, the saga of its refurbishment has not been a pretty one—nor, as the weekend’s press indicates, has it enhanced the reputation of Parliament Classic and avoidable errors were made in the refurbishment programme, which was due to be finished in early September and has only just been finished. I understand that the costs quadrupled. I know for certain that the specifications were changed and changed again after agreement had been reached with the gym management. It was disruptive in the extreme to us who use it and also to the staff. I thought that I had been able to put cold showers behind me when I left school 50 years ago but, like many other Members, I have had to endure cold showers, or no showers, as late as last week On Monday, having spent my two hours in the gym, I came out in anticipation of having a shower, only to discover that in the two hours that I had been working away in the gym, the showers had packed up. Happily, I did not meet any constituents, but other rather surprised Members will have seen me wearing my jacket over my gym kit and carrying the rest of my clothes, on my way to find a shower elsewhere. It is amusing—we are all tolerant of the situation—but it tells a story about why a better grip is needed of such issues.