Finances of the House of Commons

Debate between Andrew Miller and Viscount Thurso

Thursday 21st November 2013 Commons Chamber

[John Thurso (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes the medium-term financial plan for the House of Commons as set out in Appendix A to the First Report from the Finance and Services Committee, HC 754; endorses the intention of the Finance and Services Committee to recommend to the House of Commons Commission a House of Commons: Administration Estimate of £200.6 million, which includes funding for the proposed Education Centre; further notes that, in line with the target for the Savings Programme, this is consistent with a reduction of 17 per cent in real terms since 2010-11; and further endorses the intention of the Finance and Services Committee to recommend to the Members Estimate Committee a House of Commons: Members Estimate of £33.3 million.

I am extremely grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for allowing this debate. Last year was Members’ first opportunity to have a substantial debate on the finances of the administration of the House and their own budget, and this year’s debate very much follows the same procedure. The Finance and Services Committee, which I have the honour of chairing, has produced its report on next year’s estimate and is proposing to advise the Commission that the estimate be £200.6 million. This debate is an opportunity for Members to discuss the report and the related documents, to consider the advice before it is made to the Commission and, I hope, to approve it.

Following a change to Standing Orders this year, the Committee now has a duty to advise on the Members estimate, and I want to make clear the difference between the two estimates. The substantial amounts required to look after Members, in terms of pay, office costs and so on, are dealt with by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority in the IPSA estimate. The remaining Members estimate deals with the small number of costs left over after most of the costs went to IPSA, and they are such things as IT provision, stationery, liability insurance coverage and the occasional pension liability that occurs as a result of movements in the bond price within the Members contributory pension scheme.

I would like to begin by paying tribute to the staff who serve us. We have the good fortune to be looked after, in all areas of the House, by very dedicated and extremely professional staff who do their utmost to ensure that we can do our work smoothly and efficiently. They often work in difficult circumstances and for long hours, mirroring our work patterns, and are run by a management who do everything possible to help us in everything we seek to do. I am therefore happy to pay that personal tribute, but I believe it is one that Members in all parts of the House would be happy to pay too.

I should like briefly to set out some wider points about the estimate and then make a small number of points that I believe should be addressed individually. At the start of this Parliament, the Commission decided that, in a time of considerable austerity, it was right to have a look at the costs of running the House service. During 2010-11, a rigorous examination was made of expenditure, based on the principle that we should be able to do whatever was necessary for our proper work as scrutineers of Government, legislators and promoters of our constituents’ interests, but that, within that principle, we should seek to do that work as effectively as possible. The result of that examination, which took place over some considerable time through that year, was the medium-term financial plan, which the House agreed to last year and which broadly delivers a 17% reduction on the estimate over the course of this Parliament, from what was estimated would be £231 million at the start to £210 million by 2014. This year’s estimate of £200.6 million is on track to achieve that.

I should add, for those who are aficionados of dissecting the numbers, that some areas of the numbers are not entirely like-for-like. Therefore, to make an exact comparison, one has to take account of those areas of transfer in or transfer out. I can assure the House, however, that in broad terms we are on track to achieve the estimate that we were seeking to achieve of £210 million by the end of the period.

[Andrew Miller (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

Paragraph 2 of appendix A, which is entitled “Medium-Term Financial Plan” and appears on page 12 of the report, lists

“a number of significant policy matters and events on the horizon that may have a bearing on the budget”.

The variability of the sums derived from those items seems to be enormous, so how can we have any confidence in the figures that the hon. Gentleman is presenting to us?

[John Thurso]

The Finance and Services Committee has looked in detail and scrutinised all these areas. One of the major factors that will affect the estimate is the movement of the House pension fund from our own resources across to the civil service, which will change the way it is accounted. The other areas where there is a degree of uncertainty include, for example, the impairment costs, which we have been advised should be made in respect of certain buildings, and the way we account for them. These have been moved from the capital cost, which is where they were budgeted for, to the resource account of the administration budget, where it is thought they should more properly be. I hope that answers, in part, the hon. Gentleman’s question.

[Andrew Miller]

With respect—I do not mean that to be interpreted in the usual way—the first item on that list is:

“Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal”.

That is a massive imponderable. We have no idea at present of the scale of that cost, the timetable or where all the other items on the list ought to fit into the context of that project.

[John Thurso]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for narrowing his question down. I will come to the restoration and renewal project in a moment. The key point is that, except for the points I will make shortly about the contract to make a full, professional and robust estimate of the costs and cost probabilities going forward, none of the costs to which he refers will fall in this Parliament or in the current medium-term financial plan. What the hon. Gentleman has identified will fall into the costs that go forward beyond the time frame of the costs that we are debating.

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[John Thurso]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising that issue with me. I do not have a specific answer to it, but I take very seriously what he said and will look at it, do what I can and come back to him.

The final point that we learned from our evidence session, and which absolutely every one of the HR directors of the various enterprises made, was: never allow HR and management to use zero hours as a sloppy way of managing staff. Our advice will contain a statement to that effect: that it is proper to have call-off contracts and to deal with casual staff properly, but it must be done with rigorous HR. I do not know what fellow commissioners may or may not say to all that, but I am hopeful that the Commission will accept the advice we are proffering.

The final point I would make on pay and conditions is that change is always difficult and unsettling, even in the best of organisations. I have had experience of, to use the jargon, “re-engineering” two businesses that were going bust to make them sustainable for the future. In making changes and asking people to change the way they do things, there are difficulties and there is absolutely no way round that. That is going on here, but what we are trying to ensure—and seeking to impress on the management—is that this be done as transparently and fairly as possible. There will be blips in morale from time to time, but everything possible should be done to mitigate that, and I believe the House service has listened to the points we have made.

There is of course one major area of disagreement on pay and conditions, which is going to end up being dealt with in court. That is regrettable, but as I understand it the legal advice on both sides is robust, and that is what happens in such situations. However, in most other areas —probably all—the discussions, based on good will, are likely to progress well, and I pay tribute, frankly, to the union representatives who have also engaged in those discussions with House management.

[Andrew Miller]

Of course, we are not a business that is going bust; we are a Parliament, and I am sure we all agree that that is the top priority in this discussion. What contingency is there in the figures if the House is proved wrong and has to pay legal fees and the increments involved?

[John Thurso]

The sums are fully provided for, as the hon. Gentleman would expect. I cannot tell him off the top of my head exactly what they are, including all the elements; if I may, I will write to him. It is obviously several million pounds, but I do not know exactly how many several million, and I would not wish to give the House the wrong information.

When I was saying earlier that I once re-engineered two businesses, I thought, “I know exactly what I would say to that if I was sitting somewhere else in the House”, and the hon. Gentleman has not disappointed me. Of course we are not a business going bust, but in looking at costs, any organisation can look hard at what it is setting out to do and the way it is setting out to do it. We now use iPads and we have radically changed our hours, so how and when we do things have changed out of all recognition, in just a decade. It is therefore right that we look at these issues, and clearly there has to be change.

I turn to income generation, an issue that I anticipate the Chairman of the Administration Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst), will fill the House in on if he catches your eye, Mr Speaker. Parliament, in addition to being a working institution, is an iconic visitor attraction and world heritage site, so it is right that we develop ways of making it available to visitors. It is also right that we retrieve the costs of that. The principles, which I have set out before, are, first, that Parliament is a working institution and its work as Parliament takes primacy over all other activities. Secondly, all citizens have a right to access their MP on all aspects of the legislative process without let or hindrance or charge. Subject to those two overriding principles, however, the House has a duty to open to visitors as much as it can, and to recover the costs involved. The three relevant areas are: the development of more commercial tours; the development of retail activity; and the use of the banqueting facilities by outsiders.

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[John Thurso]

If I may, I will write to the hon. Gentleman about that, unless the Chair of the Administration Committee happens to know more about the exact criteria involved and can give him an answer now. I believe that the reforms involved removing sponsored events, and that it would still be possible for other events to take place under the new system, but I will find out exactly what the situation is and get back to the hon. Gentleman.

[Andrew Miller]

We need some clarity on that in this debate, as there is some confusion. The events that I run on behalf of the parliamentary and scientific committee, the oldest all-party group, are rocketing in price under the new propositions. Learned societies, universities and science-based organisations should not carry such a burden.

[John Thurso]

I can confirm that there is no charge for events undertaken by Members, and there is a 25% discount on events for outsiders that are sponsored by a Member. There is no discount on events that are run purely by outsiders. That is my understanding, but I will happily confirm that to him.

House of Commons Administration and Savings Programme

Debate between Andrew Miller and Viscount Thurso

Thursday 8th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[John Thurso]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. I can tell him that I have had particular praise from the wife of one hon. Friend, who thanked me profusely for having relieved her of the duty of piling those up in the loft. So all in all, it is a wise move but, as I say, for those who wish to continue to receive bound volumes of Hansard, we have made provision for them to be purchased.

The next point that I would like to touch on is the provision of ICT. The aim here is to move to a more cloud-based system. This will allow Members to access all the services they need from virtually any equipment they choose to use. It moves the security aspects—one of the most important points—from their individual pieces of hardware on to the cloud system. So cloud e-mail and office services which are designed to provide flexible access from anywhere and virtually any device should be a truly enabling feature for Members.

[Andrew Miller (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

As a Member who is trialling the use of iPads in Select Committee—which, by the way, is proving very effective—I can report that we cannot put information on the cloud at present because the servers for Apple products are in the United States and are therefore covered by the Patriot Act. That presents some interesting problems. Has the Committee given any thought to how we can solve them?

[John Thurso]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman. The Committee is not yet engaged on the Patriot Act. What we are engaged in is ensuring that these questions are asked of Parliamentary ICT. That is the important point. PICT is currently running what is called the cloud-readiness project to look at all these issues. If we want to arrive at the point where all the benefits that I have sought to outline are available to us, ensuring that the system is secure and that storage and transmission facilities are available are clearly prerequisites for any provider of cloud services. If a provider cannot offer that, it will not get the custom.

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[John Thurso]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for those comments. On his point about catering “subsidy”, the actual sale prices in most of our outlets are comparable to either, in the case of the dining rooms, private sector outlets or, in the case of the cafes, a normal work canteen. The prime cost is that of food, which in the trade we used to call the kitchen cost, and that is comparable to similar commercial operations, so the gross profit, or kitchen profit, is comparable. The problem is that we occupy the facilities for only part of the week, so for the remainder of the week they cost money because they are serviced and there are staff. Therefore, the gross profit is insufficient to cover the total fixed cost, and on that basis we have a subsidy. I think that it is an appropriate subsidy, particularly if we are looking at this debate. Equally, his point that we should be reasonably expected to reduce that subsidy by the way we operate in order to give the best value is absolutely correct.

[Andrew Miller]

Furthermore, the fixed costs are higher here because of the nature of the building.

[John Thurso]

I am happy to agree with the hon. Gentleman.

I am conscious that I have occupied the crease for far longer than I had intended and do not wish to upset you any further, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I will crack on. My last point regarding the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow is that it essentially asks for more time. I say to him, with the greatest respect, that I have spent two years circulating e-mails, writing reports and seeking to consult Members, some of whom have engaged and some have not—he has been a great engager. We have had a Westminster Hall debate on the matter and today we are debating it in the Chamber on an amendable motion. It does not get any better than that, as far as parliamentary time is concerned, so I suggest that now is the time to make the decision, whatever the House chooses.

Two other amendments have been tabled. I have already referred to that tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden, who chairs the Administration Committee. I believe that other members of my Committee are content to accept it if the House wishes. The other amendment was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) and relates to an extremely important point about the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. I know he is hoping to catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I will not go into detail. Suffice it to say, on the basis of the briefing he gave me, I have talked at length with officials and am certain that we will be able to secure the necessary discussions between him, his board and the relevant people to ensure that those points are properly taken on board. I hope that the result will be the correct accommodation.

Members have an historic opportunity to take their destiny in their own hands in considering what services we want and how they should be funded. I am delighted to see so many Members in the Chamber and delighted that there are so many amendments, even though I ask the House to reject at least one of them. Let us have a debate, make a decision and settle the matter. I end by thanking the members of the Finance and Services Committee and the officials who have helped them, both at Management Board level and below, to ensure that the work we have done has been thorough and solid, which has enabled me to lay before the House a report and plans that are well considered, well structured, thoroughly thought through and that, I think, offer a solid way forward. I commend them to the House.