Civil List

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge), who is the current Chair of the Public Accounts Committee. Under my chairmanship and hers, the Committee has for many years fought a relentless campaign on this issue, but I never thought this day would come. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor has risen to such distinction, but I remember his being a member of our Committee when he was a very new, young Member of Parliament, and he may recall a visit we made to Kensington palace together. The trouble with dealing politically with royal family matters—I know this from my many years of chairing the Public Accounts Committee—is that whereas an incredibly worthy report about tens of millions of pounds, or even hundreds of millions of ponds, being wasted in the Department for Work and Pensions will end up only on page 15 of the Financial Times, if we are lucky, something involving the royal family gets much more interest. I think that the visit we made to Kensington palace was on pages 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the Daily Mail. There is enormous public interest where the royal family is concerned.

My right hon. Friend is to be commended for being the first Chancellor of the Exchequer to have the guts to take this issue on and deal with it. As I said, I thought this day would never come. When we started this campaign and really tried to gear it up, we were looking at three areas in which we thought that parliamentary accountability was absolutely vital: the royal family and all aspects of royal finances, the BBC and the Bank of England. Those three great institutions stand without Parliament and we were told for all sorts of reasons why it was quite inappropriate for the National Audit Office to crawl all over their accounts. It has been like pushing water uphill, but I think that after many years and many bloody battles we are going to drag the BBC to full accountability—and not a moment too soon. That is quite right. Again, I commend the Chancellor for what he is doing. The Bank of England is a more difficult issue and we are still struggling on that, but we have a great victory today. For the first time since this modern settlement was made in 1760, Parliament will, through the Public Accounts Committee, be able to scrutinise all aspects of royal finances.

Although there has been great resistance to this proposal, I have to say that in all my many conversations with the royal household I never detected any resistance from it. I think it has been Governments who have worried about certain republicans on the Public Accounts Committee crawling over the royal finances. I should like to pay tribute to a great and wonderful parliamentarian, who has not been mentioned yet and who is a personal friend of mine—Mr Alan Williams, a former Father of the House, who served with great distinction for many years on the Committee. We all know that he gave the royal finances a good going over. Unfortunately, another personal friend of mine, the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Mr Davidson), is not here, but I am sure that if he were still on the Committee he, too, would be giving the finances a good going over.

This will be tough for the royal household—there is no doubt about that—and there will be strong questioning in the Committee, as there is on all these subjects, but that is absolutely right because that is what we are about: accountability. I think they have absolutely nothing to fear. As the shadow Chancellor made clear—we do not need to labour this point, because we all know it so well—the Queen has throughout her reign acted with incredible grace and wisdom and with such enormous constitutional propriety. We know all that, but what is not so well appreciated—certainly not by the general public and perhaps not by many Members of Parliament—are the enormous strides that the household has made in delivering efficiency savings and cutting costs. I am pretty confident that when the Committee, working with the National Audit Office, is allowed to crawl over the accounts, it will find a first-rate, modern institution.

It is unfortunate that up to now the Committee has been able to deal only with royal travel and palaces and not with the rest. That seemed a strange state of affairs. We managed to save the royal train, by the way, which is, in terms of modern accountability, a fantastically wasteful but noble instrument of royal travel. [Interruption.] It is necessary. It is so old that it can only travel at night.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Leigh]

I give way to an ornament of the constitution.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend and his colleagues saved the train but unfortunately not the yacht. Is there any chance that for the diamond jubilee we will get the yacht back?

[Mr Leigh]

Well, some stingy previous Government, whom I will not mention by name, got rid of the royal yacht. What a tragedy. It is not the working part of the constitution but it is an important part. As for the royal train, it is quite right that this wonderful elderly lady should sometimes be allowed to sleep on the royal train so that when she visits Newcastle or Manchester she can wake up and perform her duty refreshed, and not be forced out of bed at 5 am to take a plane. We saved the royal train; that, I think, is something that the PAC achieved.

The PAC, then, will not cause any unnecessary trouble. Although I cannot speak for the new Committee, I have great respect for the right hon. Member for Barking, and I know that she will handle the matter in an effective and completely non-partisan way. I am sure that the Committee will do a wonderful job.

Before I finish, I want to say something about royal palaces. We paid that visit to Kensington palace, and we visited Buckingham palace. We found a lot of peeling wallpaper there—there was a lot of under-investment.

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

Disgraceful!

[Mr Leigh]

Yes. This is the Head of State. She should not be in a palace that is falling down, and we should not be mean and stingy about that. I think that the Government had been a bit stingy. Perhaps these new arrangements will allow her to look after her palaces better.

There is one scandal that I want to raise: Frogmore, the royal mausoleum. It is falling down. As I understand it, under the new arrangements there will be an opportunity for the royal household to have greater control of its own affairs so that it can rehabilitate Frogmore, which is an important national monument and in an appalling state. It is a national scandal that the mausoleum for Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort is in such a derelict state that the public can no longer be admitted. That shows some of the problems with the royal finances. The Queen and her household have been making enormous strides in creating efficiency savings, but they simply have not had the independence or the resources to try to maintain the whole of the estate. It is vital for the nation that they be allowed to do so.

In conclusion, I warmly commend the Chancellor, and say well done for finally getting parliamentary accountability. We now want to continue doing battle with the BBC and the Bank of England, and make sure that this Parliament can audit all aspects of our national finances.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr MacShane]

I actually believe that a plane should be made available for the use of senior Government Ministers, including the PM. He had to scrounge a lift from Prague to Brussels with the Czech President the other day. He got something out of it, but frankly, every senior Minister in most democracies has that mode of transport available to them. Our planes are continually available to any member of the royal family, while elected Ministers come second.

We then have the problem of explaining why the present monarch and the next one are such giant landowners. Is that an issue that we might be able to debate, Mr Deputy Speaker?

Of course we all enjoyed the royal wedding celebration this year and we will enjoy the diamond jubilee next year. Roman emperors promised their subjects panem et circenses: the current Government are doing their best to reduce the quota of panem with their cuts and cruelties imposed on the poor and handicapped, but they are increasing the availability of circenses through the royal shows.

I do not believe that there is any kind of republican mood in the country. It was interesting to hear the oleaginous loyalty, if I may put it that way, expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn), who had a tremendous enthusiasm for the monarchy, which has surprised many of us. I remember the silver jubilee in Rotherham in 1978, when I am told that 41,000 Union Jack flags were sold in the socialist republic of South Yorkshire.

If we look at the European Union, we see that the states that are monarchies—Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and even, with all its troubles, Spain—enjoy less partisan and less conflictual politics. When it comes to growth, distribution and a fair social settlement since the second world war, we find that the EU’s monarchies generally have a much better record than the EU’s republics. The royal families, however, are also much cheaper there. In Spain, with its King, Queen and wonderful royal palace where I had the privilege and honour of having dinner with the Crown Prince of the Asturias and the lovely Princess—and Prince Charles—a few weeks ago— [Interruption.] The food was free, but I paid for my own air fare. The total cost of the whole Spanish monarch is €8.4 million, while the Queen of the Netherlands gets by on €828,000.

I ask only that we do some comparative analysis before simply continuing with an arrangement that, even with the Chancellor’s proposed modernisations, remains deeply anachronistic.

[Mr Leigh]

Surely we should make a comparison with other major countries. In fact, the cost of the Queen bears favourable comparison with the cost of the Italian and the German Presidents—and who has ever heard of them, and what do they do for their country in comparison with our Queen?

[Mr MacShane]

I do not really want to get into discussions about German lineages. I recall a previous German President who actually walked the length and breadth of Germany in his summer holiday, and he did not receive anything remotely like what we pay our official Head of State.

It is interesting to note that Scotland’s First Minister, Mr Salmond, has ditched his party’s original republicanism and now asserts that an independent Scotland—if that unlikely event were to take place—would keep the monarch as its Head of State. However, I would like to see any future monarch living a lifestyle in tune and in touch with that of the nation. We can see the Duke of Cambridge, who serves with RAF officers, and his wife living a lifestyle much closer to that of the rest of the nation.