House of Commons Commission Bill

Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

I begin by offering the apologies of my hon. Friend the shadow Leader of the House, who is out of the country today. The task of representing Her Majesty’s Opposition therefore falls to me this afternoon.

As the Leader of the House said, we support the Bill. We thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) and his Committee for the work they put in and the speed with which they produced their report, which has allowed us to make these straightforward alterations ahead of schedule.

For those who are not familiar with Commons procedures, it is worth touching on the role of the Commission. The Commission is not like a Select Committee: it does not have the powers of a Select Committee or perform a scrutiny function; it does not summon witnesses or produce reports. That role is performed by the Finance and Services Committee—to become the Finance Committee—and the Administration Committee. The Commission is a governance body. Clause 2 states:

“The Commission must from time to time set strategic priorities and objectives in connection with services provided by the House Departments.”

As the House of Commons Governance Committee highlighted, one of the defects in recent years has been that the Commission did not necessarily understand its own role, and it certainly was not understood by the wider membership of the House and beyond, so we welcome not only the changes being made but the new provision which, for the first time, I think, sets out explicitly the role of the Commission to make strategic choices.

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

While the hon. Gentleman is talking about the responsibilities of the Commission and how it will work, may I ask whether it is still envisaged that the commissioners will be elected, and if so, will that be by the whole House or by the individual parties?

[Thomas Docherty]

I will come on to that shortly.

One of the major challenges facing Parliament when we—or perhaps our successors—return in May is the need in the next Parliament to make a decision on restoration and renewal. I pay tribute to the right hon. Members for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso) and for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst) for their work on tackling the early stages of thinking on restoration and renewal. Restoration and renewal is not optional. We will have to spend money—taxpayers’ money—and Parliament must take huge decisions on the appropriate timetable for carrying out those works and how to ensure best value for taxpayers. The Commission will have a crucial role in providing leadership, so it is absolutely right that we ensure that it accurately reflects the views of the House. It is also important that the Commission has external members who will be able to provide strategic advice. It is no criticism of Members of this House, but not all of us have business experience or are used to grappling with some of the issues that the Commission will have to deal with.

The hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) will understand that it is not for me to speak for other parties and their internal processes. He is probably slightly more familiar than I with how the Conservative parliamentary party operates. It is clear that two of the members will be the Chairs of the Administration and Finance Committees, so that is a matter for post-election arrangements. The question was asked during the debate on the Governance Committee’s report, so let me say clearly that the Opposition do not believe that the commissioners who are not Select Committee Chairs should be paid an additional sum to carry out this work, in part because we do not believe it is appropriate in the current climate and our constituents would not regard it as sensible, and in part because serving on the Commission should not be more onerous than being a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the European Scrutiny Committee or, indeed, the Finance and Administration Committees. What is important is getting people who come forward and are selected by their party because they have a particular interest or knowledge.

We welcome the progress made on the appointment of a Director General. The Leader of the House is right to say that it is necessary to complete that process after the election, but we do not see that as a significant obstacle to the Bill’s progress.

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[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Ind)]

I begin by expressing my gratitude to the Leader of the House for the way in which from the establishment of the Committee he embraced its work. Inevitably, when a Select Committee dominated by Back Benchers comes forward with reforming recommendations, there is an inbuilt tendency—there certainly was when I was sitting in his place—to think, “This hasn’t been invented here. We ought to look at all these proposals with great scepticism and no doubt we can improve them.” In one area the right hon. Gentleman and our Front-Bench did indeed propose improvements in respect of the recommendations in the report. He, together with my hon. Friend the shadow Deputy Leader of the House, simply said that this was an agreed all-party report which appeared to make sense, and that he therefore committed himself, along with my hon. Friend, to implement it.

There is an irony about the way in which things come up in this place. The provenance of the Committee was—I put it delicately—a difference of emphasis regarding the future official leadership of the House, which was dominating the news at the time. Out of that came the House of Commons Governance Committee, and I am extremely grateful to the House for deciding that I should chair it. I was extraordinarily fortunate in having on the Committee seven other Members drawn from a range of parties who showed astonishing dedication and commitment to working, in some cases, three days out of the four that we have here each week, from mid-October through to December in order to achieve the outcome. Well, we got there, and I think it was to everybody’s advantage that we had the report out before Christmas, rather than afterwards.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I hope the right hon. Gentleman will allow me to say that we got there thanks to his amazing chairmanship. It was amazing to see so sophisticated and capable an operator steer us through, when we had a lot of differences of emphasis on the Committee at the beginning. I hope he does not mind my interrupting him to put that on the record.

[Mr Straw]

Not at all—least of all today.

Those of us who are now Hegel and Marx—at least a bit, in my case; I hope I do not offend the hon. Gentleman—can genuinely say that a dialectical process took place in the Committee, where there was thesis, antithesis and synthesis from a variety of sources. I was talking to my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz), who was energetic in the Committee and was not going to let anything go, but out of that energy—sometimes it felt as though I had a terrier locked on my ankle!—we got a better report.

One of the things that emerged during our inquiry was the opacity of the current arrangements for running this place—the lack of connection between the Commission and everything else underneath. One key Committee, the Administration Committee, chaired by the right hon. Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst), was in some kind of limbo. It did not have executive powers, although everybody thought it had. It had to negotiate with others. It had a membership that was put there principally by the Whips. In my view, had it not been for the fact that the right hon. Gentleman and two or three others almost exclusively had sat through the Committee over the past five years, it could not have operated at all. That was one indication of the opacity and less than optimal way in which these arrangements operated.

There were other such indications—for instance, the fact that the non-executive members who give advice to the administration of the House were on the Management Board, not on the Commission, which is a slightly eccentric way of doing these things. We had very good evidence, including from the right hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso), who represents a large chunk of Scotland. I may say parenthetically that he and I were having a conversation about the difficulty of getting to his constituency. As we know, he is Viscount—these days, Mr—Thurso. He was talking about the fact that he would get an aeroplane to Inverness and then would drive. I asked what would happen if he were to go by train. He said, “Well, I would get a sleeper to Inverness and then another train.” I asked, in my naiveté, “Which station?”, to which the right hon. Gentleman replied, “Thurso, of course.” It must be reassuring to have a station named after you.

To return to the Bill, the right hon. Member for that large chunk of Scotland has chaired the Finance Committee. He has also been a member of the Commission. That was a very good exemplar for us to build on.

There are many recommendations of the Committee that do not need legislation; these recommendations do, and I believe strongly that with these changes we will have an administration for future Parliaments that is better and more effective than it is at present.

On the question whether the four Back-Bench commissioners should be paid, Members must consider that in the next Parliament, and do so rapidly. I am clear that if at least two of those Members have executive responsibilities for chairing important Committees, they must receive the same kind of emoluments as any other Chairman; otherwise, given the amount of time that will have to be devoted to these positions and the fact that they will be much more public, as it were, within the firmament of the Commons, people of serious calibre will not be attracted to undertake them. We do not want these positions and the other two on the Commission for Back Benchers to be seen as some sort of consolation prize for those who have failed to be elected to the chairmanship of some apparently prestigious subject Select Committee. That is extremely important, and I hope the Whips will bear that in mind, not least when they come to the timetabling.

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[Thomas Docherty]

With the leave of the House, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will respond briefly to two points made by the right hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso). I may have picked him up incorrectly. The Opposition do not think that the Commission members who are not Chairs of Select Committees should be elected by the whole House. It is a matter for the parties to elect them. If I can extend the principle of Select Committees, members of Select Committees are not elected by the whole House; they are elected by their parties. Their role on the Commission will be to represent, as the Leader of the House has already said, the views of those parties. As Members of Parliament, it would not be democratic for Labour Members to have a say on who represents the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrats or the minority parties. Therefore, for the avoidance of doubt, the parliamentary Labour party position is that it would be for those individual parties.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Does the hon. Gentleman think that the finance commissioner, for example, should be elected by the whole House, even if he is not saying that the commissioners without portfolio should be elected by the whole House?

[Thomas Docherty]

That is something that we will look at. My position is that the current arrangements for the Select Committee Chairs have worked well in this Parliament and they should continue in the next Parliament.

It is critical that there is no ambiguity about the position of the parliamentary Labour party. We do not believe that the other commissioners should be paid, because the work is no more onerous than being a member of the Finance and Services Committee or the Administration Committee or the Foreign Affairs Committee, and they do not receive payment. My understanding is that the Commission meets once a month and it would be slightly strange if the only member of the Commission who was not receiving an additional payment ended up being the shadow Leader of the House, because the shadow Cabinet are not paid. The Commission itself does not have an onerous meeting schedule—