House of Commons Governance

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

I echo the sentiments that the Leader of the House has just expressed. I am sure that we all feel the same sense of sorrow on hearing that Lord Brittan has passed away.

I rise to support the motion as a member of the Governance Committee. I little thought at the outset of this process that we would end up where we have, or with as happy and constructive a result. My original goal in tabling an early-day motion on the clerkship nomination was simply to allow colleagues to express their concerns about the nomination, which has now been terminated. This came after my noble Friend Baroness Boothroyd had fired a majestic broadside of her own on the topic, in her own inimitable fashion.

Such are the vagaries of life that, in late August last year, I was in the middle of a series of walks to raise money for two outstanding local charities, the Royal National College for the Blind in Hereford and the Midlands Air Ambulance, and I vividly recall standing at the cairn on the top of the Cat’s Back on the Offa’s Dyke path in the Black mountains, looking out over my gorgeous constituency and—if one can imagine such a movement from the sublime to the ridiculous—calling the House of Commons to table my early-day motion from there. That was a very rare example of successful rural mobile telecommunications, although I know that the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport is even now straining every sinew to improve those communications. But supported by you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and this House, the mysterious alchemy of Parliament has transmuted my original concern and that of others from base alloy into the gold of careful constitutional reform, and for that we have enormous reason to be grateful.

I do not propose to comment in any great detail on the substance of this report, except in one regard to which I shall come. But one key point needs to be made now, and it is a point that we should recall as we continue the debate. It is that the Committee came down overwhelmingly in favour of a single unified service. There is, at the heart of that idea, a balance that must be struck between the accountability to which the Clerk is entitled from the director general and the delineated areas of autonomy that the director general exercises as head of the executive committee. It is in that balance and harmony that the subtlety of the report and the recommendation lies, and it is in the success of that harmony that ultimately the balance of the good management of this House stands to be assessed.

I wish to join colleagues who have acknowledged the brilliance of the Chair of the Governance Committee. He was a model Chairman. Remarkable as it may seem to those who think about how much time he has spent in Cabinets and shadow Cabinets, he cut a comparatively naive and youthful figure as the Chair of a Select Committee. None the less, he did preside over a model of judicious, inclusive and yet rapid consultation. We took evidence from a vast and diverse array of people, which included Mr Speaker and the Deputy Speakers, many colleagues and executives from this House, senior executives from the other House, outside experts, Clerks, our magnificent doorkeepers, security personnel, and our brilliant librarians who struggle to keep us all up to the mark with information. Perhaps the highlight was a fascinating session we had with 60 very thoughtful and committed members of staff across all levels and functions of the House. It will astonish Members to know that the remarkable achievements of the Committee are all the more remarkable given the Chairman’s commitment to the House of Commons gym.

The point came through time and again that the House of Commons is an institution unlike any other. Many people talked about the sheer difficulty of managing 650 autonomous Members of Parliament, each in effect running a small business and responding to their constituents’ concerns. That managerial challenge has been magnified over time by the increased constituency workloads of Members of Parliament; the rising numbers of their staff; heightened security concerns; the drive to make Parliament more accessible; and the need to renew the crumbling fabric of the Palace of Westminster. None the less, many witnesses testified that the House was, in general, well managed. They said that that was increasingly so in recent years.

It is important to note that we also came across areas where improvement was needed. I am talking about areas where we found poor management, unclear or overlapping responsibilities, clashing priorities, slow decision-making, lack of implementation of agreed actions, and inconsistent strategic direction. In particular, the crucial relationship between the senior statutory body, the Commission and the Management Board was not working well. All those matters have been addressed in the Committee’s report.

For me, this experience has served to ram home one key message, which is that the British constitution relies on the effective functioning of Parliament. Time and again, witnesses emphasised that it is the parliamentary function of this House that is, and must ever be, primary. The role of the Clerk is absolutely fundamental. He or she acts as the final word in procedural matters for a host of other Parliaments across the Commonwealth. When I opened the debate on the motion that established the Committee, I said that contrary to popular belief, parliamentary procedure—the rules of the game—is not some pettifogging accretion or irrelevant decoration to the business of government; it is the essence of government. This country is governed by laws, and laws are made in Parliament, and that Parliament is run according to rules and procedure. Without procedure, there could be no government.

In retrospect, I have one, and just one, regret, which it is important to place on the record. Having reflected further, I believe that the Committee could and should have recommended that the name of the candidate for Clerk should be presented in an address by Parliament to the monarch, signed perhaps by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, instead of the present system, which the Committee has left intact, whereby a letter goes to No. 10 Downing street and so to Buckingham palace. This is, after all, a purely parliamentary matter that does not concern the Executive directly at all. An address would be a cleaner and more transparent approach that would not permit a nomination to be made as it was made last year unless Parliament were sitting. I hope that that idea can be revisited by the House in future years.

I think that it is fair to say that I have established a national and perhaps even intercontinental reputation for being a bore about one of our predecessors, Edmund Burke, and the deep insights he still brings to politics and to government. Burke is the Paul Scholes of modern politics: just when the game is fizzling out and the crowd desperately needs a goal, he has an uncanny way of ghosting into the enemy’s penalty area and slotting the ball home. He does so again here. Scattered across his writings, Burke gives us seven tests of reform, seven ways by which we can judge the quality or temper of a given set of political measures over and above how we collectively and individually might feel about them.

For Burke, reform should be early, anticipating the emergence of a problem before its full effect are felt. It should be proportionate to the evil to be addressed to limit collateral effects. It should build on existing arrangements and previous reforms so that it can draw on any lessons learned from them. It should be measured, so that those making the change and those affected by it can adjust their behaviour appropriately. It should be consensual, so that it can be lasting over time regardless of changes of Administration. It should be cool in spirit, to maintain consensus throughout the process of change and, finally, every step of it must be practical and achievable in itself.

The Committee’s recommendations satisfy at least six and possibly all seven of the tests laid down by Burke and I do not think that they can have any higher recommendation than that. This is reform in the spirit of reform.

I conclude by thanking the Chairman of the Committee and my colleagues on it, the Committee staff, who did a superb job, and the Members and staff of the Commons, who will have the thankless task of making these reforms work.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

The whole House should be grateful to the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath) for his work on the House of Commons administration, not least for the masterly way in which he summarised current concerns and controversies and how they have been resolved. He also briefly mentioned a slight dysfunction in co-ordination between the two Houses, and I will conclude my remarks with a small and rather sad recent example of that.

The hon. Gentleman said that there is a great difference between the atmosphere of this debate and the debate held on 10 September, and I agree. It is a measure of the success of the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), and his Committee, that he has managed to reconcile two apparently irreconcilable views, and that the central question of whether it made sense for the leading procedural expert in the House of Commons also to be the chief manager of the House has apparently been decided.

In my intervention on the right hon. Gentleman I asked what would happen if there was disagreement on a matter concerning management—not procedure—between the new director general and the next incumbent of the office of Clerk. If I understood correctly, he said that it would be decided at a level that was, in a sense, above the two of them, and that it would not be a question of the Clerk overruling the director general on a matter of management that by rights ought to be in the sphere of the director general.

In our debate on 10 September, I suggested that the Committee ask itself four questions. I think we will find that those four questions have now been answered. Should a top chief executive officer be expected to be a top procedural adviser, too? The answer is clearly no. Should a top procedural adviser be expected to be a top chief executive officer? The answer is equally no. Should the two roles be combined by default in the future, as they have been in the past? Should the top procedural adviser be allowed, if the roles are separated, to overrule the top chief executive officer on management matters, or vice versa on procedural matters? I think we have learnt that the answer to those two questions is no as well.

[Jesse Norman]

My hon. Friend is being typically clear and precise, but the answer to the first two questions is not quite as clear as he suggests. The Committee’s decision was that the roles could be combined by one person and had been combined by one person in the past—that is the evidence for it—but that now, for reasons of other commitments and the development of the House, they should be separated.

[Dr Lewis]

I am delighted at the result, even if I do not entirely endorse the reasoning. I wish to say a word of sympathy, if not appreciation, for the situation in which the House of Commons Commission found itself a few months ago. It was faced with either making a single appointment from a very limited pool of top procedural advisers who would become, by default, the director general of the House of Commons—as if by some magical process of osmosis during their rise up the learned ladder of becoming a top procedural adviser they had somehow imbibed the skills needed to be a top chief executive officer or director general—or, alternatively, if it wished to go outside that very limited pool of possible candidates, it had to decide whether it was appropriate for a top manager to sit in the Clerk’s chair without having imbibed, by a reverse magical process of osmosis, the skills required to be a top procedural adviser. That was precisely why the message went out loud and clear, on 10 September last year, that we needed to send for the marvellous negotiating and reconciliation skills of the right hon. Member for Blackburn, to decide once and for all whether the two functions should be separated.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jesse Norman]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Dr Lewis]

In just a moment, but I want to make one more point. I know my hon. Friend is concerned with the constitutional aspects of this matter, but I am concerned with another aspect. The new arrangement will not work unless the individuals who occupy the two posts—I am glad to see the hon. Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) indicating his approval—have their respective roles clearly in their minds. If either of them tries to play games of superior status, the new system will not work. We can construct the best system in the world, but if the people who occupy the top posts are not minded to make it work, it will not be a success.

[Jesse Norman]

My hon. Friend shares my view that harmony at the top of the new arrangement will be vital. None the less, there is a very clear arrangement. The Clerk is top dog. The director general reports to the Clerk. The director general has clearly delineated responsibilities: the managerial delivery side. That is the unified structure that has been created and will hopefully be agreed.

The training of the Clerks—I have no interest in revisiting this, and we have generally taken the view in the debate that we will not do so—has not been ignored in previous years, although the Committee came to the view that it could be strengthened. The training of the Clerks has so far enabled the Clerk Assistant to run a department that is roughly 40% of the whole. These people do not arrive at their jobs by some mystical process; there is some structure of responsibility and training by which they achieve their posts. The Committee has decided that that needs to be extended, providing a further rationale for the separation.

[Dr Lewis]

My hon. Friend is fighting a gallant rearguard action for the old guard, but if the degree of management skill imbibed previously led to this spectacular spaghetti junction of an organogram of the existing system, there was something deficient in the in-house management training. Any Committee that comes up, by contrast, with something as clear and sensible as the new—