House of Lords: Governance

Lord Strathclyde Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Grand Committee

[The Senior Deputy Speaker (Lord Gardiner of Kimble)]

My Lords, looking round the Moses Room this afternoon, I see a galaxy of stars of Members—and not Members—who have a great history in this House. Therefore, while my notes say that I am very pleased to have this opportunity to open the debate, my expression should be rather stronger than that.

At the outset, I thought it would be helpful and useful to set out some of the details about this conundrum of the governance of the House—the beginning of an answer to the question that was asked several times during our debate on 25 October: who runs the House? I shall start with the officeholders in the House.

The Lord Speaker presides over proceedings in the Chamber, chairs the senior domestic committee—the House of Lords Commission—is the primary ambassador for the work of the House, has formal responsibility for the security of the Lords’ part of the Parliamentary Estate and is one of the three “key holders” of Westminster Hall. The Leader of the House, in addition to her ministerial responsibilities, has a wider task of upholding the rights and interests of the House as a whole. This gives her a particular role in the governance of the House, in addition to her membership of the commission.

I recognise the roles of noble Lords who make up the usual channels: the Leaders and Chief Whips of the main party groups and the Convenor of the Cross Benches. They all play a crucial role in the governance of the House through their various memberships of the House’s domestic committees and the arrangement of business. Finally, as Senior Deputy Speaker, I am deputy chair of the commission and chair of a number of the House’s domestic committees, and I exercise general supervision and control over private Bills and hybrid instruments. I also speak on and answer any Oral and Written Questions concerning the administration of the House, the work of the House of Lords Commission and the work of the committees I chair.

Moving on to those domestic committees, in July 2016, the House agreed to the implementation of proposals that were developed through an extensive governance review undertaken by the Leader’s Group on Governance, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard of Northwold. This included the creation of a new senior committee, the House of Lords Commission, to provide high-level strategic and political direction for the House of Lords administration on behalf of the House and to monitor the performance of the administration. The commission engages on strategic matters such as restoration and renewal, the financial and business plans provided by the administration, security, allowances and the ongoing response to Covid-19. The commission is supported by three other committees: the Services Committee, the Finance Committee and the Audit Committee.

The Services Committee agrees day-to-day policy on Member-facing services, such as catering, digital, property and office services, and on the use of facilities. It provides advice to the commission on strategic policy decisions in relation to such services. For example, the Services Committee has been reviewing the House’s fire evacuation policy, our health and well-being policies, and the new travel office contract. The Finance Committee considers expenditure on services provided from the estimate for the House of Lords, and reports to the commission about forecast outturn and estimate and financial plans submitted by the management board, and monitors the financial performance of the House administration. The Audit Committee considers internal and external audit reports and the management responses to such reports, and provides advice to the Clerk of the Parliaments. The chairs of each of these committees sit on the commission.

Taken together, 31 noble Lords serve on these committees: officeholders, the usual channels and Back-Bench Members. We work together across the committees with the best intent to enable the House to flourish. That is the structure the House agreed following the governance review recommendation for what might be termed Member-led corporate governance.

I now turn to the official-led administration, which supports our work as Members. The House administration is led by the Clerk of the Parliaments. By statute, the Clerk of the Parliaments is appointed by Her Majesty by letters patent. He is the chief executive of the House of Lords and the chief procedural adviser to the House. The Clerk of the Parliaments is also specified in statute as the accounting officer and the corporate officer for the House, and the statutory employer of House of Lords staff. He is responsible for all aspects of the services provided by the administration for Members, the public and other interested parties. In discharging his duties, he is supported by a wide range of staff; in particular by the management board, which he chairs. The management board takes strategic and corporate decisions for the House administration within the policy framework set by the commission. The Clerk of the Parliaments and the management board lead the House administration with the objective to support and strengthen the work of the House of Lords. In this, they are guided by four values: inclusivity, professionalism, respect and responsibility.

While this is, to some extent, an answer to the question of who runs the House of Lords, I readily recognise that it hides a wealth of detail, not least the constant interactions between committee members, officeholders and Members from all around the House. But, as I have found in coming back to the House, in a sense, since May, it is not simple, sometimes, to put one’s finger on where decisions are to be made. It was, in part, in recognition of the complexity of our work, the importance of ensuring we meet the highest standards of good governance, and ensuring that the Member-led and official-led elements of our governance system worked in close partnership with one another for the benefit of the House, that the commission asked for an independent external management review to be carried out.

The report of the external management review, published earlier this year, made a broad range of recommendations. The majority focused on the internal management of the House administration. There are three recommendations that it would be particularly useful to cover here.

First, the report proposed that the commission be put on a statutory footing, with a separate legal entity to act as the employer of House staff. Essentially, this would remove from the Clerk of the Parliaments his current statutory responsibilities and place them with the commission. It would allow for clear lines of direction and delegation from the commission to the administration. It would be a radical and complex shift away from the current situation. The commission has treated this recommendation with caution; noble Lords may also have views on this matter.

Secondly, the EMR, as I will describe the review, recommended that the governance arrangements of the House, particularly the relationship between the commission and the Clerk of the Parliaments, be set out clearly in a governance statement to bring clarity to questions of who is accountable and responsible for what. The report of the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, made similar recommendations. Work on putting this recommendation into effect is under way, and I anticipate the commission being able to make a statement in the spring.

Thirdly, the report recommended the appointment of a Chief Operating Officer. It is important not to underestimate the complexity, scope and range of services that are provided by the House of Lords administration. Much of it goes on behind the scenes, often in partnership with the House of Commons, and is visible to us only when something directly affects us. It is quite distinct from the procedural work that we see every day to support our proceedings.

The responsibility for overseeing and managing this work falls to the Clerk of the Parliaments as accounting officer and corporate officer of the House. With this in mind, the review highlighted a need for additional senior-level capacity in the administration’s management structure specifically to enhance the administration’s performance in relation to the work outside the Chamber and committees—broadly speaking, to support the Clerk of the Parliaments in his role as chief executive of the administration. A recruitment process for this post was undertaken earlier this year and an appointment made. Mr Andy Helliwell will join the administration on 3 January.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

I am sorry to interrupt the Minister; I hope that it is in order.

I have here a briefing from the House of Lords Library on the organisation of the House of Lords administration, which is of course excellent. Nowhere does it mention Members, who ought not so much to be represented but to whom the administration needs to be accountable. Secondly, the appointment of the new—what is he?

[Noble Lords]

Chief Operating Officer!

[Lord Strathclyde]

Yes, him. Would the Minister say that he feels that, in the past few years, the clerks have been unable to fulfil the function that this new person will do? I think that the clerks have been admirable in the way they have carried out their duties. I did not mean to interrupt, and of course I will speak to this later, but I wanted to make that point before the Minister got any further.

[The Senior Deputy Speaker (Lord Gardiner of Kimble)]

It is fair to say that a considerable proportion of my speech opened with the Member-led governance of this House and its huge importance. My remarks relate to my understanding, which is about Member-led governance; I have then referred to the administration, which we rely on very closely.

All I can say is that we have identified that extra support is needed for the Clerk of the Parliaments. We have excellent people working for us, as I shall say with greater emphasis shortly, but the truth is that it is a very demanding job, as I outlined. The Clerk of the Parliaments’ responsibilities are extremely great. Therefore, the endorsed view was that there should be extra support, outside the Chamber and committee work, to help the Clerk of the Parliaments with the very considerable responsibilities that we have placed in one person.

This has been a brisk gallop around the essential aspects of our governance structure. It would be remiss of me, as the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, said, not to highlight the excellent work of the administration and of Members, both individually and collectively, for the good of the House. The work of our committees, communications, outreach, digital, heritage and conservation, maintenance, catering, security and more is all supported and enabled by good governance.

While I may not be able to answer in detail the many points that will be made in today’s consideration, or debate—whatever we wish to call it—I assure your Lordships that I shall listen carefully. If I am permitted to say so, I know that a number of other people are listening carefully, both here and outside the Moses Room. I very much look forward to hearing what noble Lords have to say. It is the case that my door is proverbially always open, as is that of the Clerk of the Parliaments. The Lord Speaker intends to hold a series of townhall meetings, at which I will be present with the Clerk of the Parliaments, the chair of the Services Committee and those of other committees, as appropriate, to ensure that all noble Lords feel that their voice is heard.

We all accept that the effective, responsible and professional governance of our House is essential, as is noble Lords having confidence in it. To me, in my role, that is of huge importance and significance. The whole purpose of good governance is to support and strengthen the House in the delivery of its vital constitutional role. All of us with a position in the governance structures I have described take our roles very seriously, and at all times we seek to work as a team to discharge our responsibilities for the benefit of the House, its Members, its staff and, importantly, the public we all serve. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, it will be very difficult to follow the noble Lord, Lord Mann. I do not think he and I have been in a debate before and I have to say that I agree with much of what he said and I disagree with much of what he said. But I think that, very early in his career in your Lordships’ House, he is in danger of slipping into his own anecdotage; I hope he will be rescued from that.

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate and to have the Senior Deputy Speaker speaking to us and replying on behalf of the administration. It is very early in his career, and therefore I hope he recognises the tremendous interest in this subject, signalled by the number of people who have bothered to come along on a Wednesday afternoon to share with him, in the privacy of this Room—and perhaps a bit wider—their views on the state of this House and particularly its governance.

First, let me give a bit of philosophy about this House. What are we? As a House of Parliament, we are a unique institution. We have unique rhythms, responsibilities and needs. The House cannot be run by those people who are insensitive to its nature, nor by those who invoke any new fashionable strand from some management school—that way madness lies.

In a way, the long list in the Library briefing of all the reviews that have taken place over the last 20 years leads me to believe that there has been a collective loss of confidence by the administration itself. So I want to say something very positive about the clerks of this House, who do a magnificent job and have done for as long as I have been in this House. It is that combination of intelligence, expertise and hard work that makes it so good, and they have learned about us as we have learned about him. It is no accident that the Clerk of the Parliaments himself was once my private secretary—I regard that as being a very good thing. Before he was my private secretary, he was private secretary to the Chief Whip of the then Labour Government. That shows how you need to have people steeped in the culture of the House of Lords, rather than bringing people in from outside who will never be able to learn or understand what we are all about. We are different from a local authority or a cricket club, or practically any other organisation in this country, apart, perhaps, from the House of Commons.

I am sorry that I interrupted the Senior Deputy Speaker in his opening remarks, but it struck me that at no point was he talking about the Members, and I wanted to say a little something about service. We are here to try to serve the needs of the nation and legislation and the great debates of today. We come here and expect a service to be provided, so that we can go about our business as effectively as possible. We have wonderful staff in this House, from the doorkeepers who greet us to the catering staff who provide us with food—it is absolutely magnificent. But there is a sense, over the course of the last few years, of an increased bureaucracy that makes everything much more leaden than it once was. My noble friend Lady Noakes talked about the chairs that have suddenly been changed: they are cheap and nasty chairs, rather than the magnificent chairs we had in the past. None of this is done with any consultation or any feel for the fabric and fibre of how this House actually operates.

I wholly understand that Covid has been the biggest challenge that this House has had to face for very many years. It has come through it admirably, and we have been able to continue our work, so everything I say about the organisation needs to be seen through that prism. I hope that, one day, we will be over all that has happened and can get back to the kind of House that we had before.

I mentioned the organisational chart earlier. It is a very pretty picture with lots of little boxes and beautiful arrows that go all over the place, and at the bottom there is a sign that says “represents”. I thought “Aha! Here we are. We’re going to talk about the Members of the House”, but it does not. It talks about another range of sub-committees. At no point does it reflect the people in this House whom it is here to serve.

On the apparition of lay members on some of our most senior committees, you have to spend so much time trying to explain to them why things are done in a particular way and getting them to understand the workings of the House that I see no merit in having lay members of the House for a short amount of time to try to learn about us and give us some sort of non-executive expertise. This House just does not need non-executive expertise; if anything, we are a House of non-executives. We all bring so much experience from other aspects of our lives.

I shall take up the point made very well by my noble friend Lady Noakes about the political direction of the House. It is in the terms of reference of the commission. I thought that political direction was rather directed by other people, not by the House of Lords Commission. It certainly should not be.

There are small and trivial points to make about the catering department which I will not bother to do at the moment, except to say that there used to be an excellent system where many of us who asked for it were billed monthly by direct debit. It was an extremely good system. It has been done away with, for no reason that anybody can understand, including the poor old staff, who shrug their shoulders and say that the decision was not made there. Who made the decision? We do not know. That is one example.

We are a special House. We need to be treated specially. I am not looking for great answers today from the Senior Deputy Speaker, but I hope that in his deliberations over the festive season he will think carefully about the representations made today.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Strathclyde, for whom I did a sort of job some 15 years ago. I do not think I did much of any use, did I?

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

It was very good.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

How sweet of you to say so. My noble friend said this is a special place. I would describe this House as an unusual place—in fact, I usually describe it as rather weird to friends of mine. In that, I much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Mann. It is extremely unusual. However, it also does some rather good work, and I mention that because the noble Lord, Lord Mann, was rather hard on the House. For instance, the recent amendment tabled by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, about sewage in rivers has changed the way the Government are dealing with sewage in rivers. Similarly, my noble friend Lord Moylan’s amendment on hate crimes may yet change the way the police deal with them.

Who runs the House? The noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, said that the commission is the ambassador for the work of the House and one or two other things. That left me slightly confused. It does not seem that it runs the House. However, I shall focus on the Ellenbogen inquiry report. Paragraph 24 states:

“the House of Lords is a self-regulating house; power ultimately resting with its members”.

You could have slightly fooled me. It is a very thorough report. It goes on for 131 pages with appendices. It is an inquiry into bullying and harassment in the House of Lords. Those who have been here longer than me may disagree, but I am not entirely clear what the problem was that she was trying to identify. I will look at the evidence in the report. Of course we would like to hope that all of us, every Member of this House and, indeed, every member of society behaves properly. Sadly, we also know that they do not, some, as described in this report at para 167, because of “declining health”, which is a bit of a euphemism, frankly. We all know what she means and, short of a medical order, it is difficult to instruct people in declining health to retire. Perhaps we could look at that, but it is another matter.

The report deals with misbehaviour. I say to the clerks listening to this that a lot of the junior staff complain about their line managers telling them what to do and not listening to their ideas when, the report assumes, the junior staff must know better than those who are more experienced. However, I want to focus on the Peers who misbehave. Largely, we talk about discourtesy and some sexual harassment; again, declining health may come in, particularly for the latter. The report talks about elderly offenders; usual suspects are also discussed. It is sad and an embarrassment to us all. They are described as “creepy”, which they are, but that is hardly unique to Parliament and it applies to a very small number of people.

Of course this should be addressed—it has been, up to a point, and I think we would all strive to help with that—but, on Members’ conduct towards staff, I quote paragraph 159:

“With depressing predictability, the same members of the House were named by contributor after contributor”.


Paragraph 160 says that another person told Naomi Ellenbogen:

“‘It makes my skin crawl when people say “M’Lord”’.”


If that is the case, that person is possibly working in the wrong place. When I was in the Army on the streets of Belfast, I used to call all the people in west Belfast, many of whom might have wanted to kill me, “Sir” and “Madam” because that is the easy way to do it. When I talked to constituents in the other place I would also call them “Sir” and “Madam”, largely because I could never remember their names. If you went to a decent shop, such as Waitrose—or, dare I say, Lidl—you would expect people to be polite to you and probably still call you “Sir” or “Madam”.

I suggest that we need to read the comments on which the Ellenbogen report is based because out of it came the Valuing Everyone training, which is mandatory and for which several people have left the House. The venerable 90 year-old Baroness, the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, was threatened with discipline. I did it—I am sure that we all did—and found it surprisingly entertaining, funnily enough. With me were a former Prime Minister and a man who is a friend but whom I knew for his behaviour from when I was a Whip in the other place. On at least one occasion he was complained about for being incredibly rude to a police officer, but there was also a pattern so it did not happen just once. I fear that he is the sort of person to which this sort of training is directed, but he got every answer to every question absolutely right. Do you think it worked? Do you think it will change his behaviour? I very much doubt it.

Frankly, I fear that the training was a complete waste of time. A nice person was doing it—she told me that she had been in equality training for 20 years—but what good did it do? I ask the Senior Deputy Speaker: how much did it cost? Was it properly put out to tender? What specific qualifications did Naomi Ellenbogen have when she was selected? Finally, on the Valuing Everyone training, are we going to have to do “appropriate refresher training” every three years, as the report says? I really think that it is nonsense.

Above all, I come back to this point: who is responsible for all this? It is rather embarrassing and demeaning, not to individuals like me but to the House, not to know who is running and responsible for things. In paragraph 221, the report recommends appointing a director-general—we now have the Chief Operating Officer—but this is just bureaucratic job creation, as was mentioned by—

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

Everybody.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

Well, by my noble friend Lord Howard, but yes, by everybody else. Lead administration is better than top-heavy administration. I have seen that throughout my life. You need a streamlined administration so that you have fewer chiefs, fewer expensive staff and offices supporting them, less duplication and fewer meetings. Frankly, you also have less cost and quicker decisions. I fear that the way this House is going is the wrong way, as my noble friend Lord Howard said. It is a sign of a declining institution when you start having burgeoning bureaucracy. As my noble friend Lord Strathclyde said, we need to have confidence in this House and sort out who runs it and who is accountable.