It is a pleasure to be in the Chamber and to open the debate on the 29th report of the House of Commons Commission. This is the third year in which the Commission’s annual report has been debated. Two years ago, there were calls in various parts of the House for a review of the way in which the House was run and a year ago, in this debate, I announced that Sir Kevin Tebbit had been appointed to review the management and services of the House. Many hon. Members—certainly several of those in the Chamber—will have met and spoken to Sir Kevin and his team during the course of his work. We are grateful to Sir Kevin and his team for the work that they did and for the full and comprehensive report that he presented just before the summer recess.

The debate is an opportunity for the House to express its view on the Tebbit report. The Commission will listen carefully to what is said before we take decisions on how to implement the report and the recommendations that it makes. I hope that all hon. Members, whether they are taking part in the debate or not, will let the Commission know what they think of the review and the recommendations and what they think should be the priorities for change.

The Commission has already agreed to some preliminary steps towards the implementation of the report, including, in particular, to merge the estates and works functions, which will be headed by a new parliamentary director of estates from next January; to appoint a new director-general of facilities, who will supervise not only estates and works but accommodation, office services and the full range of services within the House; to reorganise the Board of Management on functional lines to try to strengthen the corporate sense of work in the House, as Sir Kevin’s report expressed the feeling that some of the Departments operated somewhat on their own and that there was not a sufficiently corporate sense of purpose; and to strengthen the office of the chief executive.

Full implementation of all the recommendations in the report would clearly take considerable time, and we will focus on those that are most significant to the delivery of services to Members. I am pleased to say that, in general, Sir Kevin found that the way in which the management of the House operated was encouraging and reassuring. He did not think that the systems were broken. The performance of the service is generally well regarded, and its reputation with other parliamentary services is high. In only one area—the management of estates and works—did he feel a clear need for remedial action, and that is why I have flagged that up as the one that the Commission latched on to first and that we thought ought to be a priority.

The report is not the only measure this year of how House services are performing. The Board of Management, with the support of the Select Committee on Administration, which we thank sincerely for its work in the House, conducted a survey of Members and Members’ staff and produced a report in May 2007. There was a good response rate to the survey, as 45 per cent. of MPs and 54 per cent. of their staff responded, a significant increase from the responses the previous time that the exercise was conducted. Broadly speaking, those who responded were representative of the political mix and other mixes in the House. One MP told the survey that

“given the nature of the main inhabitants”—

MPs—

“the place works remarkably well.”

Broadly speaking, that is a summary of the conclusions.

One thing that the Commission stopped to ponder was the fact that only a fifth or so of Members thought that the Commission was working very or fairly effectively, while a third or so thought otherwise. We had to ask ourselves whether we should be alarmed by that, but, if we consider the combination of the findings of the survey and the recommendations from Sir Kevin Tebbit, we think that broadly speaking perhaps the fairly low-profile way in which we do our work is not something that is likely to communicate itself to Members and necessarily strike chords with them. The definition of a good club committee is that often nobody notices what it is doing and we think that a better measure of the work that we are doing is the level of Member satisfaction with the services that the House provides rather than their having noticed us making headlines or doing anything very eye-catching, which it is not, in truth, our purpose to do.

When asked how the services of the House had changed recently, most MPs and staff said that they had not changed significantly, but well over a third said that they had become more effective. Only one in 10 Members felt that services had become less effective. That is no cause for rejoicing, but nevertheless it shows that some satisfactory progress is being made.

Most respondents felt that the emphasis on providing advice and services for the House and Committees as well as for individual MPs and their staff should broadly remain the same, but the survey does suggest that more attention should be paid to promoting public knowledge of the work of Parliament. That is certainly something that we have discussed on previous occasions during debates such as this.

The Board of Management is also drawing on the survey to make improvements to particular services and to ensure that the services that work well continue to do so. I want to say a few words about promoting public knowledge, which is an important challenge for the House. A recurrent theme in such debates and the Commission’s work throughout the year is explaining the role and work of Parliament to the public. Over the past year, the 17 visitor assistants have completed their first full year and my impression is that that service and system has got off to a good start. We have sent out 265,000 copies of the new voters’ guide since July 2006. The radical overhaul of the parliamentary website is still a work in progress. Parliament has had 891,000 visitors, and the outreach visits by the education service teams to support MPs in their work with schools when the pupils are not able to reach Westminster are also gathering momentum.

One recognises that some schools that are a long way from Westminster, such as those in my seat of North Devon, struggle to organise regular school visits. We do not want to restrict access to Parliament to children who are educated in the south-east. There is a limit on how far school parties can travel in a day and often a financial limit on their ability to organise extended visits to London. We are interested in helping school parties to visit and the Administration Committee has recommended financial support for that. We have asked the group that works on informing the public to try to work up some proposals on how we might do that, and they will come back to the Commission for consideration later. The Select Committee on Finance and Services will want to provide input, too. We will continue to talk to the parliamentary education service about the sorts of ways in which we can improve access to Parliament not only for school children but for other members of the public from around the country.

At some point in these debates, we usually turn our attention to information technology. This year has seen the passage of the Parliament (Joint Departments) Act 2007, which enabled us to put the Parliamentary Information Communication and Technology Department on to the necessary statutory basis as a Department of both Houses. PICT has been the subject of an inquiry by the Administration Committee, to which the Commission will consider its response shortly.

The survey of services shows low satisfaction in some areas, particularly with remote access, which many of us know to be less than satisfactory—IT installations, printers and one or two other detailed points. The Administration Committee said:

“The feedback we have received from Members since we were appointed in July 2005 has made us aware of a significant undertone of dissatisfaction with the ICT services provided by Parliament. We want to ensure that processes are in place to enable appropriate Members’ services to be delivered efficiently and to an agreed standard.”

I am sure that all Commission members would echo that aspiration and do what they can to help bring about an improvement. No one should underestimate the scale of the change that bringing PICT into being has entailed and nor should anyone underestimate the size of the challenge of providing services to Members, their staff and constituency offices, peers and everybody working in the Palace. If a new Department with new leadership of all these challenges is taking a little while to get on top of every last detail, I do not think it should be any great surprise. I want the House to understand that there is a determination to continue to work to make the improvements and to ensure that we get a service that everybody regards as satisfactory.

A useful development has been the PICT local offices, including the one in Norman Shaw South, which is in a sense an outreach post that Members can get to relatively easily from their offices in order to receive face-to-face help. I, myself, have used it and was very impressed by the service. A steady flow of Members have been making use of that new service—even, indeed, during the summer recess. Members have wanted help with mobile computing, remote access and other such points.

The Administration Committee recommended

“that PICT should commence market investigation so that we and other relevant bodies can be presented before the end of the year with a range of costed options for the provision of regionally based support units.”

Certainly, there has been a certain amount of dissatisfaction with support to constituency offices, and we will want to look at that when the financial implications have been worked through.

I answer parliamentary questions on behalf of the Commission. They cover many and varied topics, but the single most recurring theme relates to green issues and Parliament’s environmental record. I am grateful to Members for keeping those issues at the forefront of people’s attention. I think that it is right that they do so. I point to the Speaker’s introduction to this year’s annual report. He observed that

“all of the House’s electricity has come from renewable sources since February 2007—the full year effect will be to cut our carbon emissions from energy by 70 per cent, equivalent to an annual reduction of 3,400 tonnes of carbon”,

that

“40 per cent of our waste (equivalent to 850 tonnes) was recycled in 2006/07—up from 37 per cent in the previous year”,

and that

“we reduced the total amount of water used on the estate by 15 per cent from the previous financial year (equivalent to more than 83,000 cubic metres).”

Although I readily acknowledge that, of course, further work needs to be done across the board on our environmental performance, those observations point to progress in the right direction. Over the summer, the management boards of both Houses held a joint meeting on that subject to co-ordinate their policies, and, recently, the House auditors carried out a review of the systems for environmental management, which will come before the Administration Estimate Audit Committee shortly.

There is no doubt that we can, and will, do more, to manage our environmental performance effectively and, certainly, as I said, it is the most popular subject for parliamentary questions to the Commission. As I have said once or twice in answers to oral questions, some colleagues could do a little more to help our environmental performance, by being slightly more diligent about switching off lights when they leave their offices. Quite often the totality of those individual actions is more effective than inventing smart systems to deal with the problem. Having said that, as a Member with an office in Portcullis House, I share the frustration of other colleagues with offices there with the heating and cooling systems, which are supposed to respond to the environment outside, but occasionally do so at a pace rather more leisurely than that at which the climate changes outside.

I shall touch on the international parliamentary bodies. The Commission will make a decision shortly on whether to accept the transfer, from the Treasury, of responsibility for funding the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body and the British American Parliamentary Group. The Finance and Services Committee has been considering that and is recommending to the Commission that the transfer take place, subject to conditions. The Commission will make a decision between now and Christmas, with a view to the new system, if there is to be one, coming into place from April of next year.

The Tebbit report recommended that the Commission take over responsibility for making grants in aid to those four inter-parliamentary bodies, at a total cost of £3.3 million per year. It is a finely balanced issue. We have to be careful about the extent to which a precedent might be set and we must attend to issues of proper governance and the reputation of the House as a whole. As a member of the Administration Estimate Audit Committee, I am conscious of the need for the House to be seen to be exercising proper oversight for internal, as well as external, activities. Certainly, where those are funded from the administration estimate, we will ensure that that happens.

Freedom of information has featured often on the Commission’s agenda in the past year, as well as on that of the Members Estimate Committee, when information has been sought relating to parliamentary allowances. Next Thursday, for the fourth year in a row, the House will publish details of Members’ expenses in the previous year. That is under the publication scheme introduced when the House chose to be covered by the Freedom of Information Act 2000—it did not fall under the original Act. The publication scheme was agreed at the time and is a comprehensive way in which to get the personalised expenditure figures for each Member into the public domain.

The Commission fully respects the fact that there is public interest in the disclosure of information about how public money is being spent through those allowances. It is understandable that from time to time journalists, in particular, seek information beyond that which is covered by the publication scheme. We have to strike a balance, therefore, between the public interest and the privacy of Members, not least where their families, homes and staff—they are entitled to privacy as well—are concerned.

The Commission or the MEC has to consider whether requests that go beyond the publication scheme should be agreed to, resisted, or if need be, appealed against to the Information Commissioner, the tribunal, or even ultimately, the courts, where a decision would have to be struck, balancing the public interest and data protection for MPs and for other public officials.

In the light of some controversy in the past few months, however, I make it perfectly clear that neither the Commission nor the MEC had any substantive discussion about the Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill. We did not take any view on it. We did not support or, indeed, oppose it, but we decided that, even if the Bill was passed, the House would continue to publish the same information about Members’ allowances that has been disclosed under the freedom of information publication scheme every autumn for the past four years.

Looking ahead, the Commission is conscious that substantial work will be needed over the next 10 years or so on the historic building in which we work, and the cost of replacing the mechanical and electrical systems and repairing the roofs is estimated to be £200 million or more. We await detailed plans as part of the long-term estates strategy. They depend partly on the arrival of the new parliamentary estates director, which, as I mentioned, is scheduled for January. It will be the major task on the new appointee’s desk on day one in the post.

There has been some press attention this week about the following issue. The Commission has discussed very tentatively the possibility of partial closure of the building to enable the work to be carried out more cheaply and quickly. However, there is absolutely no view at this time about what the best options will be. It will be a matter for the new director to work up some proposals for how he or she thinks those huge tasks should be undertaken and to bring them forward to the Committees in due course for consideration.

I must say a few words about the sorry matter of the visitor reception building. Last year when we had the debate, I fully expected the building, which is just outside Westminster Hall, to be open by now. The Commission has received reports at almost every meeting over the past year, and it has been very dissatisfied with the delays, the reasons for which are many and complex. I cannot say much about them at this stage, because we are doing our best to unravel them, so that we can have the building finished and functioning as soon as possible. A recovery manager has been appointed and is doing a good job. For the first time, the Commission feels that somebody is getting on top of the complex issues to which I have referred. When the building is finished, I have no doubt that the Administration Estimate Audit Committee, among others, will have to examine what has happened.

Members know that the Senior Salaries Review Body has been considering Members’ pay and allowances over the past year or so, and we await its report, which may or may not lead to changes, and subsequently, to revisions of the Green Book. Members also know that a new communications allowance started in April, and the Commission and MEC have undertaken to review it in the light of experience.

I have probably said enough by way of introduction to the Commission’s report and work over the past years. I thank all the staff of the House, who work so hard on behalf of Members and Committees. They do their very level best to make the working of the House more efficient and the experience of Members undertaking that work as pleasant as possible. I particularly thank the Clerk to the Commission, Andrew Kennon, his secretary, Louise Sargent, who deals meticulously with all the parliamentary questions that come our way, and all the staff who support the Domestic Committees of the House. We are very grateful to them for their work in keeping us functioning as well as we can. I very much look forward to hearing what Members have to say about the report, the Tebbit review and the work of the House, and to feeding their comments back to my colleagues on the Commission in due course.

This month, I shall celebrate having been a Member for 25 years. I bring to the post of Leader of the House and to my membership of the Commission—this is my first such annual debate—a perspective from the days when the House authorities did not have to bother about passes, because there was no pass system, and when Members were much less demanding of the support services, because constituents hardly ever wrote to them. When they did, they did not expect to get a reply, and quite often they did not. Now, we would all like more change to and improvement of the support services and House facilities, but they have transformed over the years, and I echo the thanks that have been given to the Commission and to the staff who work on it.

I am pleased to have my first opportunity as Leader of the House to contribute to the debate about the work of the House of Commons, and particularly about the review of the administration of House services, which Sir Kevin Tebbit recently undertook on behalf of the Commission. It was a running theme of the debate two years ago that there should be a substantial external review of the House management and services in order to follow on from the reports by Sir Robin Ibbs in 1990 and Michael Braithwaite in 1999. The hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) announced in last year’s debate that the review had been commissioned, and that is what we are debating today.

I join the hon. Gentleman in thanking Sir Kevin and his supporting team of House officials. The governance of the House through the Commission is conducted independently of the Government. Hon. Members know that, as Leader of the House, I am a member of the Commission ex officio and represent the Government on it. However, as all my predecessors have acknowledged, the role of the Leader of the House, whether on Commission matters or more widely, is not purely to represent the Government. I take the concerns of all Members into account. I have sought to make it clear to colleagues that I view the role and position of Parliament with the utmost importance, and I want to ensure that the work I do, including on the Commission, contributes to Parliament’s effectiveness.

As the Leader of the House, I chair the Modernisation Committee, promoting consideration of reforms to the House. The Commission’s role is not so much to ensure that the House has the best means of conducting business, but that it has the right resources and administrative structures to allow the best, most effective work. Those two roles are in many areas complementary, not least in the important task of ensuring that the work of Parliament not only is effective but comes over to the public as effective and relevant. That is part of what we call the issue of public engagement, which in turn is rightly one of the Commission’s three primary objectives.

Following the Modernisation Committee’s 2004 report, “Connecting Parliament with the Public”, my predecessor-but-one, now the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, finished his speech in this debate two years ago with remarks on the theme of engagement with the public, which he described as “crucial”. My immediate predecessor, now the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, also emphasised the importance of that activity. I fully agree, and so does the Prime Minister. He showed his commitment to it with his 3 July statement on the governance of Britain and with his more recent speech proposing, among other things, a Speaker’s Conference.

Traditional representative democracy faces challenges on a number of fronts, and Parliament has the central role in sustaining trust, confidence and a sense of efficacy in the representative political process. I, like the hon. Member for North Devon, therefore attach great importance to the Commission’s work in conducting and supporting moves to make Parliament more welcoming and accessible; in increasing public information about its work and how House decisions impact directly on everyday life; and in informing people how they can find out more and become more closely involved.

I therefore welcome the recent proposal from the Administration Committee, chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen, North (Mr. Doran), which the House endorsed in June, to prioritise educational facilities. The Committee’s report envisages identifying more space for visitors from schools and colleges in the wider accommodation strategy under development.

I am fortunate to have a constituency that is near to the House. Whenever I am out and about in schools in my constituency, I meet young people who talk to me about Parliament because they have visited it. They have a point of reference—a lifelong memory that stands them in good stead. Indeed, I sometimes meet people who came here as a child and are still interested in Parliament because they remember that visit. I cannot over-emphasise the importance of visitor services.

This annual debate provides us with an opportunity to recognise the amount and quality of the work that the House staff do during the year. As the Commission’s report states, there are now some 1,700 staff employed in the Departments of the House. They support the work of the House effectively. They work on maintaining buildings to a high standard; on security, which is of growing importance; in the catering services, some of which are absolutely excellent; in Hansard; in the different parts of the Library—I think that the Library of the House of Commons is one of our crowning glories—in the administration of our pay and allowances, the importance of which is never to be underestimated; in the procedural and Committee support offices, and elsewhere. I pay tribute to their work. Many of them, including people working in cleaning, catering and security, live in my south London constituency and are my constituents, so I have good reason not to take their work for granted.

Further challenges to which staff will need to respond in the coming months will include implementing any agreed changes to allowances arising from the coming Senior Salaries Review Body report; procedural changes arising from the work of the Procedure Committee and the Modernisation Committee, and work arising from the report of the Administration Committee on ICT services for Members.

Of course, I used some of the services provided by staff more directly when I was a Back Bencher than I do now as a Minister. One of the principal jobs of Parliament, and therefore of its staff, is to assist Members in the effective scrutiny of the Government, and it is the Commission’s job to assist that process. That relates not just to the Library but to the Table Office and all such staff.

One area in which there has been recent change is IT services for both the House as a whole and Members directly. The recent Administration Committee report on ICT services for Members showed some of the difficult issues involved and some of the problems that individual Members face in getting the services that they need with acceptable reliability. That report and the Commission’s annual report showed some areas of improvement, but also noted that more work was needed. They also showed that the House authorities were well aware of the importance that Members attach to the issue and the need to continue the progress made. As Leader of the House, hon. Members often raise with me the continuous need for improvement, reliability and particularly, as the hon. Member for North Devon said, remote access. The new PICT service is designed to facilitate that. It was established in 2006 under the leadership of Joan Miller, and we wish it every success in that important work. The Government supported those developments by making legislative time available to enable the Parliament (Joint Departments) Act 2007, which allows the service to have its full required status as a Department of both Houses, to get through Parliament and on to the statute book.

Expenditure issues are important. The Commission’s report sets out the resources required for the administration of the House. They are substantial, running at £210 million for the year in question and £233 million for the current year. That is in addition to expenditure on Members’ salaries and their travel, staff and other costs, which brought the total to about £365 million in 2006-07.

Administration costs, like costs anywhere, are subject to constant upward pressure. In recent years, the Commission has succeeded in containing costs in real terms, subject to additions only for specific, unavoidable items such as security. We must always consider the climate of expenditure controls in the public sector as a whole, and many parts of government are expected not just to hold costs steady in real terms but to reduce them or accommodate within them new and additional services. That is something that we all need to bear in mind when calling for additional services, which can include new procedures such as evidence taking in Public Bill Committees, however beneficial such changes might be.

The conclusion of the review of management and services by Sir Kevin Tebbit is that, overall, relatively little fundamental change is needed. However, he is clear that there are things that need to be done to ensure continuous improvement in services. He makes a number of recommendations on the detailed workings of the Commission, the Finance and Services Committee, chaired by hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell), the Administration Committee, chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen, North, who is here today, the Board of Management under the chief executive and the individual Departments. He also makes recommendations about the operation and role of the Audit Committee.

I wish to pick up on two wider points that Sir Kevin makes in the report. One relates to expenditure, which I was just discussing. Sir Kevin suggests that, while there is little evidence of direct waste, the relative lack of budget discipline to which the House is subject compared with the running cost reductions imposed on Government Departments means that there is a need for more prioritisation in the use of resources for different projects. That is clearly something that the Commission and the other decision-making bodies of the House should address.

Sir Kevin calls for a more developed performance management system to allow better tracking of performance against objectives and priorities. He advocates more regular rolling surveys of Members’ satisfaction with services and notes the need for organisations to avoid focusing too much management attention on an unduly narrow set of objectives instead of a more balanced range of key strategic objectives—the balanced scorecard approach. I am sure that both the Commission and officials will want to examine that carefully as we take forward the implementation of the review.

I wish to emphasise again my commitment to the Commission’s work and my role as a member of it. It plays a key role in overseeing and directing the House independently of the Government, including in the delivery of the services that the House needs to scrutinise the Government, the services that individual Members need to support their work and those needed to maximise good communication and interaction with the public. I am pleased to be able to take part in the debate and pleased that I and the Deputy Leader of the House have the opportunity to hear the views of other hon. Members.

Finally, I wish to pay tribute to the work of the hon. Members who are fellow members of the Commission. It must be said that it is not one of the most glamorous jobs in Parliament, and I am sure that the hon. Member for North Devon is not beset with people admiring his work and thanking him for it, but I should like to take the opportunity to do just that. Somebody has to volunteer to take the lead, and it is difficult, thankless work, but incredibly important. I thank him and the other members of the Commission for their work.

I am pleased to speak on behalf of the Opposition in this annual debate. After listening to the Leader of the House comment on how matters have changed in the 25 years that she has been a Member of Parliament, I must confess, after two and a half years in the House, to an experience that I had in my first few months. I was waiting in the Chamber to be called by the Speaker in a debate in which a number of people wished to speak. I returned back to my desk and found that I had three e-mails from the same person. The first e-mail was a legitimate inquiry, the second was rather stroppy and complained that I had not replied and the third informed me in no uncertain terms that I would not be getting that person’s vote. It was with some satisfaction that I was able to reply to that individual and tell him that he was not my constituent.

I welcome the report by the House of Commons Commission. It is a thorough piece of work and all those involved in its production are to be complimented, particularly the Speaker, the Leader of the House, the shadow Leader of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), and all the other Members who serve on the Commission. I commend, too, all the staff who supported them in helping to produce the report. Our debate takes into account, too, Sir Kevin Tebbit’s review of management and services of the House, to which I shall return.

This is an important debate, as it covers the issues that enable us, as parliamentarians, to do our jobs efficiently. It is the machinery behind the scenes that keeps the institution of democracy well oiled and functioning efficiently. All the House of Commons staff deserve a huge round of applause for the work that they do in the background, whatever they do, throughout the estate.

I agree with much of the Commission’s report, and I do not intend to go through its points in detail. Indeed, many of the salient points have already been covered, but I should like to touch on a small number of issues. IT support for Members has already been mentioned, and I am happy to say that, since the merger that led to the setting-up of the PICT service—the Deputy Leader of the House and I took part in a debate on the Bill that gave legal sanctity to that merger—there has been an improvement. It is fair to say that some Members are still a little concerned about IT support in remote locations, particularly in their homes or constituencies, but I am pleased that that is being worked on.

It is good to see that we are becoming ever more environmentally conscious and that rates of recycling and energy conservation continue to increase. However, may I take the liberty of suggesting that the Commission consider introducing a greener procurement agenda for those who supply services, goods and materials to the House? Perhaps we should take a look at their green credentials to assist with greener matters generally.

The security measures necessary in the House reflect the times we live in and, regrettably, it is necessary to introduce a more advanced pass structure. I do not think that anybody will complain about that, but I hope that the system will be closely monitored in the early days, particularly when there is a Division. Members may recall some MPs, including myself, could not open a door when there was a three-line Whip because the card reader would not accept our passes. I hope that that point will be taken on board, certainly in the early stages. I also thank all the security staff, who make our work much easier and who ensure that we can carry on in these difficult times. I welcome the increased public access to the House, as well as the visitor centre, which will doubtless assist in encouraging greater numbers of people to come here. A 10 per cent. increase in visitors is certainly to be encouraged, and I very much hope that the numbers will keep increasing.

Paragraph 94 on page 36 of the Commission’s report says:

“Proposals…in the Modernisation Committee’s report of 2004-05 on European Scrutiny have not yet been considered”.

Given the importance of that subject, particularly on the day on which the Prime Minister is engaged in talks overseas on European matters, it is regrettable that the Government have been selective in implementing the measures proposed by the Modernisation Committee.

Parliamentary questions are, of course, an important part of the workings of the Commons and, indeed, the Lords. I welcome the extra days that have been set aside during the recess for tabling questions, and the system has, by all accounts, been successful. I look forward to its continued availability and perhaps even an increase in the number of such days, depending on the results of any surveys that are carried out.

I appreciate the concern expressed by Government Ministers about the huge volume of questions that they receive. However, if they answered questions properly at the first time of asking, they probably would not receive so many supplementaries. Once, when I tabled a written question, the Department concerned told me that it could not answer because of the format in which the question was tabled. I tabled a similar question to another Department, which said, “We don’t have the information in the format that you requested, but here’s the information in the format in which we have it.” May I suggest that all Departments use a huge dose of common sense when answering questions to ease such problems?

We are also dealing with Sir Kevin Tebbit’s review of management and services of the House of Commons. It is an excellent report, which I support broadly, and I congratulate Sir Kevin and his team on a voluminous, but nevertheless effective piece of work. It makes several sensible proposals, and I shall deal with just a small number of them. I entirely agree with the proposal to merge estates and works services into their original form before the de-merger. It is certainly a good idea to strengthen the role and office of the Clerk of the House of Commons.

Sir Kevin raises the important issue of education. Given that young people are increasingly apathetic about the political process, we should do all that we can to make politics more interesting and to make them more aware of what happens in Parliament. With that in mind, it is particularly important that the parliamentary website is improved—a point that Sir Kevin made in his review. At present, the website is not particularly user-friendly, and it could certainly be made easier to navigate. I welcome the proposal that the Board of Management should include external members. I am all for having expertise and talent, from whatever quarter, and we should lose no pride in seeking advice and assistance from outside if that assists the proper functioning of Parliament.

I would, however, sound a note of caution. Sir Kevin’s review speaks of targets to measure success and failure. It is important that we do not go down the route of targets for targets’ sake or introduce a culture of targets. By all means, let us have broad objectives—there is no reason why managers should not also have objectives—but we should be wary of implementing targets simply because that is what everybody else is doing. We must look carefully at the circumstances, and we should not do something just for the sake of it. As I said, I do not want to make a lengthy contribution. I simply conclude by again thanking the Commission for an excellent piece of work, which I for one certainly endorse.

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this debate on House services. All the contributions so far have made it clear just how important those services are.

I am the Chairman of the Administration Committee, which was appointed to consider the services provided by and for the House. The Committee mainly represents the interests of Members, and it advises the Speaker, the House of Commons Commission and senior staff on how to meet Members’ needs. Since 2005, the Committee has produced reports on a range of services, including post-election services, catering, accommodation and IT. The hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) referred in some detail to our important report on facilities for visitors to Parliament—particularly the education unit—which has been a major part of our work over the past year.

We have considered a wide range of issues. We had to make some major decisions on smoking policy, including the difficult decision to ban smoking from the Smoking Room. We also decided to continue calling it “the Smoking Room”, despite the fact that it is a non-smoking room—hon. Members can make of that what they will. We recommended that the relevant legislation be implemented throughout the parliamentary estate, despite the fact that there was no requirement to do so. Implementation is, however, proving difficult, and we shall have to return to the issue, because there is a lack of appropriate areas where people can smoke without causing a nuisance to others in the area. We continue to keep the issue under review.

The Committee spent a considerable period over the past year developing the principle and detail of the communications allowance, which has now been implemented. That accounted for a significant part of our work. We are monitoring closely the implementation of the new system of access control. The hon. Member for North-West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara) mentioned IT systems, and rightly noted that facilities in Members’ constituencies are still a major difficulty. We have worked closely with PICT to improve those services, and substantial progress has been made, including the introduction of the one-stop shop mentioned by the hon. Member for North Devon. We hope that improvement will continue. Our aspiration is to provide the same level of service in constituency offices as in the House. All Members will understand the importance of that for the day-to-day work of their offices. We decided that one of the Committee’s major objectives should be to make its work open and transparent, and detailed notes of our discussions are placed on our website. Frequent updates are circulated to Members and staff, and we regularly consult Members and staff as part of our inquiries.

As for Housewide issues, I have already mentioned educational facilities and facilities for visitors to Parliament. We work closely on such matters with our equivalent Committee in the House of Lords, and we hope that there will be scope for future co-operation on other issues. I want to take the opportunity to thank my colleagues on the Committee for their hard work and their commitment to improving services in the House; to the heads of Departments and their teams, with whom my Committee has, since its establishment, built a rapport; and the Clerk and his team, who have given us excellent support throughout the past year.

An issue that we frequently confront is the increasing demand on services in the House, and we must recognise the scale of the challenge. More and more is expected of Members, which, in turn, puts pressure on services in the House of Commons, which we need to do our job. The Tebbit report notes that

“the picture is one of rising numbers...greater costs and higher expectations.”

That creates difficulties for all of us who are trying to deal with those services. For example, while the number of Members has remained broadly constant, the number of Members’ staff on the payroll has increased by 35 per cent. since 1998-99. The number of House and other staff has also increased. As an example of the growing pressure on services, the Refreshment Department has increased the number of meals that it provides in a year by 50 per cent. since 1988-89, from 1 million to 1.5 million. The range of information technology services, and information provided by the Library online, has greatly increased. Increased security concerns have required significant change to the fabric of the building and to working practices. The provision of modern facilities must be combined with the maintenance of the Victorian Palace of Westminster. That is not always easy, particularly with the heritage authorities sitting on our shoulders. The output of reports from Select Committees has increased markedly, and the number of questions has increased—I could go on.

Members of Parliament are not a homogenous group, and we have varying needs and priorities. We talk in our Committee of 646 individual private businesses; we have those discussions particularly in relation to the provision of IT services, as every hon. Member has their own needs and demands when running their office. The House service does a very good job of trying to cater for all our disparate needs. We are not always the easiest of customers, and we must recognise that. Sir Kevin Tebbit’s recommendations are a key part of our considerations. He has produced a thoughtful, thorough and useful report which I and my Committee welcome. We particularly thank Sir Kevin and his team for the way in which they went about their work. They took the trouble to speak to the majority of Committee members individually, and they attended Committee meetings in which we discussed the progress of the review. Sir Kevin was very helpful when answering our questions.

Sir Kevin made recommendations about objectives and performance management for Departments of the House. That has been welcomed by other hon. Members, and it was certainly welcomed by the Administration Committee. We are keen to be closely involved in establishing the new framework and in monitoring its implementation. Effective performance measurement is complex in an organisation where much of the work is reactive, but it is also the key to improving the services that we receive and to ensuring that the House works well. The Administration Committee supports the changes to the Board of Management recommended by Sir Kevin. Its present structure is, we believe, too unwieldy and not ideally suited to service delivery. External advisers could provide an alternative viewpoint and ensure that performance is benchmarked against best practice elsewhere. Perhaps I could add a word of caution, however, as changes at the top will inevitably have an impact at every other level among staff. It is extremely important that management should handle any changes with the utmost sensitivity.

The Committee agrees that the Board of Management should examine the broader issue of a more proactive House service. Departments of the House need to do more to inform hon. Members of the range of services available to them, and to do so instead of taking a reactive approach. The Committee agrees, too, that a client relations group should be established within the Serjeant at Arms Department to provide a more responsive and integrated service to Members for accommodation and facilities. Some colleagues will know that I met staff representatives earlier this week to discuss the issue of priority for MPs in the House of Commons. It was an extremely useful meeting, despite what hon. Members may have read in the press, and I was grateful to the staff representatives for arranging it. One very obvious conclusion for me from what I heard is that we need to improve our communication with staff. I understand that there are good lines of communication for staff of the House through the staff representatives and trade unions, but there are very few for Members’ staff. I hope that a way can be found to include the representatives of all the staff employed in the House in any consultations that are established following the review.

The Committee’s view is that facilitating services for hon. Members should be a higher priority than providing information for the public. If extra funding is to be released for public information provision—for the parliamentary website, for example—the Committee should be involved in close scrutiny of any proposals, which should be subject to approval or veto by the Finance and Services Committee and the House of Commons Commission.

Sir Kevin makes two recommendations about the Administration Committee. First, he recommends that the size of the Committee be reviewed, on the basis that smaller bodies are more likely to be effective. We strongly oppose a cut in membership, as a complement of 16 allows us to include representatives of smaller parties. Their views are particularly important in many of the decisions that we make, and we need to include as broad a cross-section of Members’ views as possible.

Secondly, Sir Kevin recommends that individual members of the Administration Committee should be invited to track particular services, such as catering and IT, on behalf of the Committee as a whole. The Committee intends to revisit that idea shortly, but it has considered it in the past and decided not to pursue it, basically because we were anxious not to return to the old Committee system that the new Committee replaced. We did not want to recreate a sub-Committee system, but we will examine Sir Kevin’s recommendations.

In conclusion, Sir Kevin points out that changes in the way the House operates in recent years have brought

“changes in the scale and complexity of management and service delivery.”

As well as improving services for Members, the House must promote public engagement with its work—in particular by improving the educational facilities that it offers. It is vital that the House service should not lose sight of the central importance of allowing hon. Members to carry out their work as effectively as possible. The Committee plays a key role in working with the House service to achieve that goal, and Sir Kevin’s review is an important guide in improving services and delivery. The Committee cannot represent Members’ views unless it is aware of them, and I would like to take this opportunity to remind Members that they should not hesitate to contact me or any other member of the Committee to raise issues that are of concern to them.

Like the Leader of the House, I am participating in a debate of this kind for the first time, even though I am, being just behind the right hon. and learned Lady in length of service, close to clocking up my quarter century as a Member. The story that she told is right: for all that time, the public’s demands on the place have grown and the system has had to respond, as would happen elsewhere.

I believe that my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) and his colleagues on the House of Commons Commission, the hon. Member for Aberdeen, North (Mr. Doran) and his Committee, and other hon. Members, seek to keep up with the new state of the nation—and the world—whose expectations are ever rising. It is quite difficult to keep up in that way in an old building not built for such a purpose, but in general the political colleagues who lead those bodies, and the staff whom they employ, do very well. Of course there are always new challenges, but I want to join other hon. Members in starting my remarks by paying tribute to their excellent work.

This is the people’s Parliament—that is not my phrase; I have nicked it from other people—and therefore in the debate about whether we are looking after Members or the public, we must always seek to look after the public better as we serve them. There are sometimes tensions, an example of which is provided by the meeting attended by the hon. Member for Aberdeen, North the other day. In my view, there was a slight misinterpretation in the directive that went out about who should have priority for services. The announcement did not reflect the more detailed and sophisticated debate that had gone on between the relevant authorities and did not quite hit the nail on the head. That is a sensitive area, but we should address it.

Some wise owls among the parliamentary colleagues to whom I have spoken said that it is not a matter of giving priority to Members, but of having the ability to deliver certain, pinched services more speedily. That is not a criticism of people within the system, but a suggestion that we need to deliver more cups of cappuccino per five minutes in Portcullis House, to use a limited example. Of course, that has staff and cost implications, but there are ways of doing things in those sensitive areas.

The hon. Member for Aberdeen, North raised a second sensitive area. The House took the view that we should be included in the anti-smoking legislation. I dissented from that legislation nationally, although my party was, by policy, a protagonist for it. I still take a more liberal and dissenting view on those things, and I hope that we will not drive out those people who smoke into unimaginably unpleasant corners of the estate and that we seek to accommodate them. For some people, it means the difference between a sane or an insane day in the office, and helps them to cope. I hope that we can be civilised towards those people who do something that is perfectly legal, and allow them to be accommodated appropriately.

The third controversial issue, which I have just spotted, was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon: the future of our location if we decide, when the building is looked at, that it needs major structural repair. That time may come. I realise that this is premature and that lots of people will be considering this for a long time, but there is a pretty obvious answer to the fundamental question, and I want to flag up a second issue. If we have to do major work on the Commons Chamber, the obvious answer is that it must be more cost and time-efficient to move elsewhere for a period and then move back than to try to do it over 30 years in the holidays. That might be regarded as a rather strange or perverse proposal, but the Commons has moved before when necessity required it, and there are alternatives available. I hope that we are sensible about cost, even if we have to be relatively radical about the solution.

At the same time, I hope that it will give us the chance to reflect on whether it would be better for the main Chamber to be organised in the same sort of shape as this Chamber, or in a semi-circle, rather than in the traditional, entirely accidental and now extremely anomalous, old chapel shape, where we sit in pews opposite each other. That is not the best way to get proper, informed and intelligent debate. Most Parliaments around the world do not have that layout any more, and I hope that we will take any such opportunity to get us back here in a new structure.

Malcolm Jack and his colleagues in all the Departments: the Serjeant’s Department; the catering services—I shall be told off if I miss any out—the Clerks Department; PICT, our information and technology colleagues; the Library Department; the Official Report; and Finance and Administration, all do very professional jobs very well. We each use each of their services at different times and we all have cause to thank them and their staff, who are often extremely good.

I hear that there are 1,700 staff, and I have seen the pie chart on page 65 of the report, which shows the diversity of the staff. They are just under 70 per cent. white, 4.6 per cent. Asian, 8.5 black, 0.5 per cent. Chinese, 1.8 per cent. mixed, 1.8 per cent. other, and the inevitable 2.4 per cent. not declared and 11.5 per cent. unknown. I do not know whether that is because they did not know; actually, I know the answer, it is because they did not declare it on the form. That diversity is helpful, but we need to see it at all management levels, because although the senior management team is equally gender balanced, which is a compliment to the parliamentary estate, there are none the less no black or Asian faces in senior management. Just from being around the place, I sense that the preponderance of black, Asian and mixed race staff are in the lower grades on lower pay. We need to work harder at all levels to have a diverse staff that reflects not only Britain, in which 8 or 9 per cent. of people are from the black and minority ethnic communities, but the capital city, in which that figure is more like 40 per cent.

We should also try to recruit people from the United Kingdom as a whole, rather than just locally. Some people would see it as a great privilege to come here for a while, even though they might eventually go back to your country, Mr. Weir, or elsewhere. It is important to ensure that this is the UK’s Parliament. Whatever view certain parties take about whether that should be the future is a separate issue. We need to try, so I make a big plug for diversity at all levels from the senior all the way down.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the terms “black” and “Asian” are too broad? Someone like me, of Indian origin but born in Uganda, would be called Asian, but that term can mean anyone from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh or India, or an east African Indian such as myself. In the same way, the term “black” could mean someone from the Caribbean countries or from Africa. While I appreciate their good intent, I hope that those who take such figures on board will recognise that they are not as accurate as they could be.

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman has thought about these things more, and more personally, than others of us have. Without getting into the detail of the debate, we should listen to his wise words. Obviously, there are officially recognised categories used in censuses and so on that we should follow.

May I add another plea? There is no legal requirement to employ any particular number of people with disabilities, but we have a moral requirement to staff generally. There is a target figure, but I am not sure whether we publish details of that. When I last inquired, we were way off the target. I would be grateful to know what the current figures are, and I think that we should hold ourselves to account. I am also talking about people who can work sometimes but not all of the time. I understand that it is difficult for employers, but I have employed people with sight difficulties and visual impairments. People who are schizophrenic can work perfectly well on the days that they are in good health—it is simply more unpredictable—but they can do job sharing in those circumstances. If we are talking to the rest of the nation about employment, we need to be as good an employer as anyone else, and we have a big enough work force to do that.

As my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon said, Mr. Speaker started his report by pointing out that the issue that comes to the top of the pile, across the estate, is concern for the environment. That is understandable and I am grateful for the efforts that we have made—I flag them up and thank people for them. Let me add my shopping list. First, there is far to much unnecessary use of lifts. If people use the lift to go up two floors and it looks unnecessary to me, I challenge them. In City Hall, there are stickers by the lift doors saying, “Is your journey really necessary?” If we are not to be the obese society that we are told we will become, many people should be using the stairs instead of the lifts. That is a serious point. It is also energy consuming, and we should challenge everyone on the estate not to use lifts unless they absolutely have to. I realise that we must not drive ill and aged people to walk up six flights of stairs, but there is a sensible medium.

Secondly, getting lights and power turned off is a perpetual battle. I have twice had to phone the Speaker’s Office as I have gone past to tell someone that the lights in the Speaker’s House are absolutely ablaze at 11 o’clock in the morning on a sunny day. We really must all try harder. I try persistently. It is about everything from the power points on the computers and televisions to the heating, although that is more difficult. My hon. Friend mentioned Portcullis House. I live on the top floor, and the heating there has been extremely hot on occasions. I understand the difficulties, but using as little energy and heat as is compatible with the job seems to me to produce a better service, and we are all more awake as a result.

I am not sure whether the reports are printed on recycled paper. They do not say that they are and do not look as though they are. If they are not, they should be. If they are, I apologise, but they ought to say so. I hope that we will do everything we can to ensure that all our documents are on recycled paper.

I declare an interest in a tricky issue that was raised last year. On every fine day, I cycle in if I can. If it is wet, I do not, and I have to admit that occasionally I do not cycle on fine days. In fact, today was one—but I cycled in yesterday. There are now cycle racks outside 7 Millbank, but there ought to be more. We need to work with Westminster city council on this. It is not adequate to say that we cannot find a place. I understand the issues within the estate, but there should be signs to indicate to the public that there is adequate provision for everybody who wishes to cycle to this place. It is the healthiest way to get here, second only to walking, and for many of the staff it would be a better and more pleasant way to come to work. I hope that we can increase provision inside and outside the estate.

The Library does a fantastic job. The Pitt and Fox exhibition, the photographic exhibition and other exhibitions that I have been privileged to attend and, on one occasion, to open, have been excellent. I commend the Library for its reactive and proactive services, which are increasingly good. All the lectures and staff training that it offers and the subject briefings are excellent. Long may its services continue.

Other colleagues are much more knowledgeable about computers and technology than I am. I acquired a personal digital assistant—a little hand-held thing—only last week. I have not yet been brave enough to let go of my mobile phone and transfer everything to the one machine, but I am getting there. Some colleagues, of course, are absolutely competent with technology. Probably the best way to test what works, including things such as websites, is to have them tested by a representative group of our staff—the 20-somethings—to whom their use is second nature. They would soon say whether a website is good and accessible, compared with all the others, and they would soon say whether machinery is easy to use. We do listen to the voices of the young who are brought up with these things, but the more that we can listen to them, rather than to those of us who manage technology but in only rather limited ways, the better.

I am grateful that on various occasions when I have needed rescuing at the weekend—when I have been stuck somewhere trying to get into my laptop—somebody has found the answer for me much more quickly than two or three years ago, when I used to have many unhappy hours and sometimes had to give up completely. That is definitely progress.

On engaging with the public, it is good that we are producing Voting Times and other such publications. The roadshows around the country are a good idea. I hope that they will be held county by county, and that that can be done so that people across the county know about them. Perhaps MPs from the county could be invited to join in.

The visitor assistants are great. I see them at work. They are the right sort of people, in that they are really engaged, which is appropriate. Yesterday, I asked a group who came down from Solihull to visit my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt) whether they had had a tour. They commended the woman who had taken them around. She was enthusiastic and positive, and had a thorough knowledge of the history. The Leader of the House was right. I meet people all the time who have a clear recollection of a positive experience when they came here. Getting this right absolutely makes the difference to people’s perceptions about whether or not this is their place. I commend such initiatives.

We must make it possible for schools outside the south-east to visit Parliament. I make an offer through the Deputy Leader of the House and my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon. I am privileged in that my constituency is almost the nearest one to this place. The hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) is the first over the bridge. My suggestion would involve buildings such as Bankside house, which is owned by the London School of Economics. It is let out during school holidays, term holidays and university holidays. We could probably do more for those from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the north country and west country. We could work out packages including an overnight stay that would give them an opportunity to do things. Now that the Prime Minister and Mr. Speaker have given their support for the use of the Chamber during the holidays, there are all sorts of opportunities for those for whom one day is not realistic, with the best will in the world, and who could come, provided the trip were not prohibitively expensive. I am happy to talk to my hon. Friend about such matters.

We hope the visitor centre will be open soon. I understand the frustration about the delay. May I make just one point? There is one thing that we do not yet do well in respect of visitors, in spite of our best efforts: managing the lobbies that pass through security and communicating to Members that visitors have arrived. I would be happy to offer suggestions. The green card system does not work well enough, and there is no automatic way, if somebody comes, to inform the MP or their office. Occasionally, one wants to run away from constituents. We know that, so let us be honest about it. We may not wish to see them, but that is not normally the case. We are normally willing to see them, particularly if they have come from further afield. I am sure that we could come up with a system. I have regularly been frustrated because people have been kept waiting when I have not known, or they have tried to communicate but have not been able to get through. We should have a better system at the main ports of entry. I would be happy to work with colleagues on that.

Freedom of information has come up during this debate. I accept what my hon. Friend said about the Commission’s not taking a view on the Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill, which was introduced by the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (David Maclean). I am glad that it failed. It would be nonsense if Parliament were exempt from freedom of information legislation. We must be as accessible and as open as any other legislature in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world. I hope that my hon. Friend, the Commission and other authorities will ensure that we always have as open a system as the most open in the United Kingdom. The Scottish Parliament has a very open system, and I hope that we will model ourselves on the best and the most open and not on anything that is more restrictive.

We should do more joint working with the House of Lords. I know that we are two different Chambers, but we are one Parliament, and there is every logic, financially and otherwise, in working together wherever possible.

The Tebbit review is a business-like set of proposals about structures of management. It is not a radical document. It is a relatively conservative document, responding to a relatively conservative brief. There is nothing wrong with that. Assuming that it does not propose ripping up the system and starting again, I hope that the Commission and the authorities will be positive about adopting it and not water it down. It contains some good proposals for streamlining, having more accountable management and ensuring that the system works better.

It is a privilege to work here. There is always a challenge to work better, and all of us, staff and parliamentary colleagues, try to do that. We try to do it so that we can reflect the views of those who send us here. I am grateful for the opportunity to thank those who help us in our important work.

I end where I began: we are the people’s Parliament. The test of how well we are doing is how well other people think we are doing, how accessible we are and how responsive we are to the issues of the day and people’s desire to inter-relate with us. That will always be the test, and I hope that we will go on doing better and better in the years ahead.

I have not been a Member of this House as long as my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House of Commons, but I have seen a substantial improvement to the management of the services and facilities for Members during the time that I have been here. In fact, I remember when I first arrived 15 years ago asking for House of Commons stationery printed on recycled paper. The Sergeant at Arms Department was absolutely aghast and said that that was completely impossible because archived parliamentary papers had to last for at least 200 years, and no recycled paper had ever lasted that long. I suppose that we had had recycled paper for only a few decades. It took months of argument, but eventually recycled letterheads were produced. They were overprinted with a massive recycled logo, just to warn the grand old men of this place that they should not write their speech notes on it because the paper would self-destruct years before historians had come to realise the true import of what they had to say. I was pleased to hear what the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) said about the environmental attention to detail that the Commission now has. That is a welcome change indeed.

I chair the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association UK branch, and I have come to make some arguments on its behalf. The CPA UK branch is a parliamentary body, but it is funded by grant in aid from the Treasury. The hon. Member for North Devon made the point that the Finance and Services Committee of the Commission has been considering the applications that have been made by the CPA UK branch and the three other similarly funded bodies: the British group of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the British-American Parliamentary Group and the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body. I was delighted to hear from him that, earlier this week, the Committee approved in principle the applications for a transfer of funding from the Treasury to the Commission, and I hope that the Commission will agree with that recommendation. The Tebbit report is firmly in favour of a transfer of funding for these bodies from the present arrangements to the Commission. Recommendation 56 says:

“The House of Commons Commission should take over responsibility for making grants-in-aid to the four inter-parliamentary bodies.”

And the bodies agree.

I speak only for the CPA UK branch, but all four bodies applied in a joint application to the Commission earlier this year. Before we submitted our application, we had some informal conversations with the Second Church Estates Commissioner, my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell), who chairs the Finance and Services Committee. He wrote in February this year to the Father of the House, the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams), who represented the British-American Parliamentary Group, saying:

“Sir Kevin Tebbit is currently reviewing the administration of the House. You could suggest to him that includes this subject”—

the funding for the four groups—

“in his review.”

We were pleased that he did so.

There are three reasons why the House of Commons Commission should take over responsibility for our funding. I realise that there will need to be an apportionment of the expense, if the Commission were to agree, between the House of Commons authorities and those in the House of Lords. The three reasons why I believe our applications should be approved are as follows. First, as a matter of principle, we are parliamentary bodies involved in the scrutiny of the Executive, among other things, and we should not be financially dependent on them.

Secondly, in terms of accountability, we receive public funds to do our work. In the current year, between the four bodies, we received funding of £3.3 million. We should be fully transparent and accountable for how that money is spent, and we would be if we came under the authority of the House of Commons Commission.

Thirdly, the transfer should take place because our work is important; it involves many Members of Parliament and many members of the other place. The CPA UK branch has 749 serving members—432 Members of Parliament and 317 peers—together with 509 associate members who are former members of either of the Houses of Parliament. The British group of the IPU has 779 current serving members and the British-American Parliamentary Group has 651. The British-Irish body is different; it is set up, in effect, as a Joint Committee of the UK Parliament and the Irish Dáil and has a limited membership of 25 full members from our Parliament and 20 associate members.

Let me say a little bit more about the three reasons for the transfer taking place. First, the principle that parliamentary bodies should be financially accountable to Parliament not the Executive is important; but, sadly, it is not just a point of theory. Our decision to apply to the Commission for grant-in-aid was prompted by the Treasury’s decision, taken unilaterally without consultation, to cut the budget of each of our four organisations by 5 per cent. in real terms in each year over the coming comprehensive spending review period. We met the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Mr. Timms), who brooked absolutely no negotiation and presented this to us a fait accompli, a done deal. Naturally, we wanted to defend the budgets of our bodies, but we are not seeking funding from the Commission because we think that it will be more generous to us than the Treasury, although we hope that, if it were to take us on, we would retain funding at our current level and get the same sort of inflation uplift from year to year as other parts of the parliamentary estate.

We recognise that the House of Commons Commission, if it took us on, will scrutinise our work and may press us for savings or changes of policy, but funding decisions by the Commission would be decisions taken by parliamentarians about the usefulness or relevance of our activities to the work of Parliament. That is different from the Executive taking unilateral decisions about how Parliament should do its work. So, in a way, we are not just seeking money from the House of Commons Commission, but protection from the power of the Executive.

Secondly, on accountability, the Commission, after we submitted our applications for grant-in-aid, sent back to us by return a series of penetrating questions, as follows. How did each of our groups set our budgets? Would we accept that we would have to be subject to value for money studies by the House of Commons Administration Estimate and Audit Committee? Of course, the answer was yes, we did accept that. We were asked whether, if the House of Commons had to make reductions in spending, we accepted that we too would have to receive reductions in our grant-in-aid. Yes, of course we do; there is no question. In all, 13 questions were asked and each of the groups provided detailed answers to them. If we were taken under the wing of the House of Commons Commission, we would comply fully with all its requirements and we would be more accountable, publicly and transparently, as a result, which we would welcome.

Thirdly, may I say a few words about the work of my group, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association? Our group, like the others, has the active participation of more than 50 per cent. of hon. Members of the House of Commons and, indeed, more than 50 per cent. of the members of the House of Lords. The CPA works to spread parliamentary democracy and good governance throughout the commonwealth. Our work is respected, not least by Sir Kevin Tebbit, who includes as Annex 2 in his report extracts from the 2006 Commonwealth Parliamentary Association publication by our study group on benchmarks for democratic legislatures. He uses the benchmarks that we developed as a kind of quality standard against which the independence, financial and otherwise, of our Parliament ought to be measured.

In 2005, among other things the CPA UK branch and the British group of the Inter-Parliamentary Union collaborated during the year of Africa, when the then Prime Minister took to the G8 Gleneagles summit and the UK presidency of the European Union proposals for a radical change in the relationship between the developed world and Africa. He commissioned the Commission for Africa report, and we two inter-parliamentary bodies responded by organising a conference with two representatives from each G8 country, each EU country and each country in Africa—one representative from the Government party and one from the Opposition—to discuss how we would ensure that our respective Governments met their side of the bargain: that is, how the donor countries would meet their side of the bargain in terms of additional funding and how the African recipient countries would meet theirs, as set out in the new partnership for Africa’s development, in terms of strengthening the rule of law, dealing with corruption and tackling conflict in the continent, and so on. We were doing work that is directly relevant to the aspirations of our Parliament. Last year, our CPA branch held the first parliamentary seminar on gender issues.

This year, we are holding four seminars, and the one in February was on restoring trust in the political process. Each seminar is held in the UK, and we invite representatives from other Commonwealth countries. In March, we held a seminar on Westminster parliamentary practice and procedure, and in June it was on the governance of the United Kingdom. A major seminar in November will be held on climate change when we shall seek to produce a toolkit to guide Members of Parliament in both developed and developing Commonwealth countries through the issue in their own Parliaments.

The CPA UK branch recently joined a consortium made up of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the National Audit Office, the House of Commons Overseas Office, the International Bar Association, and other bodies in bidding to provide parliamentary capacity-strengthening services to the Department for International Development. Hon. Members will know that we also arrange inward and outward delegations to and from other Commonwealth countries, and in recent years we have changed the focus of those visits more clearly and directly to address more political issues that are of concern to Members of our House and of the House of Lords in their work in this place.

All those activities are important to Parliament. Like some of the inter-parliamentary bodies that the House of Commons already funds, such as the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly, the CPA UK branch is expected from time to time to take its turn in hosting the international organisation’s annual conference. The year 2011 will be the CPA’s centenary year, which is the next year when it is our turn to play host to its annual conference. There will be an additional cost in that year of some £1.7 million at 2006 prices. When it is the turn of the NATO and OSCE Parliamentary Assemblies to host conferences, they must also put in unusual and supplementary estimates to cover the cost of those events. We have, naturally, told the House of Commons Commission that that cost is on the horizon. We were asked to reveal any large expenditure that might crop up in the next three years, and the centenary year is slightly beyond three years, but as we knew about it, we wanted to tell the Commission. I hope that it will support our application for funding that conference.

The four groups are independent and different from most, but not all, the functions and services that the Commission funds. We want to preserve our independence for many reasons, not least because we want to remain independent of the party Whips. We think it would be a bad thing and not in Parliament’s interest if the Whips took decisions on, for example, who represents those associations on foreign visits and if those decisions were made on the basis of patronage. That independence is important.

The CPA UK branch is a registered charity, and there is a question about whether the House of Commons Commission should fund independent groups, but there is a precedent in the History of Parliament Trust, which is a charity and is independent of Parliament, but receives grant in aid of £1.6 million a year from the Commission. Page 68 of the report states:

“There remains one area where the House does not have control over all the resources necessary to achieve it purposes. In 1990 the Ibbs report recommended that a number of Votes should be consolidated on the Parliamentary budget, including the annual grants-in-aid from the Treasury to the History of Parliament Trust, the British-American Parliamentary Group, the United Kingdom Branch of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the British Group of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. In the event the Commission took on only the grant-in-aid to the History of Parliament Trust; the Treasury still makes the grants to the international bodies, now including the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body.”

At that time, there was no funding threat to our bodies from the Treasury, and their view was that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. However, the vulnerability of grant in aid from the Treasury has been made clear, and I hope that the House of Commons Commission will provide the protection that we need. The Tebbit report recommends

“that the House of Commons Commission should take over responsibility for making grants-in-aid to the four inter-parliamentary bodies.”

My right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House is a member of the House of Commons Commission. She was present earlier, and I hope that my hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House, will ask her and let me know whether the Leader of the House will support the application of the four inter-parliamentary groups to receive funding and financial scrutiny from the Commission. She may have already have put the question, and if so, I hope that she will be able to reply during her response.

The right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), who represents the Conservative party on the Commission, was in the Chamber earlier, and I ask her hon. Friend the Member for North-West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara) to talk to her to see whether he can persuade her to support what would be a right and sensible decision by the Commission to take responsibility for our bodies. That would be in the interest of Parliament, and it would certainly be in the interest of the bodies. I hope that a favourable decision will be made in good time before Christmas, so that we are aware of the financial situation that we expect to be in next year and can plan our affairs accordingly.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr. Weir.

I have been a Member of Parliament for only two and a half years, and it is only six months since I was asking what I hope were difficult questions of the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) about the House’s environmental performance and giving evidence to Sir Kevin Tebbit in preparation for his report. When I did so, I did not expect to find myself in my present position with its ensuing responsibilities.

I am reminded of someone I knew in the Foreign Office who sent an instructing telegram to someone who was conducting trade negotiations in Paris. The person who was supposed to undertake the negotiations fell ill, so the person I knew had to fly to Paris, undertake the negotiations, send a reporting telegram home to London, fly back, read the reporting telegram and thank the person who had done the negotiations. His final telegram began, “You spoke well.”

I shall begin with green issues, which are one of hon. Members’ main concerns. Clearly, it is important that the Commission take a balanced approach to green issues. The hon. Member for North Devon described significant improvements in recent years that were made against the difficult background of an awkward building that was not designed to cope with modern technology and the ever-increasing demands placed on it. There are some excellent statistics at the back of the 29th report, and the Commission will notice that, over five years, despite significant improvements, the estate’s energy use per square meter has increased and that levels of waste recycling have not changed significantly. I am sure that it will take those things into account.

When we look at the work of the Commission and the responsibilities of the House authorities, we can see how different issues interrelate. I see that much more clearly than I did was an ordinary Member. Several hon. Members mentioned the importance of improving IT and the improvements that have been made following the establishment of the Parliamentary Information and Communications Technology Department. Improvements in off-site IT and communications support for Members will be beneficial, because the pressure to provide more staff in the Palace will be reduced. Improvements on a number of fronts can be made by pulling only a small number of levers.

We heard about the increasing number of people who work in the Palace. Again, at the back of the report there are some interesting statistics on Members’ staff and the staff payroll. Hon. Members may wish to learn about the detail underlying those numbers, and I have secured some information that may further inform the Commission’s considerations. The latest estimate for the number of people occupying the estate is 4,700, including 646 Members, 1,850 House staff, 1,250 Members’ staff and 950 other individuals, who can be disaggregated into 475 policemen or other security staff, 175 members of the press, nearly 80 people who work on other services, 120 contractors, and a small number of members of other groups including, for example, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. When we look at the pressure on accommodation and what can be done about it, it is helpful to consider all of the groups that contribute to it.

I assume that the figure for contractors includes everyone who is not directly employed by the House, although I do not expect the Deputy Leader of the House to confirm that now. I hope that she agrees that we should, as far as possible and as a matter of principle, directly employ as many of our own staff as we can, as opposed to using agency staff or individuals employed by other people. I realise that financial considerations sometimes make such arrangements impossible.

In all honesty, I am not in a position to respond to that because, clearly, the most important thing is that the Commission should use its resources efficiently. I do not know whether it would decide to employ all estate staff directly.

Many hon. Members spoke about the importance of engaging the public. It is important that the most disengaged group—young people—are given priority. That has happened now following the work by the Administration Committee and the investment in educational facilities. My constituents are in a different situation from those of the Leader of the House of Commons, or those of the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), because my constituency is 250 miles away. Last winter, five young people—they were about 15 years old—came down to London to attend an event organised by No. 10. Of those five young people, two had never been to London. Indeed, not only had they not visited Parliament before, they had never travelled so far from their homes, which is why we must consider the needs of people from faraway constituencies.

My hon. Friend the Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) spoke eloquently about the work done by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the British-American Parliamentary Group and the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body. His words and his persuasive case will be listened to intently by members of the Commission, who are aware of the upcoming 2011 conference. I am not in a position to speak on the Commission’s behalf, but I shall report what he said to the Leader of the House. The Commission’s decisions are collective—they are not made purely by the Leader of the House, so it would be wrong of me to make any commitments, but I repeat that my hon. Friend made a persuasive case.

I agree with the hon. Member for North-West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara) about the web. An £11 million investment programme will run over the next five years, and the Librarian is particularly conscious of the importance of improving the gateway. The site is good when one enters it and uses it to track, for example, the progress of a piece of legislation, but the gateway is not user-friendly. That is well understood and work is under way to improve it.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen, North (Mr. Doran) spoke about the Administration Committee’s work. Obviously, that work is both thorough and wide-ranging, and I am sure that everybody is grateful to him for his leadership. Hon. Members made numerous practical suggestions, but I see no need to comment on all of them. I conclude by saying how grateful we are to all members of staff. They have difficult responsibilities and work in an extremely challenging environment, but they are greatly appreciated.

I thank you, Mr. Weir, and all right hon. and hon. Members who have taken part in the debate. We have had a very good discussion about and look at the various areas of work in which the Commission and the House service are involved. We were delighted to welcome the Leader of the House, who has recently come on to the Commission and brings, as she pointed out, the benefit of many years’ experience in the House. I also pay tribute to the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, the former Leader of the House, who served on the Commission for a year and was a very good member of it. He had very interesting ideas and priorities, which he pursued with great determination. We will miss him because he contributed very much to the Commission’s work.

The right hon. and learned Lady was right to augment what I said about the Tebbit report with the attention that she gave to his points about the use of resources, the need for the House always to ensure that it is receiving good value for taxpayers’ resources and the need to evaluate what we do, for example, through a scorecard system.

The hon. Member for North-West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara), speaking for the Opposition, was right to say that some hon. Members remain dissatisfied with the ICT services. The Administration Committee has quantified and measured that and flagged it up, but I hope that we have reassured him that it is recognised and that more work is taking place on that front. He urged us to pursue a more green procurement agenda, and I will certainly ensure that the Officers of the House take that on board.

The hon. Gentleman referred to the new security passes—I have taken delivery of mine just today. There is some confusion on the part of some hon. Members, although not the hon. Gentleman, who think that the PIN—personal identification number—system will be used at every point throughout the estate where the card is required. That is not true. Only at the external perimeter will the PIN system be needed, but he makes a good point that if the cards were in any sense inhibiting the ability of hon. Members to get to Divisions, we would have to attend to that as a priority.

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman’s points about reforms of European scrutiny will be noted in the appropriate places. He also warned against targets for targets’ sake, which was a commendable thought. He let us off the hook slightly by saying that we could have priorities instead of targets, but I took the point that he was making.

Objectives.

Objectives—that was it.

The hon. Member for Aberdeen, North (Mr. Doran) described the work of the Administration Committee, for which we are very grateful. I am always very grateful when it is the hon. Gentleman and not me who gets stuck with answering for some of the tricky decisions. In particular, that Committee took the difficult decisions about smoking. My hon. Friend the Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) said that he hoped that smokers would not be given too unsatisfactory a deal. I do not think that they have been. The covered terrace between Portcullis House and Norman Shaw South, for example, is quite a civilised place to go and smoke. I must say that I would not much fancy hovering in some of the inner courtyards, but needs must as the devil drives. If they feel the need, at least there are those facilities for smokers dotted about the estate.

Choke points.

Yes, indeed—quite so.

I thank the Committee for its ongoing work on ICT issues. The aspiration for the facilities outside the Palace to be as good as those inside is absolutely right. As the Deputy Leader of the House said, that will overcome some of the pressure to have more and more staff located inside the House.

I was also very relieved that the hon. Member for Aberdeen, North and not me found himself in the firing line over giving priority to MPs in accessing the services of the House. I welcome the fact that it sounds as though he has had a constructive meeting with staff to examine the complexity of some of these issues. I think that my hon. Friend the Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey acknowledged that in some cases common-sense solutions will be needed to try to make things better for everyone.

My hon. Friend considered many aspects of the work of the House. He referred to the possibility of our ending up with a temporary partial evacuation of the building to facilitate some of the works that need to take place. It is, as he acknowledged, far too early to make even any preliminary judgment as to whether that will be necessary or desirable. There has been confusion in some of the press reporting that the need to replace the roof might exacerbate that. I am not in any sense minimising the significance of that task, which will be huge, but I think that the replacement of the mechanical and engineering infrastructure will be more disruptive of the work that goes on inside the building. That is absolutely enormous in its scope. The basic infrastructure of the building is more than a little aged and will have to be replaced. If a point comes at which we are replacing entire heating and plumbing systems, there will have to be quite careful consideration of how that can be done incrementally or whether, if we try to keep going with business as usual through such major works, there is a danger that we will have one or two unfortunate consequences, not least to the public purse. As we have already acknowledged, we have to use the public’s money wisely.

My hon. Friend’s points about diversity were well made, and I will ensure that they are given attention by the relevant parts of the administration. He referred to a green shopping list and the need for stickers asking us all to ask ourselves whether we need to use the lifts. I take his point. I do not know the answer to his question about recycled paper, but I will place that in front of the appropriate Officers.

My hon. Friend referred to facilities for cycling. I myself have just resumed cycling after a brief interval of some 30 years, and I take his point that we need facilities around the place. We have taken the view, on security advice, that we can allow only passholders to bring their bicycles within the boundary of the parliamentary estate. Beyond the perimeter, there are other issues, in that this area of Parliament square and Whitehall, with the Government Departments in it, is in itself a security zone in which considerations are a little more complicated than they might be for any other London street. However, I acknowledge the desirability of what he describes.

My hon. Friend’s suggestion that we use some of our staff as a representative group to test services is very good. He referred to putting together packages for visitors from other parts of the country, which was a very interesting idea. I am entirely in sympathy with what he said about lobbies and the green card system and his points about more joint working with the House of Lords. I take the point in his gentle chiding about the Tebbit process, in that we decided to embark on a review that was limited to a test of how effective the changes from the previous review, the Braithwaite review, had been and that the recommendations that Sir Kevin has come forward with are by no means earth shattering. Therefore, I will feed my hon. Friend’s view through to my fellow Commission members. At the very least, what he has recommended should be given favourable consideration.

The hon. Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley), in his capacity as chair of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, spoke about the work of the international bodies and flagged up the 2011 centenary conference. It is not my place to give rise to unjustifiable hopes, but I will say to him gently that, although perhaps the devil will be in the detail, he and his colleagues can consider that they have cleared one of the higher fences on the course by getting a positive recommendation from the Finance and Services Committee.

The Deputy Leader of the House, whom we welcome in her new role, also made the point about ICT. She gave us a detailed breakdown of the different categories of users of the parliamentary estate, who number in total some 4,700 in the Commons part of the estate. The categories into which she broke that down included even the press, for whom facilities have recently been refurbished. One can only hope that the new comfort in which they find themselves will stop them writing such beastly things, but that is probably more of a hope than an expectation.

The Deputy Leader of the House also pressed for improvements to arrangements for visitors coming from far away, pointing out that some visitors to Parliament from her constituency were making their first visit to London. Having driven through her constituency last Sunday, I appreciate that the communication difficulties from there to London are comparable to those in my own, and we must do all that we can to help more visitors come here.

I hope that I have addressed some of the main problems mentioned. If there are any outstanding points, I shall respond to right hon. and hon. Members. To echo the words of others, I thank the staff of the House for everything that they do to improve the efficiency of our work. We are all very grateful to them.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at half-past Four o’clock.