House of Commons Governance Committee
Oral evidence: House of Commons Governance, HC 692
Tuesday 21 October 2014
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 21 October 2014.
Members present: Rt Hon Jack Straw (Chair); Sir Oliver Heald; Mr David Heath; Jesse Norman; Ian Paisely; Jacob Rees-Mogg; Valerie Vaz; Mr Dave Watts
Questions 1-61
Witnesses: Lord Browne of Madingley, Government Lead Non-Executive Board Member, Sir Amyas Morse, Comptroller and Auditor General, and Rt Hon Peter Riddell, Director, Institute for Government, gave evidence.
Q1 Chair: Lord Browne, Sir Amyas, Mr Riddell, thank you very much for agreeing to give us evidence in the first public session of this governance Committee. All of you are well aware of the Committee’s provenance. We were established to review the governance of the House of Commons, and we are paying particular attention to the nature of the senior role, which is currently a combined role of Clerk and chief executive, and whether it should be split and if so, in what way and how that split should operate. We are also, and critically, considering wider issues of to whom this individual or individuals should be responsible, how the current Commission operates and the wider consequences of changes in governance for the House and the whole Palace.
Since you are all very experienced in this area and will be familiar with some of the issues that we are wrestling with, I wonder whether each of you might want to say anything by way of opening introduction.
Lord Browne: Good afternoon. I will just limit myself to one point on the question of governance, which, at least for me, probably summarises everything, and everything else become a detail. Governance must start with clarity, which is difficult to achieve, and with a clear understanding of accountability, which includes decision rights. Who gets to decide what and to whom do you report when you have done it? If you can sort out those two things, almost everything else falls into place, but there is no fudge that substitutes getting those two things right. That is a difficult conversation to have, as I have discovered over almost 50 years in business and a bit of time serving different Governments doing different things.
Sir Amyas Morse: Well, I agree with that and would have been very happy for that to be my remark, but I guess I will add to it. Whatever construct you are putting in place, it is a helpful test to look at the tasks that it may have to undertake and think whether it is actually likely to achieve them better or worse than what you have there now. You have some substantial tasks coming up such as the refurbishment of the Palace so, “Whatever this is, is it going to work to ensure that the reputation of the House is not damaged by something that is not well controlled and well delivered?” is the sort of question—if I was sitting in your place—that I would be using to keep myself flying in a straight line, so to speak.
Peter Riddell: My perspective is drawn from chairing the Hansard Society for five years up to 2012, and from my role as director of the Institute for Government for the past three years. The institute has looked at various governance arrangements in Government and in Parliament.
I would obviously endorse what Lord Browne and Sir Amyas have said. However, although there may be a clarity about the basic question that the Committee is looking at, I also think that there are quite a lot of knock-on consequences in terms of the expertise required by the staff of the House, particularly in relation to the refurbishment work to which Sir Amyas referred, and also for the role of Members. Some of the problems arise from ambiguities over the role of Members in relation to the Administration, which also has to be tackled. I have a clear view on the basic question, but the more I explored it, and looked at some of consequences of it, those also have to be addressed by the Committee.
Q2 Chair: Thank you very much. It is inevitably slightly arbitrary, but we thought that we would like to look at issues in sections: board effectiveness; role of the chief executive; the role of the Clerk of the House, including as currently as accounting officer; good governance—public versus private sector; some civil service case studies; Member involvement; and the issue of the role of audit, which is sometimes not as clear as it should be.
If I may kick off, what do you think are the defining features of a successful board, and there is a board here called the Commission, which is the same thing? Are there are any particular differences in the public and private sectors? Would there be distinct differences about the board in the Commons, given that it is ultimately responsible to 650 MPs?
Lord Browne: I think my expertise is in the private sector, but I have spent the last four years working on advisory boards, and they are effectively advisory boards, which look over some of the work of different Departments of State.
To my mind, the most important thing to think about with a board is diversity, in its true sense, of its membership. It has to be right for the task at hand. In other words, people need to have some expertise that is appropriate for the task, and they should have sufficiently different viewpoints so that a decision can be made by argumentation rather than by simply following an instruction. That is the first requirement, and it is really very important.
The second important consideration is that, surprisingly, people do join boards and they do not have time to fulfil the role. So a requirement is to have people who actually have time not just to turn up to meetings, but to think through what they going to do before they go to the meetings, and to network, prepare and do all the things that you would normally do to be a full member. I think that is important.
Thirdly, I think agendas are really critical. They have to be both fulfilling to the task and interesting to the members, so that you can engage them the whole time. I think that is quite important. After all, being on a board is not meant to be a life sentence; it is meant to be something that engages future progress, so you have got to make it interesting.
Fourthly, it is important to make sure that someone on the board looks to making sure that whatever is agreed is actually done, and there is some feedback loop involved.
As an ideal, I would like to see all those things happening on a board. If it is an advisory board, everything is of course muted, because there is no statutory right to intervene if things do not happen, whereas if it is a board with statutory rights, it will intervene if its direction is not actually set. As to the agenda, it depends on the structure that you have underneath it. It would probably come back to the chief executive. In the corporate world the saying goes that a CEO proposes and a board disposes. I think that is a pretty good rule to have. Otherwise, you simply have a board as a higher form of management, as opposed to a source of direction and representation of the owner or the controller of the enterprise. The CEO, representing the management, must be the person proposing all and everything to the board.
Q3 Ian Paisley: Lord Browne, you said in your opening comments that we should start with clarity, which is probably the perfect place to start. The House has in effect two boards at present: the Commission and the Management Board. Do you see a lack of clarity in the current arrangements? If so, can you identify it?
Lord Browne: I am afraid that I don’t know enough about the structure to comment on it. I think that having two boards doing one thing is always dangerous, because creating a precise division between the two is usually difficult. I just don’t know enough about your precise details to know how it actually works. I have not experienced it, of course, as I am not a Member of this House.
Q4 Ian Paisley: What provisions then or considerations should be borne in mind when operating a two-board structure?
Lord Browne: The single most important thing is the decision rights: who gets to decide what and how they integrate. I would never in a corporate life propose that there be two side by side boards because it would cause confusion. I might consider having one board reporting to another, similar to the German system of governance, but they do slightly different things. One produces executive action, the other one produces representation of the affected members: labour, capital and things like that.
I would not normally have two boards looking over one thing, because I think it is very difficult to identify separation. It is kind of unnatural. It can be done but it is difficult. You then have to figure out what happens if someone strays from one to the other and who gets to regulate that. It is quite difficult.
Q5 Chair: At BP, you had the BP board underneath that. As chief executive, did you chair your own executive as if it were a committee?
Lord Browne: I had a management committee. Correct. That is a very standard process, I would say. In most corporations, there is a board of directors, which is the representation of the shareholding in effect. Then there is a management committee—rarely called a board—that has delegated authorities from the board to make decisions and it must report back to the board to explain how well it did. What did it do and did it do the right thing? The board may say that you did the wrong thing and you need to see who needs to go; or you did the right thing, have more and do more.
Q6 Jesse Norman: Lord Browne, if I could persist on this line of thought for a second with you. When you were at BP, how hard did you work your board members?
Lord Browne: Working is the wrong word. There is a very important point to note. I remember we took a great deal of time with board members about this. Individual board members other than the chairman have no individual authority. They only derive their authority as a collective. That is very important, otherwise different board members could pick off different bits of the executive and would obviously cause confusion. It is a really important rule, at least in the private sector, that the board has unitary not individual authority. The chairman, because he is there more often than the board, has delegated authority to operate as the board between meetings.
Q7 Jesse Norman: That is a very helpful comment, but it does not bear on the point I was making.
Lord Browne: I am sorry—that was a precursor. I would brief the board. I would ensure that there were no surprises, wherever possible, and that they had the context in which decisions were being made. I would brief them to ensure that they understood what the executive were doing.
Q8 Jesse Norman: Obviously, non-executives on the BP board would have been paid a certain amount, but how many hours would you expect them to work a month?
Lord Browne: Always more than specified in the contract. The contracts normally say 25 or 50 days a year, but it varies. The big thing about being a board member is that you need to have in your back pocket enough time to use when something goes wrong. When things are going fine, it is a pretty standard job: you get together and there are meetings, committee meetings, and you have briefings. The problem is when something goes wrong—you are then on duty the whole time because you need to make a lot of decisions.
Q9 Jesse Norman: So to sum up, it might be two to four days a month, but a lot more if there was an emergency.
Lord Browne: Yes. I cannot imagine doing a statutory board in less than two days a month, even if you really are very fast on the uptake, simply because you need to spend time with your other board members to deliberate and discuss.
Q10 Jesse Norman: That is very helpful. Sir Amyas?
Sir Amyas Morse: I want to add in something from my prior life as a senior partner in an accounting firm that might have some illuminating parallels here. There was a partnership board in the accounting firm. The people who worked in the enterprise were in fact the owners of the enterprise and also represented on the board, but in some ways there may be some parallels to Parliament that might be worth thinking about a little.
There was a desire to have partners represented on the board—people who were seen as leaders of different groups. It was quite a political process: people would come forward who were seen as representing and protecting the interests of their groups. You had to assess the technical proposals being made by the executive committee, so you had board members who were there for skill as well as for representational purposes. That was always quite a difficult mixture to manage, but it is worth recognising that those two elements exist and are not the same.
You do not have a neat separation whereby, as a non-executive you are kind of representing it, whereas on the board in a corporate environment you are representing the shareholders. In a partnership-type board there is much less clear distinction. The interested parties are in fact there. I suppose that in Parliament you could say that the users, the consumers of the services—the ones who are most intimately affected by the decision—may want to have representation, but you also need to have skilled technical judgment and credible challenge being brought to bear. That makes it a complex beast to manage. I think it is fair to recognise that.
Q11 Jesse Norman: I have a further question for Mr Riddell afterwards, but to be clear on this, Sir Amyas, with the House of Commons Commission there is of course a representative element; however, otherwise is it not true that this is very different from the minimum criteria laid down by Lord Browne? You do not have board members with expertise in the way that you would describe on a corporate board. Board members have nothing like the same time commitment or capacity to respond to emergency changes. Do you recognise the description we have been given, which is that in some respects it is more of a rubber stamp? There are large numbers of discretionary areas in which it is not actually discharging its job, according to those minimum criteria.
Sir Amyas Morse: I am afraid that, rather than buying into that description, I would say that if you have board members who do not have the capacity to credibly challenge the executive, it is a bit difficult to know how they can contribute, unless just in a representative capacity.
Q12 Jesse Norman: So they could not exercise the function of accountability that is central to—
Sir Amyas Morse: If you don’t know enough, particularly if you are not there representing the shareholders—even more so, I would say of a public sector board—the challenge has got to lie in the authority and insight of the individual that commands respect and gets listened to. I think that is quite crucial.
Q13 Jesse Norman: It is vital, from what you have both said so far, that every member of the board has some form of personal accountability for the decisions they are making jointly.
Lord Browne: That is true. The important thing is jointly. But then, of course, the board itself needs to govern its members, so that if people are a weak link something needs to be done.
Q14 Jesse Norman: Final question for Mr Riddell. I think you said that you had been the previous chair of the Hansard Society. The Hansard Society commission of 2005 said, in a report—it was diagnosing difficulties in the structure and governance of Parliament—“There are a number of problems with this arrangement from the point of view of parliamentary independence and effectiveness. First, the Speaker chairs this administrative body although elected by Members principally with regard to how he or she will perform the role of chairing business in the chamber. It may well not always be the case that the person with all of the qualities to be an excellent Speaker of the House is at the same time the right person to manage the House’s administration.” Do you think that is a concern? If so, would there be a case for splitting the roles?
Peter Riddell: I was not responsible for that. It is a number of years since I chaired Hansard. The actual description of the process is, of course, totally accurate. Having chaired the first hustings, indeed, from which the current Speaker emerged in 2009, I do not think there is a single reference from the then 10 candidates for Speaker about how they would run the House in the way we have been discussing it for the last 20 minutes, as opposed to what they do in the Chamber. There is a dilemma there. The attributes which you Members focus on when you elect a Speaker are not those that are relevant to what we are discussing.
If I could just develop that point. I think the problem we have got is more acute even than the ones we have discussed so far. It is not just the Commission, but also the Administration Committee and the Finance and Services Committee. There is a panoply of Committees where Members express their views on matters to do with the running, which further blur lines between the officials carrying out administration and the Members.
Taking up Amyas’s point if I might, which is very apt, you are users. It is not like John’s board, which is in a sense detached. It is a very different structure. The point about users is a helpful parallel; it does argue, in terms of clarity, for a degree of restraint on the exercise of those powers, otherwise it makes the actual administration by the officials terribly difficult, whatever structure you have there.
Q15 Mr Watts: At the heart of the problem and dilemma we are facing in this Committee, is that there are two particular roles: one between day-to-day management—running the building and the staff and managing resources—and the second role, which is the procedures of the House.
With your background, do you believe the chief executive needs to be a master of the core functions? If so, how would you suggest we could bring together those two different skills that may be required? At the end of that process, have you got a view about who should be dominant in that relationship?
Lord Browne: This is a question asked by almost every organisation; for example, the civil service itself. There are two very different things. One is the delivery of existing policy, which is a delivery job and should be in the hands of someone who is very good at it. A chief operating officer is normally the name of that person and they normally report to the chief executive officer, who is the principal representative of the board, whether that be a members’ board or a shareholders’ board. She or he is there to create policy and to have it approved by the board and to make sure that it is delegated into the hands of others who get things done.
It sort of works, as long as people are clear about who does what and, in particular, you recruit into the role the right people, because there is no point in recruiting someone as a chief operating officer if they really believe that they are a chief executive officer. That is usually what messes things up. It sounds simple, but it is very difficult to do.
Q16 Mr Watts: I am sorry to press you on this point, but out of those two functions, do you think that the candidate that is the most senior person needs to come from one of those disciplines, or could they come from both? Could you be the chief executive, for example, if you were not a Clerk? Could you be the chief executive if you had no knowledge or background of running a major organisation like this?
Lord Browne: The way I think about this is: which of those roles is closer to the real purpose of the entity that it is serving? Very rarely is the real purpose the effective running of the internals of an institution. There is usually something that is a bigger purpose, and the person who is in charge of the bigger purpose should be the person who then delegates the running of the institution to somebody else who really is a world expert at that.
Q17 Jacob Rees-Mogg: The issue of the Clerk as the accounting officer—Mr Riddell, perhaps you might like to have a go at this one. What do you think the important parts of the accounting officer role are for the Clerk?
Peter Riddell: Essentially, to be sure that the proper procedures are being followed in the expenditure of the money. Obviously, in an organisation of this size, it involves a degree of delegation. Amyas has spent many years, as well as in his current function, explaining that. I would see it as being aware of how money is being spent, and particularly being aware of where things are potentially going wrong, being answerable—it is complicated in the case of the House of Commons—for whatever goes wrong and being responsible for remedying it. That is why I favour a single person, taking up what Lord Browne said, with a delegation for running the many functions of the chief operating officer model. But you have to have a single person as the accounting officer at the top where the buck stops.
Q18 Jacob Rees-Mogg: So if the job were split either nominally or effectively, the accounting officer would need to remain the Clerk because he would be the senior person, in Lord Browne’s view—I think that that is a view that most people would share—who would be the person dealing with the basic operation of what was going on and the fundamental principle of the House of Commons, rather than the internal organisation.
Peter Riddell: Exactly. I think that leads on to other questions, which might be pursued later, about the training, background and career experience of the Clerks. In terms of the accountability structure that you have described, Mr Rees-Mogg, I agree with you.
Q19 Jacob Rees-Mogg: And you would therefore only want one accounting officer. You would not want to split the accounting officers among different levels.
Peter Riddell: No.
Q20 Jacob Rees-Mogg: I have rather led the witness, but your answers were so clear.
Peter Riddell: No, no. I think that there was an interesting parallel, which Lord Browne has recently had experience of, in the civil service where there was a somewhat unsuccessful experiment of double-heading. It has now moved to a simpler model with the Cabinet Secretary as head of the civil service but with, effectively, a COO—he is actually described as a chief executive, but in practice he is a COO—of the civil service doing a lot of those functions. I think that most people would regard that as a more satisfactory model.
Q21 Chair: Sir Amyas, you should have some views on accounting officers.
Sir Amyas Morse: Let me just add a little bit about the slightly higher levels of being an accounting officer—I am obviously indebted to managing public money—allowing for the limitations of its translation into the context of Parliament. Let us take it as a parallel. It is quite instructive to look at it and see what it requires. Yes, it requires efficient and effective use of the resource. It requires that the resource is being applied with value for money—in other words, not just that it is being applied, but that it is being applied intelligently to achieve the higher results. It also requires the accounting officer to be capable of challenging a Minister if the Minister’s proposals do not point towards value for money. In other words, it is a big role, not only doing a tiny job; it can be a role in which there is a requirement to issue challenge. That is quite clearly stated here in the section “Advice to Ministers” and I do not think that it is irrelevant to the discussion that we are having today.
You are asking a lot. If you take the Treasury formulation, an accounting officer is generally the senior executive in the organisation. That is very clearly stated here. There is nothing to prevent a principal accounting officer from appointing subsidiary accounting officers, if that is required, particularly of agencies and so forth, but normally it is the senior executive in the organisation who, under “Managing Public Money”, should be so appointed and should take the heavy responsibilities of a strategic nature as well as simply of an operational nature on board.
Q22 Chair: I wonder if I could try to flush out some of the issues that Mr Watts identifies. Given the singularity of what Parliament does, how necessary is it for the senior official, the Clerk cum chief executive, to have a comprehensive knowledge of what happens here, or should he or she simply be qualified as someone who knows about being a senior executive?
If I may give examples from my own experience—since I am about to be complimentary about them, I can name them—in the Home Office, I appointed David Omand as permanent secretary. He had some parallel experience as director-general of GCHQ, but he had no direct experience of the subject matter of the Home Office. He was, by every account, a very successful chief executive. In the Foreign Office, the good chief executives came from the diplomatic service and you can argue that you needed that particular skill.
In the Ministry of Justice, I appointed Sir Suma Chakrabarti, who had had no experience whatever of the subject matter of the Ministry of Justice, because his work had been in the Treasury and in DFID, but he, too, was very successful, not least in challenging what people were doing in the organisation and securing quite a lot of change. I can see Sir Amyas nodding.
Is that experience that I have had and witnessed of relevance here, or do we have to say that the skills required of the senior person are so singular that you have to have those skills before you look at other attributes?
Lord Browne: The answer, I believe, lies in the structure below the leader. You can bring in a leader who has generic skills—they have to have experience of understanding how to grapple with problem solving, how to build strategy and all the sorts of things that you have to do—but the substance knowledge, if they do not have it, has to be in their deputies, in the directors general, or the second permanent secretaries in the case of the civil service, where it often is. It is very rare that you would bring in a whole top team for a Department with no one with experience in the Department. It depends on how you balance the team and, in particular, how you recruit the top person with that in mind.
Peter Riddell: One of the key functions, whoever becomes Clerk/chief executive, is to maintain the confidence of Members. That is where the user parallel that Amyas drew earlier is relevant. It is difficult to do what you did at the Ministry of Justice—to bring in someone completely fresh. However, taking up Lord Browne’s point, I do not think that they necessarily, for example—the relevant thing here—have to be the total master of every procedural thing. They do not have to be picked because they are procedural experts, although indeed in the past one of the jobs of the Clerk has been to revise “Erskine May”.
I was in Holyrood two weeks ago, for fairly obvious reasons after the referendum, and talking to the Clerk/Chief Executive, as he is known there, Paul Grice, and some of his colleagues. Although his background is mainly a Clerk’s one, one of his deputies might be more of an expert on procedure, even in a relatively young institution such as the Scottish Parliament. It has to be someone who is trusted, so it is probably someone who has been around here for a bit, but they don’t necessarily have to be chosen because they are the latest editor of “Erskine May”. That is perhaps an important distinction.
Taking Lord Browne’s point, and leaving aside having a COO as deputy, I think there is an argument for bringing people in below the top level—the equivalent of director general or second permanent secretary. That is where there could be some very welcome interchange. The top role has to be someone who understands the institution, because it is very difficult to do it otherwise, but they do not necessarily have to be the absolute expert on procedure. That could be the Clerk Assistant, or whatever.
Lord Browne: Can I just contradict myself by saying that in the corporate sector the contemporary way of doing things is to bring in someone who knows everything about the job, almost ready-made and ready to go? You recruit against a very specific set of substance knowledge nowadays. Very rarely do you appoint a generalist.
Q23 Valerie Vaz: I want to pick up on the comments about the civil service. The Chair mentioned Suma Chakrabarti, and it is slightly different in the civil service, isn’t it? I come from a civil service background where there is an encouragement to move around different departments. People may not be expert in, say, DFID or whatever, but they do move around after two years or two and a half years, which is actually encouraged. They want you to do that because it is better for the organisation. We have heard from Lord Browne that there is more of a parallel with the civil service, as a public institution, than with companies. Is there not?
Sir Amyas Morse: It is not quite the same as the civil service, but it is a very instructive parallel. The civil service is used to receiving people into jobs who have been doing something quite different. They are all civil servants, and they understand the culture and how you get things done, but it is not odd to have somebody coming into a post. There aren’t the normal antibodies that you would find if you had somebody coming in who did not know much about it and who was trying to find a way to get leverage. Such a person could get into trouble very quickly if they did not have a very supportive environment. The civil service provides an almost uniquely supportive environment when somebody comes in, and you have a fantastic private office that works very hard to make sure that no mistakes are made and no embarrassment is caused while the person is finding their feet. I don’t believe I am in a position to answer this question, but you have to ask yourselves whether that is replicated in the organisation we are talking about, because that is a very good test of how far you can rely on doing that. Or would the test be, “This person is here, so how supportive do we really feel?” You just have to ask yourselves what the reality is.
Lord Browne: I think the civil service is now recruiting people at senior level with direct skill sets that are exactly needed for the job. I recently met the finance directors, and several of them come from outside. They are recruited specifically into the job.
Q24 Valerie Vaz: I want to counter that point. There is a constant skills update within the civil service. People are asked for their skills, and there is the possibility of secondment, but I think it is the lack of money that allows that to happen so that civil servants can get more expertise.
Peter Riddell: There ought to be much more interchange in, say, the Clerks Department. It is regarded as slightly adventurous to go to work for the Leader of the House in the Cabinet Office. There is a regular secondee, so it doesn’t strike me as an enormous cultural challenge. Although it is a valuable experience to see the Leader of the House’s Office, we ought to be much more extensive with secondments to the private sector, to local government or wherever. At present I happen to have a member of the Clerks department seconded to the Institute for Government who is doing an outstanding job on a very interesting project. We will see what happens to their career, but I think that that is a good thing. The Clerks department is not very far from the Institute for Government, but it is doing it more broadly.
Again, I was struck in Scotland by the experience of some of the Clerks. My impression, which I would not want to overstate—perhaps it is the small size of Edinburgh and everything—is that they are much more involved with non-parliamentary bodies. They are non-executives on X or Y. That would be good to broaden the experience at a medium level. That would be advantageous, as well as seeking to recruit one or two tiers down from the top because if you go in at the absolute top level you get tissue rejection; I think that is the appropriate phrase.
Q25 Valerie Vaz: Turning to the construction of the House. The civil service knows who the top dog is, don’t they? It is always going to be the Prime Minister. Here, it feels like it is not quite clear, perhaps as the two boards are running in parallel. Would Mr or Mrs Speaker be the ultimate person that everything derives from? To the public, I suggest they are, but maybe not in the House. How do you see that role?
Peter Riddell: It goes back to what Lord Browne said about the chairman and chief executive. On a minor scale, I have about 40 or 45 people at the Institute for Government. They regard me as the immediate boss but Lord Sainsbury is the chairman. It is a very different relationship. That is true of virtually any organisation. Amyas has a chairman too. It is quite clear who is the executive boss who determines careers and appraisals. I do not think that is complicated at all, except that because of the extent of political involvement there are some very fuzzy lines here; it shouldn’t be.
Q26 Valerie Vaz: And it can be straightened out?
Peter Riddell: I hope so.
Q27 Sir Oliver Heald: I am asking about Member involvement; that is my topic. However, on the point about training for the Clerks department and others on secondments—perhaps I can direct this to Peter for a moment—should there be something as strong as saying that every decade, somebody in the House service should spend six months or a year on secondment with a company?
Peter Riddell: Absolutely—a company or big voluntary organisation or whatever. Regardless, it should be an automatic thing for the high flyers.
Q28 Sir Oliver Heald: A membership organisation is a funny way of describing the House of Commons. What is tried at the moment through the House Committees such as Administration, and Finance and Services is to have quite large Committees that reflect a range of opinion of Members of Parliament. In a way, their views are gleaned using those two quite large Committees—Finance and Services, and Administration. What do you think about that as a way of involving Members, given that it is not an executive role in any way but means that quite a lot of people are involved in giving their views on these topics?
Peter Riddell: I think it muddies the waters considerably. The view of the staff is that it leads to micro-management. Even quite minor decisions have to go to a Committee. In any other organisation—I draw a minor parallel with my very small one—the idea that a board sub-committee would be determining charging, for example, which is what some of the Committees here do, would be daft. I decide what we charge for a room in 2, Carlton Gardens with my events team. Unless it was a big issue, I would not dream of referring to the board because that is not what it is there for. However, here, quite low levels of decisions are taken by those service Committees; I do not think that helps at all.
Q29 Sir Oliver Heald: Then you come to the Commission, which is of course chaired by the Speaker and includes the Leader of the House, the shadow Leader of the House and three elected Back-Bench Members. There is political input in that the Opposition and the Government are represented. There are people in positions who are involved in arranging the way that things are done here, the Speaker, who is in overall charge of the Chamber and everything, and three individuals who have usually been selected because they are quite senior, respected in their parties and so on. What do you make of that model as the board?
Lord Browne: I don’t know whether I can answer this question clearly. It seems to me that you have got two objectives here. One is: how do you take the temperature of the Members? Two is: how do you get business done? They need to be put on two separate bases, it seems to me. You cannot muddle them. It seems to me that you have got different ways of doing it: some membership groups have very large general committees and extremely small executive committees. It is a well-tried process.
Chair: Lord Browne, there is a vote in your House.
Lord Browne: I’m fine. I am on the Cross Benches.
Q30 Sir Oliver Heald: It is a funny system, but underneath the Commission, which I have sat on, you have an executive board made up of officials of the House who are actually doing the job. So you do have the balance that you were talking about—proposal from below and then the Commission making decisions—but of course it is such a busy group of people that they have to delegate a lot, either to the Speaker or to other Committees and so on. They do not put in that much time.
Lord Browne: But if you were drawing a parallel—I am not suggesting you should—if you have a board, the board should have members from the membership. It is like a partnership. I am in a partnership at the moment, and we have a partnership group. It is not everybody, but it is delegated to discuss with other partners and other members whether things are working. Then there is a smaller group. That is the board, and it delegates, by definition, the authority to the senior partners to make decisions. It speeds—the different functions are in different places. That is the only point I wanted to make.
Sir Amyas Morse: I think Lord Browne sets it out very well. There is a big difference between consultation and decision making, as he rightly says. With consultation, you must have a way of disposing of, and being seen to respond in some way to, the views put forward. It is not good enough to say, “We’re going to ask you to give your views, and then we’ll go off and decide what we think, and we’ll let you know in time.” If you are going to separate, there has to be a cycle—I am very used to this from my life in a partnership—where you explain what you have done, so to speak, with the input. You respond. You say you have taken account of it and thought about it carefully, and you have been able to do it, or you will be able to do it next year, or you are not able to do it at all because we are doing something that doesn’t work.
What you do not do is simply take the input and ignore it, or be suspected of ignoring it. That way, you give people a satisfactory closure on what they have offered you in the first place. That means you have a viable consultation cycle going on, and as long as you do not ignore it, it gives you permission to take decisions in another place and with a smaller group.
Q31 Sir Oliver Heald: Finally, on the Clerk position, which of course is also chief executive, I would like to ask all three of you this. That role includes things like going to see the Lord Chief Justice and discussing what the boundaries of privilege are: that is, the right to free speech in this place. It includes responsibilities like giving definitive opinions on constitutional matters such as when a Committee is looking at what privilege is, together with the Attorney-General, who gives the legal opinion. It is the Clerk who gives the opinion on constitutional practice. Parliaments from all over the world ring for advice on what procedural matters are to the Clerk. So there is that role.
At the same time, there is the role of being at the top of the board overseeing the work of the Commons. It is a curious mixture. I would be interested in each of your views on whether that job would not lose considerable authority if the roles were not combined. It is the fact that you are the Clerk of the Administration, paid like a Lord Justice of Appeal, and at the same time the person who goes and tells the Lord Chief Justice what the boundary is. It is a mixture, but there is an authority to that role which I think is quite important. I would be interested in your views.
Lord Browne: Our discussion so far has suggested that one person is better than two when there is a leadership requirement, but the leader has to be able to identify practically how time is to be spent on his or her agenda. There is only so much you can do, so you have to delegate the things you cannot do to other people to do those things effectively and report back to you.
Q32 Sir Oliver Heald: Do you agree, Sir Amyas?
Sir Amyas Morse: Yes. I think I might add something a little different—not contradictory, but functional. You are trying to achieve competence in two different areas, as you have described. One area is constitutional law in all its aspects, precedent and so forth, and the other area is running a not inconsiderable establishment visibly, as efficiently as possible and progressively more efficiently. One discussion we have had is about where privacy should lie—that is a judgment for you to make—and another is about how you ensure the expertise in management functions freely without being overly inhibited by what might or might not be a fairly traditional view from somebody whose primary function is not management. That is why I think a degree of clarity about the separation and visible fortification of the rights, which have an admittedly subsidiary but still significant degree of freedom, of good decision making might well play a part in your way forward.
Q33 Sir Oliver Heald: So maximum devolution of power to a senior operating officer?
Sir Amyas Morse: Whether it is a maximum or just what is necessary for the task, I think you will need to have a strong rationale for what this person will give you in return for the devolved authority. What will you gain? The only reason I ask that is because there is a question that you might find in the future about having a more unified administration in both Houses. You need to think ahead to that and ask whether whatever you decide now will block you from progressing adequately in that strategic direction.
It is important to have a mid-term picture. I have two things that I could easily throw in as an observer: first, the refurbishment of the Palace of Westminster; and, secondly, the possibility of achieving more efficiency by combining what I would describe as the back-office administration, and so forth, of the House. Those are big prizes, where significant things might happen. Whatever you decide now should keep the pathway open to achieving those things. If I were advising you, I would advise you to think about that.
Sir Oliver Heald: That is very helpful.
Peter Riddell: I totally endorse what Sir Amyas just said. I think you have also got to take account of the personal. Although I agree entirely with your description of the two roles, no individual is going to have an identical capacity in both roles. They have got to perform both roles, but you might have someone who is stronger as a chief executive and therefore would draw in, say, the Clerk Assistant to assist on the constitutional aspects, which you described, and vice versa. If you look at recent Clerks, they varied in their abilities in those ways. Some have been stronger in some respects, and some in others. You should not necessarily expect any individual to be alpha in both. That, I do not think, really matters, provided that they are accountable—to go back to Mr Rees-Mogg’s question—and are able to draw in other people to say, “Okay, what actually is the precedent on that?” They do not have to be a total expert on that. They have got to know it sufficiently to be able to advise the Speaker and Members—after all, they are advising Members all the time—but, going back to my parallel, they do not always have to be the next editor of “Erskine May”.
Q34 Mr Heath: I want to ask Sir Amyas some questions about audit in a second, but just before we finish on this, Lord Browne, you were saying earlier that you believe that your non-executive directors should act corporately and not have individual roles. There are two models that I am aware of where that would not be the case. One is in local government where you have portfolio holders, as they are now called. They used to be called chairs of committee. Portfolio holders are amateurs and lay members, but have a particular responsibility and acquired expertise in an area, and sit alongside a professional officer who runs the show. Similarly, in departmental boards—I used to chair one when I was a Minister—we had non-executive directors with specific functions within that board, whether risk or personnel issues, and it was useful to have their in-depth opinion. I am trying to reconcile those two views because it seems to me that both models added value.
Lord Browne: I was reasonably careful about what I said. As the board makes a decision, no individual board member has the authority of the board. In the case of corporate activity, the audit committee has specific statutory responsibilities, which must be discharged anyway, so they are specific. It is normally the case that the compensation or remuneration committee also has specific accountabilities. In the case of the departmental boards, the audit and risk committee has a delegated duty to look at those activities. There is also a nominations and governance committee—as delegation. It is slightly different because the boards are advisory, not statutory, but the board itself is meant to work as a unitary board with Ministers, civil servants and outsiders.
Q35 Mr Heath: If I can move on to audit. Sir Amyas, you have a sort of incomplete audit arrangement with this place. There are some things you look at and some things you don’t look at. Would you briefly describe what you do and what you don’t do, and perhaps what you would like to do.
Sir Amyas Morse: We audit by agreement. The House prepares resource accounts and chooses to prepare them under the statute. It is not compelled to, but it chooses to. We and they appoint us by agreement to carry out the audit, and we do so. That means that some of the full range of things that happen as a result of public sector audit do not happen automatically, although I have to say that the House has always been very open. There has been the odd issue of a very rare kind, but normally the House has been very open and keen to replicate best practice.
Two things, however, do not happen in the same way. One is qualifications for regularity, which is particular to public sector audit and can be remarkably good for checking inappropriate use of funds, even on quite a small scale. I find that I am quite actively involved in that, and of course the portfolio. For the rest, it is carrying out value for money. If we have the statutory remit, I am entitled to carry out examination of efficiency, effectiveness and value for money, in addition to the statutory accounts audit. I can do that at my own discretion. Obviously, I exercise that reasonably but, none the less, it means that you have access and that those reports may well be taken by the Public Accounts Committee, so there is quite a big difference. A lot more calibre of gunnery is involved than in simply carrying out the statutory audit. I want to emphasise, before I finish, how open and receptive I have found the House authorities always to be.
Q36 Chair: Would you like to have those roles?
Sir Amyas Morse: If invited, I would obviously not say no, and if I was given a statutory appointment, I would have the duty of carrying it out, so it almost doesn’t matter whether I would like it or not, Jack.
Q37 Mr Heath: Peter thinks you should be given those roles, or at least, the Institute for Government does—I am putting words into his mouth.
Peter Riddell: Yes. That was a paper that was done four years ago, since when a lot has happened. It was a personal look by one of my colleagues, so I would not say that is our formal house view and quite a lot has happened since then, but I can see considerable advantages in that happening.
Q38 Mr Heath: This is very hypothetical, Sir Amyas, but if you were to be given the value-for-money responsibilities for the House, where would you start? Without looking in depth, where would you start, and what would you want to have a deep look at?
Sir Amyas Morse: That is a very hypothetical question, isn’t it?
Mr Heath: Yes.
Chair: I wouldn’t say that it was hypothetical at all.
Sir Amyas Morse: Okay. Well, I would want to understand whether there was obvious scope for simplification and rationalisation in the arrangements for running the establishment.
Q39 Mr Heath: Would you just look at the House of Commons were you to do that, or would you look at the end of the corridor where we are at the moment?
Sir Amyas Morse: I would only look at what my remit allowed me to look at.
Mr Heath: I am giving you a free hand. You are being given a Henry VIII clause, and you are allowed to do anything you like as Comptroller.
Sir Amyas Morse: I’m afraid that nobody is ever allowed to anything they like. It would take me too far. I hope that there is not too much of a resemblance between me and Henry VIII, so let us leave it there.
Chair: When a young man.
Sir Amyas Morse: Exactly. Thank you very much.
Mr Heath: I think Cromwell was the guy who looked for the efficiencies.
Q40 Chair: That is an interesting area in terms of the identification by you, Sir Amyas, of the mid-term horizons—refurbishment and particularly shared services. My instinct, and I am not putting words into your mouth, is that if we were to extend your remit and extend that remit to both Houses that in itself could act as a really powerful agent of change and greater efficiency.
I have one question to ask, and I will invite colleagues to ask any other questions that they may have, and I am aware, Lord Browne, that you may wish to go in a moment. Currently, the so-called management board does have two non-executive directors on it, and I understand that they have provided a lot of value. Depending on your perspective, the Commission is composed either of all non-executives, because none are executive, or of no non-executives. It is certainly the case that none are outsiders. Do you have a view about that?
Lord Browne: I really think that this organisation is so unusual, given that every single member is both an insider and an outsider, that there are no rules here. To go back to purpose, the reason for having outsiders on a board is basically to create a break up of cosy decision making, to open it up to fresh air, to get difference of opinion and to do so in such a way that there cannot just be people agreeing with each other. If you need that, you need outsiders. But this is a very unusual organisation, and I am not sure that that rule necessarily applies.
Q41 Chair: Except that in my experience, as a member of the House of Commons Commission, it was fairly cosy.
Lord Browne: In that case, you will need outsiders.
Peter Riddell: There is a precedent, which is the Standards Committee. It has outsiders on it, and I gave evidence to its sub-committee, which is chaired by its outside members. They do not vote on proposed disciplinary action, and stray into the territory of the Bill before the House today, but I think that there is a real virtue in outsiders. It goes back to the last point in so far as the more light that can be thrown, and that applies to both Houses, although it is more difficult down the red end of the building, outsiders are a real advantage. However, I accept that the actual political control lies with the elected Members.
Q42 Jacob Rees-Mogg: Following on from that, whether any of you think it is better to have outsiders or election, you will know that the House of Commons has moved to direct election of the Chairmen of Select Committees. This has been seen as a very good and effective step in opening up Select Committees and taking them out of the hands of—if I may say so, with our current Chairman—the cosy usual channels. Also, it has been asked whether that might be the best way of shining light on what is going on while still maintaining the rather important principle, as far as I am concerned, that the House of Commons regulates its own affairs. The role of outsiders is quite a difficult one in determining how things are done when, fundamentally, we are a legislature, and if you are not a legislator, you should not be making these decisions.
Peter Riddell: I think there is no need to compromise your principle, Mr Rees-Mogg. I agree with your analysis of direct elections. It has produced some very interesting Chairs of Select Committees, who have been challenging. From my observation, I am totally in favour of it But, when talking about outsiders, it goes to the point that Lord Browne has been the leader on—the advisory role of non-executives in relation to Whitehall Departments. It is not that they are running the Departments, but they are providing advice. The advantage of having outsiders would not be that they would usurp the role of elected Members in taking decisions, but that they could provide an outside perspective as advisers. That is the advantage. It in no way compromises the constitutional point you are making.
Q43Jesse Norman: Just to pick up the point that Mr Rees-Mogg has raised, the other half of the question you raised was, would it be a good idea to have an elected Commission? I would be interested in the views of the panel on that.
Lord Browne: I can’t comment on that.
Peter Riddell: I think certainly an elected element. There is an issue about whether you should have the Leader and Shadow Leader of the House—when Mr Straw was there, he was there as Leader of the House. But I certainly see advantages from my observation in having an elected element of members, and maybe having slightly more than you have at the moment. It also goes back to the point that was made about the sounding board element. When you elect, I imagine that you as Members will feel more confidence that your concerns will be reflected in the people you have voted for.
Q44 Mr Watts: I want to follow up Jacob’s point about how important accountability is to the board. In the case of the Commission, from an outsider’s point of view, I see very little accountability to anybody for any decisions made. Election would be one way of homing in on that. In a broad sense, how do you make sure that your board is generally accountable? Is it through independent members or a business programme? How do you get that level of independence?
Lord Browne: By agreement, first of all. Singly, it is so important to get the purpose of the board and its remit—what its decision rights are—laid out very carefully and agreed. Everything flows from that, because the people either elected to or appointed to the board have to submit to the remit of the board. It all flows from that. No fudge is going to make it work, let’s be very clear.
Q45 Ian Paisley: One of the criticisms of having outsiders is that they do not understand the ethos—a very nebulous word—of this place. How do you get them to understand what you described earlier, Lord Browne, as the real purpose? I feel that it is about the Members doing their role and serving the public. How do you get outsiders to get it—to get the ethos?
Lord Browne: Normally, at the corporate level, it is because you put people on the board one at a time. You try to stagger it, so it happens by experience and osmosis. People work at it and they begin to understand. The same is true of the advisory boards in the civil service. Most people thought that all the people coming on the boards were business people or people from the third sector with absolutely no idea what the civil service does and would never appreciate it. Based on the feedback from the civil service and Ministers, that is simply not true. They have taken the time to be with people, to pick up how things are done, to make comments and give advice on whether they like it or not, and to understand the ethos of the place:.
Q46 Sir Oliver Heald: When looking at the composition of the Commission, it is worth bearing in mind that the political parties are organised here in a way designed so that the parties’ leadership know the opinions of their Members. In a sense, having the Shadow Leader and the Leader on the Commission is quite helpful, because the Government view and the Opposition party view are represented on a range of issues. The point of the possible election of the other three members is to represent the interest of the Back Benchers. I do not know the extent to which that would be the correct way of looking at it.
Peter Riddell: I can see that, absolutely. You might want more than three; you don’t want it getting too big, but you might want more than three. I understand exactly Mr Paisley’s point, and I agree with Lord Browne’s answer to it. It is possible to get people to understand the ethos, but what they are doing is offering a check. They are saying, “Let’s talk about refurbishment.” That is a massive project with very big financial implications. Someone who is used to running big projects would say, “Hold on, think about that.” They would not be the decision maker—that would be the MPs on the Commission.
Following Lord Browne’s parallel with non-executive directors, I was struck when I talked to permanent secretaries about it. They say, “It’s terribly valuable to have someone who has run a big organisation just commenting.” They do not take the decision—the Secretary of State takes the decision—but it is a sounding board. They will not usurp the role of Members, but they are used to big projects. With all respect to members of the Commission, given the scale of what has to happen here, they are not on the whole familiar with big projects.
Q47 Sir Oliver Heald: If we think about members of the Finance and Services Committee—Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, for example, is a surveyor who is very knowledgeable about various sorts of estates issues—it is not totally that there are no skills within the Committee’s membership.
Peter Riddell: No, but I think it is a matter of relative scale.
Q48 Valerie Vaz: Peter, you mentioned the new chief executive of the civil service. Does that role differ from the one previously being done?
Peter Riddell: Since Lord Browne sat on the selection panel, I do not want to usurp that too much, but the intention is that it should be different.
Valerie Vaz: Right.
Lord Browne: I would say that it has been heavily clarified, based on experience both good and bad. It is identified in the ad for the position. What has been put in the hands of the chief executive of the civil service is a subset of what the Cabinet Secretary and head of the home civil service did, as opposed to something separate. Many of the more operational and centralised functions have been put into one place.
Q49 Valerie Vaz: Would you see a parallel for the House?
Peter Riddell: Yes. Absolutely.
Q50 Jesse Norman: Based on that last response, could you briefly do for recruitment processes what you did for the board—that is to say, set out what you think the best practices and minimum criteria are for a well conducted recruitment process?
Lord Browne: The most important thing about recruitment is recruiting into the job. That may sound like a trivial point, but you have to recruit into a job, not recruit a person. You must define the job really clearly—what do you want it to do, and what is your expectation of success? In other words, you say, “You’ve done a really good job. Here’s what you would have done.” You then normally put it in the hands of a qualified head-hunter who has access to the right type of people, and you have a broad range of people brought to it. Generally, while all public positions have to be advertised, I would say that advertising rarely brings any candidates for the most senior jobs. People need to be encouraged to apply.
Q51 Jesse Norman: Just to be clear, having decided on the job description, would you want a consistent focus on that?
Lord Browne: Yes.
Q52 Jesse Norman: Sir Amyas, is there potential scope for an audit process if a senior recruit was not properly recruited or there was an issue with that?
Sir Amyas Morse: I do not really think so. There would be a lot of judgment involved. You could show in an audit process if there had been a violation of process, because you could check, “Did you do this and that?”, but you wouldn’t get into the heart of it.
Jesse Norman: No.
Sir Amyas Morse: You would not get into the quality of judgment made, and that is what you have really got to go into, so I would not particularly encourage that pathway.
Jesse Norman: Thank you.
Q53 Jacob Rees-Mogg: I just want to ask, and I don’t mind who answers or if all of you answer; do you think we get too het up about this title “chief executive”? The House of Commons is not going to have somebody who is like the chief executive of BP and has that sort of executive power, because there are so many constraints on it, so we will advertise for a job that actually does not meet the description. I rather like archaic titles, so shouldn’t we be digging up some ancient parliamentary title to give to the Clerk in addition to being Clerk?
Lord Browne: Everybody reads through the title straight away. There has been an upward drift anyway, so absolutely everybody has to be a chief executive of something, and it is the normal course of business that everything goes that way. People do not look at the title; they actually look at what the job does and what accountabilities it has.
Q54 Jacob Rees-Mogg: Do you think the person doing the job thinks that if they are called the chief executive, they are therefore meant to behave in a chief executive way?
Lord Browne: No. I think sensible, experienced people are not excited about that.
Sir Amyas Morse: So long as they haven’t been misled as to what the job actually entails. So long as there is not more than one version of the truth going around at the same time.
Chair: That comes back to being clear about the definition of the job, and then recruiting against that definition.
Q55 Mr Watts: Just going back to Lord Browne, because I am somewhat confused, you seem to be suggesting that we should recruit to the job and that we have to be clear about the job that we want. Isn’t the problem that nobody has got the skills in the job spec that we are going to give the head hunter? Those skills just don’t exist. People with both chief executive managerial experience and procedure knowledge just don’t exist. Isn’t that the dilemma?
Lord Browne: It is if you want it all in one person without allowing that person to delegate and subdivide the job. I think you have to be very clear about what principal skills you need, which of those are to be delegated to somebody else and how that delegated job fits into the job you are recruiting.
Q56 Mr Watts: I am not sure whether the House of Commons has got a business plan—if it has, it is well hidden—but within this process, how important is the business plan to achieving the sorts of thing that the three of you have said? Is that a crucial part of the management tools that you would have?
Lord Browne: Normally, yes. In commercial life it is, because it expresses what the chief executive has to do. If you are going to want him or her to double sales, you’d better explain it in a plan.
Sir Amyas Morse: I quite agree. Perhaps I can say it another way to clarify what a business plan might be. In any major performance challenge that is facing you out there—I am conscious that I have already said some of this—that you are assuming this person will be able to fulfil in addition to their standard duties, you had better identify it and think about it up front.
Q57 Jesse Norman: We have discussed the issue of the accounting officer. We have not discussed the issue of the letters patent that the Clerk receives, which give constitutional protection against political pressure or other pressure from within the House. I suppose I am asking you, Mr Riddell, if you think that that means that the Clerk has got to be the most senior person in order to give that protection. Could you have a situation in which the Clerk was reporting to a chief executive, and therefore potentially vulnerable to being bullied by them?
Peter Riddell: No. I think the top person has to be the Clerk. It is Clerk then accounting officer, which goes back to Lord Browne’s point. The actual range of skills exercised by that person will vary depending on the person and who else they bring in. But the authority absolutely has to be with one person at the top. I do not think you can delegate that at all—that would be completely unworkable—although I understand exactly what you are saying.
Q58 Jesse Norman: For various reasons, there is a kind of gloss on it, which is that the letters patent historically go to protect the Clerk as the provider of advice on procedural matters that may be rebarbative.
Peter Riddell: Indeed.
Jesse Norman: What you seem to be saying is that it is the procedural aspect that must be at the top if the Clerk has to be the letters patent holder and the officer of procedure. I am not sure that that is what you really meant.
Peter Riddell: No. What I am saying is that he or she clearly has to be the provider of advice, but they could also consult other people. That is why I made the point about them not always having to be the person who is going to revise “Erskine May”. They have got to be competent and able to provide that advice, but that will often involve consulting other people, to take Lord Browne’s point, which I entirely agree with. Similarly, as chief executive, they will consult other people or delegate. They should be regarded by you and by the Speaker as the competent people to provide that advice, but they may not themselves be the 100% historical expert on it.
Q59 Jesse Norman: But if that is the case, how would you guard against the possibility that the advice given by the person who actually knows what they are talking about is considered rebarbative or somehow unattractive to the people in authority? The Clerk could receive that advice, but then may not act on it, and therefore the advice is never acted on because the protection and the advice are not in the same place.
Peter Riddell: I think the protection should apply. I am agreeing with you. I am saying that the protection should apply. The letters patent and the protection of the office should apply to enable them to give what may well be unattractive advice to the person. They absolutely should have that freedom. That does not necessarily mean that they would not consult other people when forming their view, so I don’t think we are disagreeing.
Q60 Chair: Just picking up on that, surely in local government, and these days in the private sector as well, there are people below the level of chief executive—the senior bod—who have clear legal duties, such as compliance officers in financially regulated sectors of the private sector, or the senior legal adviser in local government. They are normally at a second tier—perhaps general counsel in the private sector—and have clear legal responsibilities that cannot be overridden. If we wish to go down this path, there is surely no reason not to have a chief executive who would have an understanding of what Parliament is here for, for obvious reasons, but who would not necessarily have to have clerkly skills. If they had to have such skills, however, the duty of providing procedural advice and, as it were, speaking truth to power could be independently exercised by somebody at a second-tier level.
Peter Riddell: I think you would get into very difficult territory. The US Congress has what is called a parliamentarian who fulfils that function. Perhaps I am too traditionalist, but as a biographer of Burke I believe that it must be the top person who takes responsibility.
Q61 Chair: It doesn’t have to be.
Peter Riddell: It doesn’t have to be. Equally, however, you may have a compliance officer, but the chief executive is where the buck stops.
Sir Amyas Morse: Yes. I want to build on that last comment. I think you have to think about the discretionary nature of the function. You have described, quite rightly, how there is a clerk in local government who gives advice on legal matters and has quite clear duties, and it is fairly clear what they do. That is fine. You need to consider what the role of the Clerk is here and how broad that may be, and how discretionary it is required to be. In other words, is it capable of being clearly and neatly defined and put in a box so that you can say, “This is your job. You report up, and that’s fine.” That is a question that the Committee can answer for itself.
Lord Browne: First, I think we have to be very worried about analogies that are not true. We need to test them very rigorously. Secondly, I think that it is best to look at what the principal purpose of the job is. The principal purpose has to be in the hands of whoever has the top job, and the appropriate protections must be put around it. Everything else flows from that.
Chair: That is a very good note on which to finish. I thank all three of you very much indeed for giving up your time and sharing your insights with us.
Oral evidence: House of Commons Governance HC 692 5