House of Commons (Accommodation)

HC Deb 19 March 1991 vol 188 cc230-64

Motion made and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Neil Hamilton.]

8.4 pm

Mrs. Edwina Currie (Derbyshire, South)

I am glad to have this opportunity to raise the issue of House of Commons accommodation, with particular reference to phase 2 of the proposals before us. I made a new year's eve resolution. I gave a number of hours of thought to various matters, and then I came up with my resolution—to do whatever I could about the appalling conditions in which I and many others work in this House. It would have been a little selfish simply to demand that I be moved to something better, so I took the issue on board and did some research. I was absolutely amazed at what I found.

We have a little more time than usual for an Adjournment debate, so I shall begin by explaining that my office is in Commons court. It was built in the 1970s when my right hon. and noble Friend Lord Joseph was in charge, and I am told that that is why the lifts are so slow. I have to share my room, as do most of my colleagues. I share it with my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers). Previously, I shared it with my hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North (Mr. Knight) until his appointment to the Whips' Office. I am told that he has considerable affection for the room and remembers it with pleasure.

I remember that room only in that I have been there for a very long time. I occupied it from 1983 to 1986 and from January 1989 to now—some five years of my life. I know every inch of that room, every knobble on the wall and every door knob. I know it far too well.

The first problem with the room is that it is not very big. According to the recent space audit, its official size is 12 sq m. It is a room for two, which gives me 6 sq m. We must also take into account the fact that a substantial amount of the room is taken up with two desks, three chairs, a bookcase, a cupboard and the various other implements and paraphernalia of two working colleagues. That does not leave a great deal of room.

My hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North and I made our point about the room at Christmas 1985 when we held a drinks party. We managed to get 22 people into the room, although most were standing on each other's shoulders and a number had their heads touching the ceiling. However, by the end of the drinks party we felt that we had made our point.

I want to give the House some idea of what that 6 sq m—precious little space—means. It is, of course, illegal and runs counter to the Health and Safety Executive rules, of which I am sure my hon. Friend the Minister is aware. I made some inquiries and discovered that one of the buildings on the nearby site that might be available to us all in some dim and distant future, well into the next century, is Canon row police station. Indeed, some of its accommodation is already used by staff of the House. It was built in 1902 and still includes the police cells, which I understand are of some historical significance. Each prisoner had not 6 sq m but 7 sq m in those police cells, so perhaps we would all be better housed if we made use of them.

The only advantage of my little room—almost my nun's cell—is that it is air conditioned, which I find helpful as I am an asthmatic. Of course, it is necessary that it should be air conditioned because it has no other form of ventilation. It is an internal room with no windows and no natural light. In fact, it is a store cupboard, and it should be used as such. It should never, at any time, have been allocated for use by working people, and especially not by hon. Members. It should never have been permitted to be used by anybody. I suspect that it would not even be useful or appropriate for a photocopying machine or any machine that emitted vapours, and it is utterly unsuitable for humankind. To be absolutely honest, I suspect that I have one of the worst rooms in the Palace, although it has the advantage of being close to the Chamber, and I appreciate that.

I understand that in the recent space audit ordered by the Services Committee, it was established that some 230 hon. Members needed to be rehoused to ensure that each had a respectable, albeit small, room of their own. One third of hon. Members stand to be rehoused somehow. That does not include any further Members of the other place. I gather that most of them expressed no interest in acquiring any accommodation. That needs to be borne in mind. One third of hon. Members are inadequately housed and have to work in the sort of conditions that I have described—conditions that would be regarded with astonishment and disgust by our constituents.

The appalling conditions here make our work difficult. For example, yesterday I had two meetings with people from outside the House. One meeting included four constituents who wanted to join me in lobbying the Minister for Public Transport about improvement of our rail facilities in south Derbyshire. We had a successful meeting, but there was no way I could get them into my room. It would have been inappropriate and discourteous of me to ask my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport to move out so that two of them could come in. We tried to book a Committee Room but found, inevitably, that they were all booked—for some frightfully important meetings on the politics of other nations, I gather.

Mr. David Shaw (Dover)

I do not know whther my hon. Friend has been able to ascertain why some of the small Committee Rooms are booked, but in the past year it has come to my attention that they have sometimes been booked for taking Members' photographs for television companies, or by outside companies and organisations with private Bills. The result is that my constituents have not been able to meet me in relative comfort because, as my hon. Friend points out, all hon. Members have rooms which are completely unsuitable for such meetings.

Mrs. Currie

I take my hon. Friend's point entirely. The fact is that there just are not enough rooms of any kind here. I suspect that many are occupied by extremely worthy Officers of the House, Departments, and so on.

To continue with yesterday's saga, our pre-meeting was eventually held in their Lordships' House, over tea in the Pugin Room. It is not easy mixing eclairs with plans and maps—they got in everyone's way and we ended up with sticky maps. The de-briefing had to take place much later in a corridor in Marsham street, waiting for taxis in the rain. It was a thoroughly unsatisfactory situation. How on earth are we to look after our constituents, or anyone else we might want to see, if the rooms are too small to get them into?

I had another meeting, in connection with tonight's Adjournment debate, with three distinguished gentlemen all of whom have had a finger in the pie that I am describing. I made them come to my room because that seemed the easiest way of making my point. One sat at my hon. Friend's desk, who fortunately was not there, one sat in the armchair and one sat on a footstool. Again, there was simply no room for the plans or drawings. Had we wished to use anything as elaborate as visual aids, such as slides or an overhead projector, it would have been impossible. One of us would have had to go into the corridor. None of that is conducive to intelligent conversation. With respect to the officials whom I met last night, I must say that in the circumstances they did rather well.

Added to all that, my marvellous secretary is stuck in another building. She shares a room, and her working conditions are Dickensian—absolutely antediluvian. There is no room for me to house a research assistant, should I wish to have one, so I have to resist all entreaties from the marvellous keen young people who would love to come to work for me or many other hon. Members. It is a good job we do not have the same leeway as the United States Congress, which I visited in 1989, where Congress members are restricted to no more than 17 assistants. If we introduced such a rule in this place, it would really put the cat among the pigeons.

It is tempting to believe—I am looking at my hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Planning as I say this—that there is a conspiracy abroad to ensure that Back-Bench Members are prevented from doing their job properly. However, as my hon. Friend has spent a long time on the Back Benches, I am sure that he is not a party to it and that he will try to disabuse me of such a traitorous notion when he replies.

What can be done about this? Various efforts were made in the 1970s. For example, Norman Shaw North, where my secretary works, was occupied by the House in 1975 and much of it was restored to a respectable standard. Norman Shaw South was used by us from 1979. At about the same time, a great deal of work went into drawing up a scheme for the whole of the Whitehall, Bridge street, Canon row site—known as the Casson Conder proposal. It would have cost more than £100 million at 1979 prices and was rightly abandoned as almost one of the first things that the new Government did on taking office in 1979.

The trouble is that not much has happened since. There has been a great deal of talk and consultation, but precious little in the way of results. Throughout the 1980s, all that we managed to acquire was space for 30 secretaries, but not a scrap extra for hon. Members. In a Palace where about 2,000 people work, that is pathetic and I for one am losing patience.

I will go through some of the schemes. When the Casson Conder scheme was abandoned in 1979, the Department of the Environment commissioned three separate reports, one after the other, all designed to discover whether it was possible to marry private money and private effort with public money and public effort, and whether that would do the trick.

At last, in 1984, the phase 1 design brief was produced. Why it should take five years to get from a decision to a design brief I do not know, but I am not asking my hon. Friend the Minister to explain all the past decisions for which he does not have responsibility—I am simply putting on record the mess that we have had until now. The contractor is Faircloughs and I gather that the cost of the scheme will be at least £30 million. It will house 60 Members and 100 secretaries. It should have been ready in 1990, but it was not.

Mr. David Shaw

Has it occurred to my hon. Friend that there is an imbalance between the number of Members and the number of secretaries? She said earlier that her secretary is in a separate building. My secretary is four floors beneath where I operate. That makes it impossible for there to he any computer networking whereby her computer can be connected to my computer or for us to be connected by any modern electronic work facilities. Is that not inconvenient for hon. Members and will not even the new building, costing what it does, perpetuate the existing shortcomings?

Mrs. Currie

We could probably have a long debate—and perhaps we will when my hon. Friend catches your eye, Mr. Speaker—about exactly what services should be available to Members. I think that we should have access to faxes and computer links. We should have closed circuit television. We should have a dish on the roof, and I have said so, so that we can receive the television services that our constituents receive. We should have a cable system, and the quicker the better. This place is still in the 19th century.

While I am complaining, I should add one word of considerable gratitude to whomever it was—it may have been the hon. Member for Ogmore (Mr. Powell)—who stole half the gents' loo in the Library Corridor and turned it into a nice ladies' room. The ladies of this House are extremely grateful.

Miss Emma Nicholson (Torridge and Devon, West)

Will my hon. Friend alert my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Mr. Shaw) to the fact that the electronic mail system is not dependent on which floor one's secretary happens to be on or underneath? As a sexist comment, I would rather the two were reversed in any case.

Mrs. Currie

It depends whether one has a male secretary or a female secretary.

Mr. Ray Powell (Ogmore)

I should like to correct the hon. Lady about the ladies' toilet. I was not aware that the gentlemen's toilets in the Library Corridor were to be halved until I returned from a break. With all due respect to lady Members, there are not so many lady Members as male Members. If they were to walk the other way down the corridor, there is a ladies' room that I did not know about until I was invited in to see it. It has a bathroom, a shower and a lovely lounge, as well as toilets, and it is only about 10 yards from the corner where the extra facilities have been provided, so I think they are surplus to requirements.

Mrs. Currie

Presumably the hon. Member for Ogmore was taken into that ladies' room by one of his hon. Friends. In fact, it is the Labour ladies' room, and we are only there when we are absolutely desperate. I am pleased that the subject has aroused such interest.

The most irritating thing that struck any lady Member coming to the House for the first time was that the door to the loo in the Library Corridor—the closest one to the Chamber going the usual way—had on it "Members only". There are many stories of lady Members going in there and retreating in great embarrassment; of course, one or two did not retreat in embarrassment. However, the doors are now marked, "Lady Members only" and "Gentlemen Members only". Lady Members, at least on the Conservative side, regard that as a tremendous victory.

I have already mentioned that my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport shares the room that I am complaining about. He has put himself on record as saying that ladies need more room than gentlemen. I think that I should refer the hon. Member for Ogmore to my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport, who clearly knows more about the matter than I do.

To return to the design brief produced for phase 1 in 1984, we have seen the building and it looks magnificent. I gather that it has cost some £30 million and that it should have been ready in 1990. I was informed by the Clerk to the Select Committee that it would be ready during the summer recess this year. I asked about it again yesterday. The Department of the Environment assured me that it would be ready in October 1991. Occasionally we see the figure of a workman passing backwards and forwards in front of a naked light bulb. Sure as heck, it does not look ready to me. Perhaps my hon. Friend can enlighten us as to when that building will be handed over. Indeed, will it be before not the next general election but the one after? We would regard that, too, as a considerable victory.

In the interim, Canon row police station has been modestly refurbished, and in 1989 it was made available for 30 Members' secretaries. That is it. There was no other change during the whole of the 1980s, and there was no improvement in accommodation for Members.

In May 1989 things began to move at a slightly faster pace. The New Building Sub-Committee of the Select Committee on House of Commons (Services) appointed the architect, Michael Hopkins, to advise on the development of phase 2—that is, Bridge street, Palace chambers and St. Stephen's house. That is still only part of the site. There is another third, which is still a dump, before we get to Richmond house.

Mr. Hopkins had no sooner started work than the Department of Transport and London Underground announced, in July 1989, the extension to the Jubilee line, the replacement and modernisation of Westminster tube station with the new interchange for the Jubilee, District and Circle lines, and the digging up of the whole of Parliament square. When one thinks of the security problems of digging up Parliament square, one's heart turns over.

Quite rightly, hon. Members let out a howl of rage and the Services Committee and various other committees responded with equal anger. London Underground backed off, saying that digging up the centre of the square would no longer be necessary and that the new proposals would be £10 million cheaper. In its report of 14 February 1991, the Services Committee said at paragraph 13: We are particularly pleased that London Underground now accepts that there is no need to use Parliament Square as a work-site, although we are surprised that the engineering solution now put forward was not investigated at a much earlier stage. I would put it differently—it is a pity London Underground did not think of that in the first place, because we have had another year's delay while London Underground and everyone else have been flapping around, trying to work out how not to dig up the centre of Parliament square when they did not need to.

We find that two new private Bills are required to ensure that development of the Jubilee line can take place. I understand that those Bills are in Committee. I am on record already as being highly critical of the whole private Bill procedure in respect of docks, ports and railways. The procedure is a leftover not from the 19th century but from the 18th century.

I am privileged to have been selected to sit in Committee on the Planning and Compensation Bill. Back in the 18th century, the way promoters got private Bills through was to bribe everyone. That might have worked then, but—naturally—compensation clauses have no such role now and will have no such effect. The point is that we should not have to go through private Bill procedures which take years, which keep hon. Members in Committee for hours and days and months and years, and which end up subsidising the legal profession.

My hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr. Hamilton), who is sitting on the Front Bench, chaired one private Bill Committee for two and a half years and grew grey in the service of the House. [Interruption.] It had nothing to do with his constituency—it was connected with King's Cross. The whole system is barmy, so I welcome the efforts of the Leader of the House, under pressure from many hon. Members on both sides, to get shot of the whole procedure and to use the planning system instead.

Although the private Bills in relation to London Transport are expected to complete their passage through the House, with Royal Assent expected in the summer of 1992, which is not very long given the saga of private Bill procedure, the architects for phase 2 have not yet been commissioned, and the whole complicated scheme is still at the feasibility study stage.

The Services Committee promised in September 1990 that the architects' brief would be ready for Easter—that is, next week—but we see no sign of it. I hope that the hon. Member for Ogmore will catch your eye, Mr. Speaker. He certainly has my permission to do so. We should like to know where the brief is and when it will be produced.

What we shall have on Thursday of this week is an exhibition, based on Mr. Hopkins' suggestions. The House will have an opportunity to examine them. I think that I have seen them. Certainly I saw quite a lot of interesting drawings and computer printouts last night. I hope that I have not broken any protocols of the House, but in order to speak with a little knowledge on the subject I took the opportunity to see Mr. Hopkins.

From what I saw, the proposals are splendid, and I hope that no one raises any spurious objections to them. I hope that no one comes up with something which is thought essential. It reminds me of the way we used to build hospitals, or end up not building them. Everyone was invited to make a contribution, plans were produced, everyone was invited to comment and all the comments were taken on board. Of course, they were always contradictory, so we had to go back and produce more briefs, more feasibility studies and more space audits, and there was more delay.

Mr. David Shaw

My hon. Friend has referred to various plans and ideas, and the developments of the past 10 years, which have provided new accommodation for just 30 secretaries and none for Members. Will she consider what might have happened if the management of the House of Commons had been different and if we had had a chief executive, a proposal now being talked of? A chief executive would have had drive, energy and purpose, and his or her sole raison d'être would have been to ensure that the interests of Members were better looked after from an administrative point of view.

Mrs. Currie

I could not agree more. In fact, as I look at you, Mr. Speaker, with your experience and service to this House, it occurs to me that, much as we all regret your retirement at the end of this Parliament, you would be ideal as the chief executive. I agree with my hon. Friend that someone has to do it—someone who knows how the place works, and has a commitment and an affection for it and for all its foibles and quirks, someone who has in his head a brain and in his heart some sense. I commend that suggestion to the House.

However, it is not merely a question of delays at Services Committee level. There is a gap between the Property Services Agency, the Department of the Environment, our asperations and the Treasury. I understand that only £20 million is provided each year for all work on parliamentary buildings, for the entire Palace of Westminster—this magnificent national masterpiece.

Phase 2 will cost £60 million, which is believed to be phased over about three years and means a doubling of the budget. I understand that the DOE has not yet told the Treasury officially about that expenditure and will have to do so to get approval in principle to start design work. We are only a year away from Royal Assent and we have yet to tell the Treasury. I asked a question yesterday and was told that my hon. Friend the Minister, or one of his colleagues on the Front Bench, will write to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury "any time now". Really—when and when can we expect some sort of reply?

That means that no real action is possible until 1992. According to the Committee, demolition and re-build will take three years, although London Underground said—it was quoted in the Select Committee report of 14 February 1991—that it would take 53 months from Royal Assent. So it will be 1995 at the earliest before this additional accommodation will become available—12 years after I entered the House.

Mr. Ian Bruce (Dorset, South)

I wonder whether my hon. Friend has thought about the possibility that a good, economic way to ensure that less staff want to take up accommodation within the Palace of Westminster would be to tell hon. Members that they could either have an office for their staff in London or be given a higher allowance to accommodate their staff elsewhere? In South Dorset I pay for an office for two people out of my allowance and I have to pay extra for my telephone bills because I use the private telephone there rather than the free telephone service here. My hon. Friend might like to expand on that interesting idea.

Mrs. Currie

I do not wish to set out rules for the way in which colleagues on either side of the House work. My system, in a large constituency, is that four staff work for me. One of them must be here, because so many telephone calls come here, this is one of our addresses and there has to be someone here to open the mail. If I may give my hon. Friend the Member for Dorset, South (Mr. Bruce) a clue, in the weeks after I left the Government I received what might be called a rather enlarged postbag. We used to get three postbags a day and it took eight hours to open the letters. We had to bring someone else in—a research assistant who works for another colleague—and pay him, on an hourly basis, to open them. It only occurred to us afterwards that we should have saved all the stamps. Much of that sort of mail comes here and it would be a burden on the Post Office staff if it had to be sent elsewhere.

Of the three other people who work for me, one works at her home in London and two work in my constituency. I keep them all incredibly busy.

I wish that the allowance would be increased and I have expressed that wish in the House. It is appalling that we are obliged to pay our staff pathetically low rates, whether here or in our constituencies, because we would otherwise have to subsidise their pay substantially out of our own pockets.

Mr. David Shaw

One of the questions that seems to follow from that is that, while we might all want to restrict staff in central London—a policy suggested by Governments in the past and by the Greater London council in its day—considering the amount of legislation that passes through the House, which now amounts to about 40 Bills a year, together with European legislation, is it not reasonable that we might begin to approach the staff level that Congressmen employ, although we would be a long way short of that? Sooner or later each of us will need to have some sort of legislative assistant, who will probably spend a large amount of time helping us to keep track of the details of European legislation.

Mrs. Currie

I invite my hon. Friend to join us tomorrow in European Standing Committee A, where we deal with an extraordinary range of subjects week by week—European Standing Committee B meets at the same time—as he would find that his point is well made. If we are to keep up with all that, as many of us sincerely try to do, a little help must be on the cards at some stage. However, I always find that when I take on a research assistant I end up doing a lot of the work, especially if it is a young person. I end up looking after them, rather than them looking after me, so I have tended to reject that approach.

Since we have a fair amount of time for this Adjournment debate, I am more than content for colleagues from both sides of the House to comment if they wish to catch your eye at some stage, Mr. Speaker. We may as well use this opportunity to make the arguments that we want to make. We do not often get such a chance, and I for one am making the most of it.

Mr. David Nicholson (Taunton)

I am sorry that I missed the earlier part of my hon. Friend's speech. While I have been in the Chamber, she has been talking about accommodation for Members and the staff we employ. Are there not two other aspects to that debate? Since we have time, they should be explored further.

First, hon. Members receive a fair number of visitors from our constituencies or elsewhere. At present, we have to meet them in Central Lobby. Sometimes we can take them into some of the corridors. If we are lucky, we can buy them a cup of tea or coffee downstairs in the cafeteria. Accommodation, especially for confidential talks with constituents or visitors, is very limited. If 40 hon. Members each decided to give one constituent a drink in the Pugin Room or coffee in the cafeteria, that would be it—they would be packed. My hon. Friend should perhaps explore that subject.

The second matter that my hon. Friend might care to explore—as an indication of my admiration for her, may I say that I am sure that this must have occurred to her—is that, from time to time, hon. Members have to give television interviews, perhaps on days such as today when we have heard the Budget statement. At the moment we usually have to stand on one of the greens—Palace green, College green or outside the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre. Our lives have been affected by security measures taken since January and the outbreak of the war in the Gulf. Yet we are sitting ducks for terrorist attack, or any other attack, while we are giving television interviews. Should not the plans that we are making for accommodation in the House take account of hon. Members' security when giving television interviews? Would my hon. Friend care to develop that issue?

Mrs. Currie

May I answer my hon. Friend in reverse order? I agree that it is not an affectation or a conceit to ask that accommodation be made availble which is suitable for television studios. We are often required to give interviews—typically, one is asked to do so at some stage every week—and it is not merely Ministers but also Back Benchers. We think that that is a good idea. My hon. Friend's argument about security was well made. The studios available for such interviews are tiny—much too small for group discussions and only suitable for head-to-camera commentary. That is not satisfactory.

In his first comment, my hon. Friend reiterated what I said in my earliest remarks today. Perhaps he may like to do as I do: I show our rooms to those constituents whom I trust most deeply and especially local journalists whom I trust absolutely, and never again do they believe that we do not work hard. From then on they believe that we work in the most diabolical conditions, and they tend to admire us that much more whenever we manage to get anything done for them which requires us to sit down and write a letter, dictate a draft, or whatever.

Mr. David Hinchliffe (Wakefield)

We do work in diabolical conditions, and I concur with the hon. Lady's central point. The essence of her argument is about the new building and the need for expansion. Is not the key issue the use of existing premises? I spent three and a half years—courtesy of my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Mr. Powell)—in the Cloisters. I recently escaped and now share a room with another Member, which is positive luxury. I question the way in which the House has organised itself around bars and restaurants, of which I believe we have 21, or probably more. Do we need them? Would it not make more appropriate use of the establishment to convert the bars and restaurants into offices for hon. Members? Like the hon. lady, I regularly take my constituents down to the Cloisters for them to see the appalling conditions in which we work. They do not believe the conditions in which I worked for three and a half years. Should we not examine our use of existing premises before we consider the new proposals?

Mrs. Currie

I have known the hon. Gentleman for a long time and have had many late-night debates with him. We have 23 bars and restaurants. He will understand if I say with great affection that if I want to find him, I know where to look. Because of the way we work, we need facilities for refreshments—literally for refreshment even if it is beans on toast or whatever the Prime Minister eats these days, because we are here at strange hours. It would not be safe for my colleagues—such as my hon. Friend the Member for Torridge and Devon, West (Miss Nicholson)—to wander the streets around Victoria at 2 am to find something to eat. We might find more than we bargained for. We must have facilities on the premises.

When I first entered the House I, too, had a desk in the Cloisters, which I shared with 15 colleagues. What bothered me most was the absolute lack of privacy. Although I trusted my colleagues, I was bothered by the fact that on my wedding anniversary, which is on 1 July, when my husband sent me a bouquet of red roses the gossip columnists immediately wanted to know who had sent me roses. They were not satisfied with the explanation that it was a chap to whom I had been married for rather a long time. That is what lack of privacy does.

On a serious point, the wise space audit carried out by the Services Committee produced a response from only about 10 per cent. of hon. Members. Most of us bear some responsibility for our poor accommodation because we tend not to moan about it at the right time or in the right way. I have undertaken a lot of correspondence about that and I hope that my points have been taken seriously.

Mr. David Shaw

rose——

Mrs. Currie

I have been speaking for 40 minutes and I should like to make some progress.

This debate is on phase 2 accommodation and I should like to concentrate a little more on that. Phase 1 will provide space for 60 hon. Members and 100 secretaries. I am not sure about phase 2 because it depends on the feasibility study.

I contrast phase 2 with a building that is under construction in my constituency. The Toyota motor corporation announced in January 1989 that it was looking for a site. It made a decision in April 1989 and then obtained planning permission and compulsory purchase orders. A public inquiry took place and work started on the site in June 1990. At the end of October this year—not "perhaps", but for certain—the building will be finished and handed over to the company by Laing, the contractor. That is just two and a half years from decision to completion. The factory will cost £200 million, not £20 million or £60 million. The entire project will cost about £700 million, which is more than 10 times the cost of phase 2, but it will be completed in half the time. If there is an argument for the abolition of the Property Services Agency, that is it. If a company from overseas, which has never been to this country before, can build a new factory to time—in fact, slightly ahead of time—I fail to see why we, with our familiarity with and knowledge of every nook and cranny of these buildings, should take so long.

It never used to matter that we had no accommodation. Hon. Members would attend to their private concerns in the morning, stroll in for Question Time at half-past two and perhaps even do a little debating before toddling off to their clubs in the evening. One or two colleagues probably still do that. In those days, there were very few letters to deal with. Constituents were delighted to see the Member of Parliament about once a year, when the town band and the mayor in a top-hat would turn up at the railway halt to welcome him on his annual visit—it was always a he—but it is no longer like that, especially since the advent of television in the House.

I do not serve a handful of electors—I serve 83,000, covering an area of 120 square miles of south Derbyshire. I receive about 200 letters and other items of mail a week—that is in a normal week, when I am not busy doing something controversial. Most of my constituents have a telephone and use it, and many—more every week—have a fax and use that too. They all expect and deserve prompt, courteous and efficient responses and methods of handling what they want me to do—and so long as I represent the people of south Derbyshire, they will get it.

Please, could I have some more room in which to do my job properly, and as quickly as possible?

8.45 pm

Mr. Ray Powell (Ogmore)

It is a pleasure to reply to the hon. Member for Derbyshire, South (Mrs. Currie). Clearly, she has been better briefed by the civil servants than I, as the Chairman of the New Building Sub-Committee, have been. I shall take that up with them in due course. I hope that there has been no briefing over and above what the Services Committee has already received, because you for one, Mr. Speaker, would soon be telling members of Select Committees that they should not disclose information until it has been reported to the House. The hon. Lady was no doubt able to acquire much information as a result of her experience as a Minister. I am reluctant to put egg on her face—to coin a phrase—but her criticism is unjustified, especially when one considers the history of the new building in phase 1, in particular, and the distinguished Members who served on the Committee to get it established.

The hon. Lady was elected to the House in 1983 and was a PPS to the Secretary of State for Education and Science in 1985–86, with all the perks that that might have afforded her. After three years in the House, she became Under-Secretary of State for Social Security in 1986. No doubt she then had spacious accommodation and plenty of secretaries and plenty of help to open her sacks of letters.

Mrs. Currie

The only privilege or perk of being PPS to Lord Joseph was the honour of serving such a marvellous and distinguished man of whom I am very fond. Our rooms were no better. As for my time as a Minister, my room was then in the Star Chamber. The only advantage was that I did not have to share it, but it was roughly the same size as the room that I have now.

Mr. Powell

That remark surprises me. I have been to most Ministers' rooms in the House and they seem spacious to me. The hon. Lady must have been very unsuccessful in the allocation of accommodation.

Mr. Bob Cryer (Bradford, South)

She is an ex-Minister.

Mr. Powell

Yes, she is an ex-Minister. The hon. Lady has especially overlooked the problems of Back Benchers. She is now born again as a Back Bencher and she has found out the difficulties that we face. As a Back Bencher myself, I face them.

The hon. Lady referred to the delays. I do not know whether she is listening. She opened this Adjournment debate and I should have thought that she would be interested to hear the answers to the problems. Perhaps she knows them already. When she referred to the delays, she, above all, should have recognised the service of hon. Members who have served on the New Building Sub-Committee. A design brief for phase I was accepted in 1984 under the excellent chairmanship of the late John Silkin, who spent many hours on the design brief and who had to cope with the difficulties of negotiating the funding of the project with Ministers. As an ex-Minister, the hon. Lady will know that getting the funding, even for Parliament itself, is far more difficult than designing the building or getting it built.

In November 1987, the New Building Sub-Committee was set up. I put on record my appreciation of all the hon. Members who constantly attended meetings not once every three months, or once every month, but every Tuesday. The purpose of the exercise was to get on with the building. All hon. Members who have served on the Sub-Committee since 1987 have been regular attenders despite their other onerous duties. Some of them, for example, have been Whips. Recognition of their devotion to the project and to the development of phase 2 should be placed on the record. I have had the privilege to be the Chairman of the Committee. Only as a result of the efforts of the Committee shall we see phase 1 being developed and allocated to hon. Members this summer. Hon. Members will be given accommodation there when we return in October after the summer recess. That is undoubtedly wholly due to the efforts that members of the Sub-Committee have put into the project.

The Sub-Committee has produced four reports since 1987. The first deals with the reasons for the delay on phase 1. I am rather surprised to find that the hon. Lady was not in the Chamber during the debate on that report to make the comments that she has made now. Perhaps she was busy then as a Minister. We have twice presented reports to the House on the Jubilee line proposal, which delayed the development of phase 2 and could have delayed further development of phase 1. We presented the fourth report on the phase 2 proposals.

You, Mr. Speaker, and the Commission engaged Sir Robin Ibbs who produced an excellent report for the House on all accommodation. I put on record the fact that Sir Robin enjoyed the job. However, although he enjoyed coming to the House and making his report, he was not paid for his services. Sir Robin is a busy man. He gave his time and energy to prepare the report, with the help of all the staff in the House, and it will be useful as a source of reference not only for the New Building Sub-Committee, but for other Committees of the House. I am sure that everyone in the House would want to pay tribute to him and to his committee for their efforts.

I am aware that the Minister for Housing and Planning may reply to the debate and I do not want to take the ground from under him. However, I want to explain what I think the next steps should be.

Mr. Don Dixon (Jarrow)

The Minister was a member of the Committee.

Mr. Powell

Yes, the Minister was a member of the Committee.

I fully understand the hon. Lady's impatience with the slow rate of progress to date—indeed, I and my colleagues fully share that impatience. I hope that we can now make more rapid progress. Most hon. Members will be aware that phase I will open during the forthcoming summer recess. The infuriating delays that have bedevilled the work on site now seem to be over. We can look forward to moving into a splendid building. It will provide 160 extra desks for hon. Members and their staff. There will be new catering facilities, major new accommodation for the Library and much more besides. Many new offices for Members will be provided within the Palace as a result of other hon. Members moving into phase 1. I understand that about 95 places will become available within the accommodation of the House.

You will recall, Mr. Speaker, the time when we discovered that there were 25 rooms above your spacious accommodation in the Speaker's House. They will become available as a result of your inquisitiveness to find out what was going on above your head.

Mrs. Currie

My ears are pricking. Are we given to understand that the rooms above the Speaker's House will be available to hon. Members? If so, may I put my name down?

Mr. Dixon

Yes to the first question, no to the second.

Mr. Powell

My hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Mr. Dixon) said that the answer to the first question was yes and the answer to the second was no. The Accommodation and Administration Sub-Committee examined the matter and said that the accommodation should be only for hon. Members because it was above the Speaker's House. You, Mr. Speaker, would not want a cabaret going on upstairs while you where trying to sleep. The rooms were found and the New Building Sub-Committee, the Accommodation and Administration Sub-Committee and the Select Committee on House of Commons (Services) made arrangements to provide access to them. They will eventually come on stream for new hon. Members.

The problems were not only finding the rooms and organising the space audit, which the Committee pressurised everyone to complete. Thanks to the Serjeant at Arms and his staff, the accommodation audit was carried out, although it took some months. It may interest the hon. Lady to know that it is the first space audit of the Palace of Westminster since it was built. At least our weekly meetings are turning up much accommodation that might otherwise have been overlooked.

As for phase 2, much has been happening behind the scenes. In two reports to the House over the past 12 months, the Services Committee has described complicated negotiations with London Underground Limited about the future of the Bridge street site. That has taken up much of the Committee's time since the Government presented the Jubilee line scheme two years ago. The latest proposals represent an excellent deal for the House. The plan to dig up Parliament square and use it as a work site for five years has been dropped, largely because of pressure from the New Building Sub-Committee. The Government have promised that funds will be forthcoming for a concrete raft to separate the London Underground works from the parliamentary works.

That crucial decision will enable us to erect a high-quality building, shielded from the noise and vibration of the tube trains that make working in the existing buildings so unpleasant. I used to share an office in St. Stephen's house with my hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow; it was all right when the trains were not moving, but once they started we had to move with them, even if we were writing at the time. The design of the phase 2 building will no doubt benefit from the fact that the architect Michael Hopkins will be responsible for it, and also for that of the new tube station.

Having been initially blown off course by the rather half-baked proposals of London Underground, we are now in a position to co-operate with the company in the development of a finer building than would otherwise have been possible. Perhaps the two-year delay will benefit Parliament: the building above the concrete raft will include five floors which will stretch right across the raft, rather than the original design around the perimeter of Bridge street.

Over the past 12 months, the New Building Sub-Committee has been very active. We have commissioned the first thorough survey of parliamentary accommodation—the so-called audit—which consists of a computerised data base that will enable future accommodation to be planned on a rational and objective basis. The space audit has told us how much space we currently have, how it is to be used and how much of the present accommodation is unfit for its purpose.

The hon. Member for Derbyshire, South mentioned the Cloisters. I spent some time there. A number of hon. Members who were elected in 1979 were allocated no desks and no offices—not even any space in the Cloisters. We were left to wander the corridors. I remember, Mr. Speaker, asking your predecessor, in 1980, to implement the shops and factories Acts. He said that, although hon. Members passed Acts of Parliament, the law did not cover them. We could not demand the implementation of the law for the benefit of Members of Parliament or their secretaries, because we are a law unto ourselves. We had to beg or borrow a space, sometimes using the desks that were available in the Library and sometimes finding that no desk or chair was available even there.

When I was responsible for allocating accommodation to Labour Members, I offered a desk in the Oratory Room to a new Member in 1987. I told him that it could give him a great deal of publicity, because Charles I's death warrant had been signed in that room. He might appear on the front page of his local newspaper. "May I see the room?" he asked. "Of course," I replied, and I took him down to see it. "Very nice," he said. "I accept; thank you very much." Accordingly, he moved in and was given the expected publicity. He showed me the story on the front page of his local paper, explaining how he had been allocated a space in that historic room. What he did not realise was that three other hon. Members would be joining him in a week or two. He would come to regret having accepted the offer. Thankfully, things are changing now, and it is to be hoped that in the not-too-distant future there will be accommodation for all hon. Members.

I have written to all hon. Members asking for their views on which extra facilities are most acutely needed in the phase 2 building. I have received replies from just under 10 per cent. of my colleagues.

We have also received bids for accommodation from the various organisations and departments represented in the House. On the basis of all that information we have put together a package of proposals for phase 2. The Services Committee will announce its decision in a report to the House which we hope will be published shortly after the Easter recess. You would not expect me, Mr. Speaker, to divulge the contents of a Select Committee's report in advance of its publication. I can only say, wait and see. If, however, our proposals are adopted, we shall be able to achieve the Services Committee's target so that by the time phase 2 is completed, every hon. Member who wants an office shall have one and the overall standard of accommodation for Members of Parliament and their staff will be greatly increased. We hope that then we shall be able to demolish unsightly temporary accommodation such as Portakabins and find new uses for what is at present unsuitable accommodation within the estate. Moreover, we hope to be able to accept the great majority of the bids for phase 2 accommodation.

On Thursday of this week we are to hold an exhibition in Committee Room 7 from 11 am to 5 pm. It will not publicise the Services Committee's final recommendations because they have not yet been reported to the House, but the exhibition will display the current thinking of our architects and give some idea of what might be available in phase 2. The architects ought to be given credit for the advice that they have given not only on phase 2 but on phase 1. If hon. Members take the trouble on Thursday to visit the exhibition, I am sure that they will be suitably impressed. We hope that as many Members of Parliament and staff of the House as possible will see the exhibition.

Once the Services Committee has reported, it will be up to the Government to ensure that progress is maintained. We hope for early acceptance by the Treasury that funding should be made available for phase 2. Our architects can then begin the design work in earnest. Construction work could begin as soon as the London Underground Bill receives Royal Assent—possibly in about 12 months' time. If the political will of Ministers is there for phase 2, it could be completed within three or four years. My Sub-Committee will do its best to ensure that that timetable is achieved.

I could speak at length, but I realise that other hon. Members want to take part in the debate. The chances are that they will want another debate on this important subject. It is an emotive one for those without accommodation. The members of the Services Committee and I are sympathetic. Those of us who now have an office of our own have not always enjoyed one. We appreciate, therefore, the restrictions imposed on certain Members and their staff and believe that proper accommodation ought to be provided for them. It should be possible for them to hold committee meetings in their offices, at which four or five other people could be accommodated. Their secretaries ought to be able to work alongside them. Members ought not to have to walk two or three miles to contact their secretaries. It is high time that Parliament spent money on designing a building in which appropriate facilities are made available for Members of Parliament.

I should like a swimming pool to be provided, as well as accommodation for school children when they visit the House. That would enable us to educate youngsters about parliamentary democracy. Such accommodation is willingly provided in other countries. Other Parliaments pay for visits by school children. Facilities are made available for them so that they can listen to debates. It is essential that this Parliament should provide similar facilities.

The aim of the New Building Sub-Committee and of hon. Members on the Service Committee is, with the blessing of your Commission, Mr. Speaker, to make progress on the design of phase 2 and to provide accommodation for hon. Members.

9.9 pm

Mr. David Shaw (Dover)

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Ogmore (Mr. Powell) for speaking in this interesting debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South (Mrs. Currie) on obtaining it. The hon. Gentleman made a relevant point when he said that, in due course, every hon. Member should have an office, our visitors should be better treated and we should have the facility of Committee Rooms in which we can hold meetings. Those three things would go a long way towards ensuring that the House and its Members are pre-eminent in the world in terms of debate and in maintaining our leadership of many years as the mother of Parliaments and as one of the leading Parliaments, if not the leading one, of the world.

However, we must focus on whether the hon. Gentleman's objectives will be met and consider what pressure we must keep up to ensure that they are met. In the short time that I have been a Member of the House, I have learnt that, unless we keep up the pressure, bureaucracy all too often gets in the way and the administrative procedures ensure either that things do not happen or that objectives take an unduly long period to achieve.

I was elected after working in business and industry, and although I acknowledge that one wants to embrace and quickly take on board many of our traditions that go back hundreds of years, the tradition of poor facilities is not one that we should maintain. It has had its day. There was a time when it was a bit of a joke. There was a time when one could go to one's constituents and say, with a bit of a laugh, "Aren't the conditions that we work in appalling? Aren't you fortunate that we can deal with your mail, get answers out of Ministers for you and have the arrangements for all that?" There were times when hon. Members were proud of the fact that they could use a desk in the Library and did not need a secretary because they could write all their constituency mail by hand.

However, those times are in the past. We live in a competitive world and in a market economy, although not all hon. Members welcome that. In this competitive world, other Parliaments might begin to compete with the mother of Parliaments in the skills of debate and in terms of what facilities they can offer their Members. We need to stay on top of the many issues that need discussion today. This Parliament over the years has discussed issues that relate to many countries. I remind hon. Members of the debates on the Gulf and of the amount of information that was needed when making decisions about weaponry and equipment. All hon. Members suddenly wanted to get to grips with that information.

We also encounter pressures from the media. Because of what is happening in the world today, we are instantly required to be experts on a wide variety of subjects. The days when one could lock oneself away and be an expert only on health or on defence or on any other individual subject have now gone. We must ensure that we have access to a lot of information, and to that end we need not only technology and its facilities available in our own offices, but better facilities for our staff, who should also have access to that information.

It is annoying to find that, although Government Departments issue press releases almost daily on various subjects that interest me or my constituents, I do not yet have the facilities to search a database and to find out what information was released today or yesterday. Instead, one has to telephone the Department and check with the civil servants. That means delay and an inconvenience that is compounded when one has only a limited number of staff and has to carry out much of the research oneself.

However, all those facilities are increasingly available to the outside companies that lobby us. It is infuriating to attend a lobbying company function and to find that its staff are much more on top of the subject and have much more information at their fingertips than is available to hon. Members. When I go to meetings, I want to be able to ask my secretary or a member of my staff to press the buttons on the machine and obtain access to all the relevant information to ensure that I am properly briefed, as I would be if I were in business. When I was in business, information was made available in one way or another.

When I visit colleagues with whom I used to work when I was in business and see their offices and the facilities which my former employers now provide for their staff, I am appalled at how the House of Commons is falling behind day by day and minute by minute in an environment where the electronic age is pushing everything in the outside world that much further forward and at a much faster pace. We must keep up and get on top. If not, the fears of my colleagues that the European Parliament and other parliaments in Europe will move ahead will be realised, because other parliaments will be able to move information and databases forward.

Mrs. Currie

Will my hon. Friend join me in putting on record our appreciation of the House of Commons Library, and its research assistants and staff? They are absolutely first class. Will he add the press to his list of outside organisations that are much better informed on a day-to-day basis than we are? Does he agree that it is astonishing that the most efficient way of finding out what is going on in our constituencies is to phone our local newspapers?

Mr. Shaw

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend on the latter point. It is particularly frustrating when a media organisation gets on the telephone to one and says, "Please can we have a quote on … " It may be some subject on which the Ministry has just made the latest announcement or, dare I say, leaked what is to be announced later in the day. One does not have a clue that the announcement was even to be made. There is nothing on a televison screen to tell us.

The other frustrating thing is that, when we are over here in the main Parliament building, we cannot contact our offices except by telephone. We have secretaries working away typing letters, and it would be wonderful if we could go to a computer screen in the Library and go through our secretaries' work on a link line to our offices, which are some yards away. That would be especially useful when voting is taking place.

I also agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South about the House of Commons Library. We have tremendous access to information and support from the House of Commons Library, but is that resource being used in a sensible way? If I step back and look at the matter almost as a management consultant would, I notice that we have some talented people in the Library who should often be used for intellectual research and the product of the research rather than for our mundane inquiries. Sometimes such people have to deal with our mundane inquiries because we do not have access in our offices to basic computer searching facilities to enable us to search databases ourselves.

The office programme should be designed to enable us to compete with the outside business world, the people who lobby us, the media, and the European Parliament. We must keep the British Parliament ahead of the field. We want this Parliament to continue to be a centre for intellectual debate which is ahead of the field and the rest of the world.

In the few years that I have been in Parliament, I have had visitors from the eastern bloc, several Soviet republics and the United States. They were all full of admiration for the intellectual debate which goes on in this Parliament and the way in which we have stayed ahead of the field over the years. But they would be shocked if they knew that we were likely to fall behind them as they developed. They will have the advantage of developing with all the new technology. They will take on all the latest facilities. They will ensure that any new buildings in their Parliaments are wired with the latest optical fibres and other technologies which will enable them to keep ahead. It is important that we should keep ahead in intellectual debate.

We should keep ahead in representing democracy and in making sure that Parliament does more to encourage visitors. A number of hon. Members have mentioned schoolchildren and others visiting the Palace of Westminster. It is essential that we have adequate facilities and that we can offer people refreshments. Visitors from my local disabled groups have come to Westminster. I was quite impressed by our facilities for the disabled, but there are no facilities for giving a cup of tea afterwards to people who have gone around the House of Commons in their wheelchairs. Here they are, having struggled round the building and enjoyed their visit, unable to sit down and have refreshments at the end.

Nor do we have enough Committee or other rooms in which to meet people when we cannot leave the House because of debates. We must have more meeting facilities.

As a new Member, I have been rather fortunate in securing an office in Norman Shaw, North, because it is one of our better buildings and has better office provision. Yet the carpets are a little dowdy, there is dust and goodness knows how many little bugs which have been floating around for years, and one feels that there has never been a breath of fresh air in the building for some time. The paintwork is not regularly renewed. It does not give the impression of being a working environment in a modern age.

There is also a tremendous waste of space which will have to be addressed at some stage: neither the corridors nor the arrangement of the building are very modern. There is also a central courtyard which is a total waste of space. It may be that the outside of the building must be preserved for architectural reasons, but there are many buildings in the City of London whose centres have been modernised; the offices are open-plan, and an atrium and airy, light spaces have been introduced. The natural lighting in the Norman Shaw, North offices is appalling, and we rely on neon lighting which in many offices today might be questioned as being bad for the eyes.

When I read of office stress and strain and all the other conditions which are being investigated these days by the private sector, I feel that our staff are getting a raw deal, because it will be a long time before we can offer them the sort of health protection that is offered by the private sector. We must address these subjects. We cannot go on having debates and discussions like this in the year 2000 and beyond. It is just not good enough to continue for that length of time without doing something about these things.

I have mentioned in outline information facilities and access to databases, networking systems and other such things. We must accept the truth of the old saying "Information is power". I am not a great one for the conspiracy theory, but it has been suggested to me that it applies here—that it suits the Government to keep hon. Members in the dark, to keep them away from some of the information facilities and to deny them access to some of the modern technology which will enable us to get up speed and be able to compete with Government and Ministers on what is happening in the world outside, and will ensure that questions and debate in the Chamber are of the highest possible standard and quality.

I would suggest to any Minister who might be tempted down that path that it is in the interests of us all, whether in government or out of it, to have the highest possible standard of debate in the Chamber, to make sure that, when foreign visitors come here, they will still feel that the British Parliament is the leading parliament in the world and will continue to be so.

That is why we must make sure that we have complete access to all the information facilities now available, whether commercial, Government or departmental databases. The most modern facilities should be available in the offices of the future that hon. Members will occupy.

The internal mail facilities in this building need examining. It is wonderful for us to have at our disposal the services of the great British Post Office. All the traditions of that great institution are brought to bear as our mail is cared for. I understand that certain aspects of Mr. Speaker's mail receive special attention, but we are hidebound with tradition, even in such modern matters as the mail, and a special stamp must be affixed to all envelopes that appear on the Members' letter board. I accept that many of these facilities have style and have existed for many years.

When I visit a friend in Congress in the United States, I see that his mail is delivered each morning to his personal letter box at the door of his office. His secretary does not have to queue at the Congress post office for his letters. Our secretaries make a detour—it can take up to 20 minutes—going to our post office and queueing for our mail. Consider the time, not just in money, wasted by our secretaries undertaking such activities, when they should be answering queries from our constituents and dealing with administrative and other matters. I urge the authorities of the House to examine our internal mail arrangements, at least in the hope that the mail can be delivered directly to our secretaries' desks and offices.

We must review the maintenance and decoration of public buildings, new and old, in an aggressive way. The trouble with Government accounting, for the schools and hospitals in our constituencies and so on—I speak as an accountant who worked in the private sector, and my remarks apply to all Government buildings, including the Palace of Westminster—is that proper provision is not made for maintenance and depreciation because we do so much on a cash accounting rather than on an accruals accounting basis. The result is that, when the time comes for cash to be spent on maintenance and repairs, we discover that there is something better to spend it on, that the country cannot afford it, or that public expenditure is too tight at that time for the money to be spent in that way.

Our public buildings must be regularly decorated. Curtains in our offices should be taken down at least annually and properly cleaned to remove the dust and modern bugs that scientists seem to be discovering almost weekly. Only by those means shall we ensure that we and our staff work in a healthy environment. That may lead us in the future to be more efficient and productive. It will also help to keep this place in the forefront of the world's parliament buildings.

9.27 pm

Mr. David Harris (St. Ives)

I am happy to speak after my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Mr. Shaw), and I begin where he left off, on the important issue of the general appearance of this place. Hon. Members will not forget their first visit to this building. I was a young lad up from the west country who sat in the public gallery and looked round in wonderment. My local MP asked me to join him for tea, but I was too shy to accept. I was left with the impression of a building in marvellous condition. I speak of the time not long after it was rebuilt following the blitz. The stairways, for example, were in excellent condition, whereas my hon. Friend the Member for Dover was right to say that it is now in places decidedly grotty.

This debate provides a valuable opportunity for those who care deeply about this building and institution—of course, the institution is wider than the building—to review the state of affairs here, and we are grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South (Mrs. Currie) for initiating the debate. I am particularly grateful to the hon. Member for Ogmore (Mr. Powell), the Chairman of the New Building Sub-Committee, for the difficult work that the Committee does. I thank him for bringing us up to date on the plans for stage 2. We hope that the opening of stage 1 is imminent.

We can all be critical. My hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South was critical of the length of time that it takes to get anything done in this place. The parliamentary estate—what a horrible expression—is one of the most sensitive areas in the whole of London. No one knows better than you, Mr. Speaker, that nobody can do anything here without consulting many people. A great number of people are involved in the work, and many bodies outside—not least, English Heritage—are very concerned about any alteration, however small. There are all sorts of restraints and contraints on the work of improving the lot of the thousands of people who work—indeed, almost live—in these buildings.

One thinks, above all, of the malevolent influence and attitude of the Treasury from time to time. I am sure that you, Mr. Speaker, like me, remember the very ambitious plans that were produced many years ago for the site we are now discussing. I think that the building was called the bird-cage because of its aviary-type top. We all remember how, one Budget day, the Chancellor of the Exchequer killed that project at a stroke. The Government of the day had to cut public expenditure, and the bad conditions in which Members of Parliament had to work continued.

Tributes have been paid to the many people who have done their best to improve our conditions. I crave your indulgence, Mr. Speaker, to pay a tribute—one with which the House will want to be associated—to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Surrey, East (Sir G. Howe), who, in his year or so as Leader of the House of Commons, did his utmost to improve conditions. I had the pleasure of being my right hon. and learned Friend's Parliamentary Private Secretary. Having made that very swift transition one July day from the Foreign Office to this building, the Leader of the House decided, in his usual thorough manner, to go on a very extensive tour. We went to Old Palace Yard and to St. Stephen's house, which is still rattled by the trains. I have fond memories of the reaction of the hon. Member for Ogmore. My right hon. and learned Friend was absolutely shocked at the conditions in which some members of our staff, particularly secretaries, work. The conditions really are appalling. Perhaps I may enter a plea for my secretary, who still works in St. Stephen's house. I hope that she will get accommodation in phase 1 of the new building, which should open after the summer recess. I do not make any special plea for myself.

Harsh words have been said about conditions in the Cloisters. When I became a Member of Parliament I asked that I should be allowed to go to the Cloisters. I have spent 27 or 28 years here. The first 19 years were spent in the Press Gallery, and for the remainder, after service in the European Parliament, I have been a Member. Having decided that I wanted to go to the Cloisters, I sought out the good Miss Frampton, who will be remembered well, and put my request to her. The request was granted. Of course, that place would not be everybody's choice. Unlike my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South, I was not sent red roses.

I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Torridge and Devon, West (Miss Nicholson), who also has a desk in the Cloisters, will bear me out when I say that they have one merit above all others—their convenience for getting to the Chamber. One could hardly be nearer the Chamber. Admittedly, other Members sometimes speak rather loudly—not, I hasten to add, my hon. Friend the Member for Torridge and Devon, West, whose desk is two down from mine—and there is certainly no privacy, but the place has a certain charm and I should be happy to spend the rest of my parliamentary life there.

The new building will relieve some of the pressure for space, so I make a plea that when it comes into service we be given a little more space in the Cloisters, which are after all no more than a converted corridor. Given a little more space, I shall be perfectly happy to stay there.

Hon. Members have mentioned other people who work in this building and the conditions in which they have their being—our secretaries, for instance. I should like to mention the Press Gallery. The number of journalists working there has exploded in recent years, because of the televising of the House, local radio and the general growth of the lobby. Numbers have increased dramatically since I arrived in the gallery in 1961. It has tripled in size, and that has put pressure on press refreshment facilities and especially on the writing rooms. People are jammed in, and their position has not been eased by the advent of the new technology which was much lauded by my hon. Friend the Member for Dover.

Speaking of my hon. Friend the Member for Dover, I should add that databases, computers and all the machines that I have no intention of ever mastering are doubtless important to some hon. Members. The fact is that we all want something different from the House of Commons and the services that it provides. So I was glad to read in the third report of the Select Committee on House of Commons (Services), prepared by the Sub-Committee presided over by the hon. Member for Ogmore, the following sentence. Referring to the space audit about which the hon. Member for Ogmore enlightened us, it said: We are not seeking to establish a single uniform standard of accommodation. That is right and proper. We all want different sorts of accommodation. Many of us are perfectly happy in the Cloisters; others have different requirements.

My hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South is one of those who need more space, privacy and staff. No doubt she has research assistants. I do not want one—they are anathema to me. But I am not criticising my hon. Friend——

Mrs. Currie

I hear what my hon. Friend says and I agree with it, apart from two points. First, there ought to be some minimum standards here which are at least related to the laws that affect the rest of the nation. Secondly, I should like not just more room and space but a window.

Mr. Harris

I am sure that my hon. Friend will have a window, if not more space. She is right of course. The Select Committee report went on to say: We do however think it desirable to establish a basic minimum standard which, if approved by the House, could become the bench mark for future planning"— the very point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South.

I treasure the memory of my former colleague, Enoch Powell, sitting at a desk in the Library answering his correspondence with a dipped pen. Some colleagues still do that and there should be a place for it. Perhaps some of them use fountain or ball-point pen—a method eschewed by my former colleague. Equally, there should be a place for the needs and aspirations of Members. For example, my hon. Friend the Member for Dover is into computers, word processors and all that fancy equipment in a big way. The House should try to accommodate Members' different styles of working.

One of the fascinating aspects of this place is that there is no set way to approach the remarkable job of being a Member of Parliament. No one, thank goodness, has tried to produce a manual on it. We all work differently, according to our upbringing, training and constituencies. The pressure on Members varies according to whether we are full time—I do not criticise those who are not. The strength of the House is its diversity, but that produces problems for those who manage and run it.

During my five years as a Member of the European Parliament, my colleagues and I had offices that we refused to occupy because we felt that the Mayor of Strasbourg, Pierre Pflimlin, was attemping to cement the European Parliament to Strasbourg. A great building was constructed there, without parliamentary approval, and made available to us. The offices contained a shower and a couch and were quite palatial, but I was there for only one week a month. My office would have made most Members of this House green with envy, but I hope that we shall never reach that position here.

I not only cherish the memory of Enoch Powell working in the Library, but when I go there I delight in seeing some of my colleagues still working there—often by choice—because that is the way it should be. We do not want uniformity but better standards, especially for our staff and those of our colleagues who require them. We want better facilities for the many people who serve the House and work in it, perhaps not directly for Members of Parliament.

Some Opposition Members have made the case on behalf of the catering staff. They have described the conditions in which they must work and the paucity of their rest facilities. They work terrifically long hours, especially when the House sits late, and deserve proper facilities.

The debate has been well worth while. I hope that it will spur on all those who have been wrestling with the accommodation problem for many years to make even greater efforts. My hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South is right to say that we should make faster progress, but we are getting there. Some of us are happy to be self-sacrificing and say, "You have your fine office. We are content with ours in the crowded Cloisters".

9.43 pm

Miss Emma Nicholson (Torridge and Devon, West)

It is difficult for Parliament to get it right, not only because of the differing needs and views expressed by my hon. Friends the Members for St. Ives (Mr. Harris), who sits in front of me in the Cloisters, and for Derbyshire, South (Mrs. Currie), but also because it is a question of housing. It is perhaps appropriate that my hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Planning will answer the debate. I say that quite seriously. I was recently in Romania, where, as we know, the dictator, the Parliament and all the authorities built themselves truly massive palaces, which would doubtless fulfil all the requirements of the endless reports that have been produced about services in this place. But when I went to Romania, I was ashamed that the people had not turned all the palaces into houses for the poor immediately after the revolution. In terms of civilisation and care of our own people, we are a million miles from Romania. Nevertheless, I believe that there is a point to be made.

I understand that we are already the most expensive Parliament in the world, and we sit the longest hours by far. The next Parliament down the list sits only half the hours that we do and the next one down, half the hours again. We are enormously expensive in terms of staff. I have worked in many areas of the world, in many different offices and in countries with different cultures and styles of economy. Never in my life have I been as well looked after personally as I am here. In my working experience, the service that we receive from all the staff, with their different responsibilities, titles and tasks, is truly unique.

There is simply nothing like it anywhere else. We talk about Congress. The messengers in Congress are youngsters—dressed up and running around. I am amazed that they ever arrive. Presumably it is only their keenness and enthusiasm that get them there. How far removed they are from the stately dignity of our highly intelligent badge messengers. When one hears our messengers talking about the very framework of the building, as they do each morning, one realises their great knowledge and love of the Palace of Westminster.

The hon. Member for Ogmore (Mr. Powell) referred to catering facilities. Never in my life have I been able to walk into any one of a number of restaurants and cafeterias at my place of work at 3 am and get the sort of breakfast I want.

This is a truly remarkable place. Would that all the library facilities in the United Kingdom could match the level of service that we are offered. I am proud that I can sit in the Library and do my work on behalf of my constituents. The facilities are truly remarkable, not just because of the intelligence of those who serve us from behind the counters, but because of the enormously varied service that they provide, ranging from providing us with daily or weekly papers to bringing to us any book that we care to name. The service is unique in the United Kingdom.

My hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives referred to our desks in the Cloisters, but failed to mention one important point. It is true that we sit in a passage and that it is sometimes difficult. The police walk through, reminding us to vote, and that is a helpful service, but everyone else also seems to walk through, including secretaries and colleagues. Nevertheless, it is an extraordinary feeling when one looks up at the vaulted ceiling in the middle of the night and remembers that, with the exception of Westminster hall, the Cloisters are perhaps the oldest part of the House—the passageway through which Princess Elizabeth walked when she was concerned about the possibility of her sister executing her. This is an historic place, of truly great proportions both physically and because of its uniqueness.

I heartily support and praise the way in which the building has been adapted in an extraordinary variety of ways to meet some of the needs of a modern Member of Parliament. In the Cloisters, my hon. Friend and I have no privacy for our telephone calls. My desk is still labelled "Enoch Powell". I sometimes wonder exactly who I am. I took out the "Iain Macleod" label. It was a toss-up as to which eminent former Member of Parliament I should attempt to copy. Perhaps it was Mr. Macleod, who I knew the better of the two, and whose philosophy I probably share.

It is tough that we cannot have a private telephone conversation. It is difficult to have a tiny desk that cannot hope to contain the amount of mail that pours to us through the Post Office three, four or five times a day. However, in that old Cloisters, that historic place, there is the knowledge that we are just part of a long procession of Members of Parliament serving the United Kingdom.

Mrs. Currie

I am intrigued by the fact that my hon. Friend's desk in the Cloisters has Enoch Powell's name on it. Her experience is similar to that of my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Mr. Norris), who was at school with me in Liverpool. On one occasion he found that the schooldesk that he was sitting at had carved on its lid the name "Arthur Askey".

Does my hon. Friend think that perhaps the appalling working conditions in the Cloisters could be one reason why that distinguished gentleman Mr. Powell was driven to work in the Library? It is certainly something that drove me to work in the Library. Unfortunately, there are nowhere near enough desks in the Library to accommodate colleagues who find that they cannot work in peace or concentrate in places such as the Cloisters, which is a corridor and a public thoroughfare.

Miss Nicholson

There is a benefit in working in such a cramped environment—the sense of comradeship and community. We are all battling against the same difficulties of volume in the modern world. [Interruption.] Over and above that, it enables us to concentrate in such environments as this Chamber at the moment, when hon. Members are attempting to thwart my speech. They are talking despite the importance of the topic. In a word, it teaches one concentration—and that art is highly prized in commerce and industry outside this place.

I wonder whether we are aware—despite, or perhaps because of, the slowness of change—how much conditions have imnproved in this place over the past 25 years. I understand that before my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath) became Prime Minister, the only stamped envelopes that Members of Parliament were allowed to use were for destinations within the Greater London area. Those with constituencies in Cornwall or Devon had to pay for their postage.

Lest that sounds trivial to the electorate, I shall remind the House of an interesting statistic. Some 30 years ago, before this place became engulfed in such a volume of mail, the general public wrote to their Members of Parliament only a fraction of the number of times that they do now. Then, only 3 per cent. of the electorate wrote to their Members of Parliament in any one year; now, the figure has risen to 63 per cent. That explains why we have such great difficulty in coping with the volume of mail. That is not my imagination; it is actuality. Alas, it is the fault of our good friend the word processor, on which my hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives commented when he responded to the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Mr. Shaw).

However we view the problem, we must come back to the central question of cost. This is a very expensive Palace of Westminster. We demand and acquire more services. We are looked after better and better and at greater and greater expense. The high cost of running the mother of Parliaments has put hon. Members off the sensible and sane plans which have been brought before the House but not implemented.

Cost is one of the real difficulties, and I believe that there should be some self-discipline and budgetary control in the mother of Parliaments. If we are to indulge ourselves by providing more accommodation for hon. Members or their staff—I heartily endorse the latter—there is a case for our looking more closely at our high expenditure. I hope that that will lead my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House to examine with a much fiercer eye the number of hours we work. Is it honestly necessary for the mother of Parliaments to sit so much longer than Congress which, alas, has so much more regard, resources and responsibility than we have?

I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will suggest to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House that, while it is splendid that he should look at ways of enlarging our comfort and ease, we should look at how the budget balances and try to restrict some of our already large expenses.

Other things matter as well. Health and safety have already been mentioned. It is a fact that, while others honour our health and safety legislation, the House of Commons does not have to do so. We pass the legislation, but we do not honour it. That is not a meritorious attitude. If we pass such legislation, we should honour it. I did not find it at all surprising that the first major case of salmonella which was egg-induced arose in the other place.

When one sees the desperately limited facilities that are available to the catering staff, one is astounded at the high-quality food and drink that they manage to turn out. The high standard they achieve is very creditable, given the difficulties under which they work.

I love to go downstairs and sit in the Members' cafeteria. The engraving on the wall there shows that it is very little different from what it was 200 or 300 years ago. It is fascinating to see the similarity, but the sensitivity with which we approach food today and the safety that we require surely mean that we should give our catering staff a better place in which to work than they have at the moment.

Facilities for the disabled is a subject that is close to all our hearts. I am fortunate enough to be chairman of ADAPT. It took us a long time to work out what ADAPT could be made to mean because we needed the word so very badly. It stands for Access for Disabled People to Arts Premises Today. It is the child of the Carnegie trust—that great trust which is perhaps the grandfather of all trusts in the United Kingdom. It was founded by Andrew Carnegie, who went to the United States of America and made his fortune in steel and railways. He set up an enormous trust in the United States and then came back and set up a more modest trust in Scotland. Out of his generosity came the building of most of our libraries, not the most modern ones but the Victorian libraries in all areas of the United Kingdom.

The Carnegie trust has not rested on those achievements. It is one of the quietest, most effective and largest trusts for good. It works on the same lines as the Rowntree trust and similar trusts. It created the body of which I have the honour to be chairman——

It being Ten o'clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[ Mr. Boswell.]

Miss Nicholson

Half the board of ADAPT is composed of people with profound disabilities. It makes decisions affecting arts premises and public libraries. What do we mean by arts premises? We mean cinemas, theatres, museums and all sorts of places where the public go for entertainment.

It is an appalling thing to say, but the only way for a disabled person in, for example, London to have a good night out with dignity is to stay at home in front of the television set. Therefore, the advisory committee of ADAPT had much work to do. Our task is to provide grant aid to stimulate the adaptation of cinemas, theatres, picture galleries, and public libraries as quickly and effectively as we can, by putting in induction loops for those with problems of hearing, by helping with Braille signing for those who are blind, and by putting in ramps and mechanisms for people whose main form of locomotion is not their legs but a pair of wheels. In that way, we help disabled people to have a happy night out with dignity. That is the function of ADAPT.

Like many hon. Members, I am involved in many charitable endeavours. All of us are in different ways as Members of Parliament. Many people ask me to be patron or chairman of voluntary bodies. I have accepted as many as possible, on the basis that when something is important we can have an occasional meeting here. In the case of ADAPT, having meetings here is a non-starter. Despite the best efforts of all our courteous, efficient staff, it is not possible to have even quarterly committee meetings here if most of the members of a committee are heavily disabled.

I know the difficulties of dealing with grade 1, treble-starred, listed buildings, or unique buildings such as the Palace of Westminster, but is it proper that the mother of Parliaments cannot without enormous problems welcome someone in a wheelchair? If someone in a wheelchair is coming here, the Member who has invited that person has to say, "Do not come to St. Stephen's entrance."

People in wheelchairs cannot come in by the normal way. They can come in without going through security. Because they are in wheelchairs they have to go round the back, to the entrance used by post office vans. Such people have to be met personally by the Member who has invited them. They have to be escorted to the lift and up to the principal floor as if they were criminals. Last week, 13 people died on the M4; a number were injured and some of them may end up in wheelchairs. Those people will suddenly realise that, as far as Parliament is concerned, they are on the other side of the fence, they are different. We ensure that that difference shows.

I have had to give up holding ADAPT board meetings in the mother of Parliaments, despite the fact that in our first year of office we have raised and spent more than £1 million on adapting buildings all around the United Kingdom. It is not open to me to adapt Parliament or to offer handicapped people an honest and honourable way in.

I believe most strongly that the mother of Parliaments should not discriminate. Our colour, background or physical and mental ability should not stop us from coming here and meeting our Member for Parliament. It should not stop disabled people from attending an ordinary meeting, even taking into consideration the problems that the rest of us face when meeting our constituents in the mother of Parliaments; yet it does.

Last week, the ADAPT board and I met representatives of the Royal Albert hall. I invited them here. We have offered the Royal Albert hall a rolling programme to alter the hall so that it can never again be said that it has 6,000 seats and only four places for wheelchairs. That is a great project to undertake, but what has happened? Because we had our meeting here, one of our brave ADAPT board members had to come here. We met in Committee Room 17, and to my humiliation, because of the enormous number of chairs there, our committee member had such difficulty getting in and out that she was seen not as the fascinating, interesting and highly intellectual woman that she is, but as an invalid—as someone different, someone in a wheelchair.

I know that the mother of Parliaments will always be imperfect in many ways, and perhaps it is for her imperfections that those of us who are fortunate enough to be Members of this place love her so dearly. It is an honour and a joy for all of us to work here. I love the Palace of Westminster, and I believe that we all do.

None the less—with a proper bow both to modernity, as it is represented by the enormously hard-working hon. Member for Derbyshire, South, and to historic associations, in the different ability to work under pressure, demonstrated so superbly to me every day by my nearest colleague in the Cloisters, the hon. Member for St. Ives—please may we make enough progress to be able to offer a meeting so that a disabled person in a wheelchair may come here with dignity, or to offer our staff somewhere to work with a little privacy and greater comfort? We are fortunate to work here. Let us try to do a little better and to tackle with haste and urgency the problem highlighted by this debate.

Mr. Cryer

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. As you are aware, I applied for a second Adjournment debate and the Department of the Environment agreed to provide a Minister, providing that the first debate was concluded. The matter is quite clear.

My subject was the poll tax, which was very appropriate in view of the announcement today. In my view, although it was clearly in order, the Tory Whips have deliberately brought in speakers to spin out time and to prevent a debate on the poll tax.

Madam Deputy Speaker (Miss Betty Boothroyd)

As the hon. Gentleman has so rightly said, the debate that we are proceeding with is perfectly in order.

10.8 pm

The Minister for Housing and Planning (Sir George Young)

We have had a useful debate, initiated by my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South (Mrs. Currie), in which hon. Members from both sides of the House have taken part.

Today's proceedings have covered two parliamentary institutions—first, the Budget and then a debate about the fabric of Parliament itself. Both debates have been about money and about priorities.

My hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South fulfilled her new year's resolution to take up the question of accommodation, not just for hon. Members but for their staff and others who work in the building. The House is grateful to her for the opportunity to debate a subject which has not been debated since December 1988. The debate has been wide ranging and some of the subjects raised do not fall within my responsibility—for example, questions of food, the hours during which Parliament sits, the mail and many others.

Some of the issues raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South are covered by the New Building Sub-Committee and we are grateful to the hon. Member for Ogmore (Mr. Powell) for bringing the House up to date on the Sub-Committee's deliberations and the progress that it has made towards phase 2, about which my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South feels strongly—and rightly so.

During the debate, the difference of approach of many hon. Members towards their work has become clear. My hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Mr. Shaw) is clearly plugged into every new device of information technology, whereas my hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives (Mr. Harris) is perfectly happy to work in the Cloisters. As many hon. Members have said, it is important not to impose a standard form of working.

When I recently returned to the Whips' Office and took with me my electric letter opener, an answering machine and a desktop printer, one or two members of the office regarded it all as highly dangerous. They regard a propelling pencil as a concession to technology and believe that one should go no further. We must remember that hon. Members discharge their obligations in different ways and we must respect their different approaches.

I was interested in the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Dorset, South (Mr. Bruce) who said that it might be easier if hon. Members were given the opportunity to—as it were—opt out. They could forgo their claim to accommodation in this building either for themselves or for their secretaries, or both, in return for an enhanced allowance which would enable them to provide accommodation in their constituencies. Since I entered the House, one of the changes that I have noticed is in the number of hon. Members who have a highly developed operation in their constituencies. The allowances do not always cover that—telephone calls and other overheads must be met out of the allowance whereas, if the Members were based here, those costs would be covered by the House. I was interested in the idea that there could be a trade-off—perhaps we need not provide so much accommodation in the Palace at great cost if more Members were prepared to relocate their operations outside. However, that is not a matter for the Government. It is a personal observation from someone who has no secretary here and who makes very few claims on the facilities.

I endorse the kind words—which were echoed by many other hon. Members—of my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South in commending the many people who have worked so hard to improve the facilities available to hon. Members and to their staff. The hon. Member for Ogmore and his colleagues on the New Building Sub-Committee have laboured for many hours on behalf of colleagues to secure improvements. It was suggested that hon. Members themselves have a role to play in organising themselves and the premises more effectively.

I remember the approach taken by Walter Harrison, who used to put a note on the desks of those whom he suspected did not use them frequently, saying, "Please ring my office at once." If no telephone call had been made within a few days, that desk was confiscated and allocated to someone who would make better use of it. I think that it was his successor, the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe), who said that we should consider how we operate in the House and how to make better use of existing facilities.

The right hon. Member for Salford, East (Mr. Orme) and his colleagues on the Accommodation and Administration Sub-Committee are another hard-working group. I understand that it was the right hon. Gentleman—with active encouragement from my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman)—who secured the transformation in the Library corridor, which was referred to at the beginning of the debate. Part of a Members' cloakroom was converted for use by lady Members. The Sub-Committee has many other achievements to its name and has contributed significantly to improvements in accommodation. Its achievements often go unsung except when it has the temerity to seek to make changes that involve man's best friend.

Another role is played by staff, such as Committee Clerks, the Serjeant at Arms Department and the Parliamentary Works Office. All of them have a role to play in maintaining our facilities and in putting forward proposals for better facilities.

Considerable strides have been made in the past 10 years. None the less, my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South was right to point out that Members, their staff and the staff of the House often have to work in less than satisfactory conditions. I have noticed how many Ministers who have rooms here have allocated their rooms to their secretaries because they are ashamed of the facilities that those secretaries would otherwise have. That is a clear comment on priorities and expectations.

Hon. Members can and do make their views known, and they have been doing that for the past two hours. Staff do not have the same opportunity. It is right to pay tribute to their contribution to the running of the House, often in trying circumstances, and to their forbearance. I assure them that their needs are being taken fully into account in the development plans.

One cannot accuse the House of not having given careful thought to its needs and one cannot accuse Governments of either party of rushing into solutions. The first mention of using Bridge street as a site for hon. Members was in a debate in March 1960. Lord John Hope, the Minister of Works, announced: The Government have decided to apply for designation for Government development of the area bounded by Bridge Street, Whitehall, New Scotland Yard and the Embankment. He then said prophetically: As the House knows, that is bound to take a bit of time". He was proved wrong when he said: I believe hon. Members, on the whole, would feel that it is not a good thing for Members to go over to Bridge Street."—[Official Report, 31 March 1960; Vol. 620, c. 1527–28.] It was seen as suitable for those who did not need to be on the spot. Even though the perspective has changed, the need to maximise the number of Members' offices within the Palace is still the aim of the House.

Barbara Castle, now Lady Castle, led for the Opposition in that debate. The only hon. Member who spoke then who is still in the House is the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn). Rab Butler closed the debate as Leader of the House. He mentioned that there were only 124 Members' secretaries' desks and that there was no waiting list. As a Minister, he announced that he had ordered an extra 25 filing cabinets for Members. In a plebiscite for the Stokes committee, only 295 Members said that they wanted a desk. A Minister had recently said that one telephone per desk was over-egging the pudding. In addition to the Bridge street site, a number of other schemes were also under consideration. There was a suggestion that the Palace should be completed as Barry had intended by entirely enclosing New Palace Yard with an extension from the Clock Tower to the St. Stephen's entrance. There was a proposal to use the roof spaces and to infill the courtyards.

As a result of that debate, in the 1960s and the 1970s, the north and south Upper Committee Corridors, the Star Chamber Court block and the tea room block in Commons Court have all been used to provide additional accommodation. The Barry extension, surrounding New Palace Yard, proved too controversial.

There were major acquisitions in the 1970s, such as Norman Shaw North and South, which accommodates almost 150 Members, the Library and 200 secretaries' desks. The development of Bridge street has been less encouraging. A number of plans have come to naught, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South and other hon. Members referred. The House will recall the design with which Spence and Webster won the competition for a new parliamentary building, which was abandoned in 1976. There were plans by Sir William Holford in the early 1960s, by Sir Leslie Martin for the whole of the Whitehall area in the mid-1960s and the Casson Conder comprehensive proposals which were abandoned in 1979, as my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South said.

Although 1979 saw the cancellation of the then latest scheme for improving accommodation for Members and staff, and was the cause of more delay, it could in retrospect be seen as a watershed. Instead of large-scale developments causing major demands on the public purse, we have gone forward since then in smaller bites. As a result, we have achieved more in the 1980s on the site than in the whole of the previous 20 years.

It may be appropriate to mention the important role played by my right hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine). He achieved that sea change in 1979, and pushed through phase 1 of the redevelopment. It is appropriate that he is back at the Department to do the same for phase 2.

The first of the recent major improvements was 1 Canon row, occupied in summer 1989. Although it was refurbished only for short-term use pending redevelopment as part of the Bridge street project, it none the less provided some worthwhile gains, accommodating 30 Members' secretaries, providing training accommodation for the Official Report and bringing together the staff of the Parliamentary Works Office. Better police accommodation has been provided, as—most recently—has an improved gymnasium, for which tribute should be paid to my hon. Friend the Member for Dorset, West (Sir J. Spicer).

There were also consequential gains in the Palace. The leader of the Liberal Democrats—who do not seem to be represented in this debate—gained a much larger suite of offices, and additional Members' offices were built on the official corridor, off the Strangers' Gallery and on the ground floor—about 10 in all. That may not seem a lot, but it is at least significant.

My hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South rightly mentioned the progress—and lack of progress—with Bridge street phase 1. The contract was let in May 1987 and work started in the following month for completion in May 1990. The new accommodation should have been available for occupation at the end of the summer recess last year, but it is a matter of history that that did not happen. The Services Committee commented that the lack of progress was a sorry commentary on the state of the building industry", and I tend to share that view, but there will be other occasions for a post mortem; perhaps tonight we can look forward.

The fine building that emerged from the scaffolding is now clearly visible. I do not know whether my hon. Friend has been around the building, but it is well worth a visit. I was enormously impressed by the way in which the work had been carried out and by the high standard of finish. It will, I think, be a very attractive proposition for hon. Members who locate there.

It is equally obvious that the work is now coming to an end. The main contractors' senior managers have said that the contract will be completed by Easter, which is less than two weeks away. There is still some major snagging work to be completed and a good deal of effort is going into that. I hope that on this occasion the House will not he disappointed.

I know that the New Building Sub-Committee is keeping a close eye on developments. It will visit the site shortly after Easter to confirm that the forecast has been fulfilled, as will I. If the target is achieved, moves into the building will start at the time of the spring bank holiday, and should be completed by the end of the summer recess. The building will provide accommodation for 100 Members' secretaries and 60 Members, a cafeteria seating 150 for the use of both Members and staff, a Library for all those north of Bridge street and residences for senior staff, as well as overnight sleeping accommodation.

The benefits, however, will be enjoyed not only by those who move into the new building. There will be less overcrowding in existing Members' offices, less pressure on the catering facilities in the Palace, improved Library facilities and better offices for staff. My hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives suggested that there might be less congestion in the Cloisters. That is a matter for the usual channels, but I am sure that his suggestions will be taken on board.

The vacated residences of the Serjeant at Arms, the Deputy Serjeant and the Speaker's Secretary are all to become Members' offices. It will also be possible to bring into use the derelict area above the Speaker's Secretary's residence, which will mean further gains for Members. Following phase I and the consequentials, 112 secretaries and 127 Members will gain desks. My hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South, will need to put her case as persuasively as she can to my right hon. Friend the Chief Whip, whose responsibility this is—patronage: that is real power! Even those who do not succeed in obtaining one of the new rooms should at least find that their existing rooms are less crowded. Those changes should all be completed early in the new year.

Not only will Members gain; particular attention has been paid to the Refreshment Department, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Torridge and Devon, West (Miss Nicholson). It is acknowledged that there is a serious problem there. Additional accommodation has been allocated on the ground floor of the Palace: that will be used for lockers and changing rooms this year, while long-term plans are developed in conjunction with the Catering Sub-Committee. The Administration Department will also gain significantly more space this year in Dean's Yard to help overcome the present shortage.

My hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South expressed concern about the speed at which phase 2 has been developed. Hon. Members in all parts of the House agree that the accommodation ought to be provided quickly. The Services Committee produced its report—"New Parliamentary Building (Phase 2). The Next Steps"—which we debated about two years ago. The report recommended that consultants should be appointed to carry out preliminary design work on New Palace Chambers, to identify suitable uses for Nos. 1 and 2 Bridge street and to undertake a feasibility study of the proposed Bridge street subway.

Following a fee-bidding exercise, Michael Hopkins and Partners was appointed in 1989. Both the House and the Department have appointed an eminent architect. My hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South perhaps knows the cutlery factory that the company designed for David Mellor—not my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Putney (Mr. Mellor)—at Hathersage. It won a Royal Institute of British Architects Award in 1989. Already we have firm evidence of Mr. Hopkins's foresight. In addition to undertaking the three particular studies, he was asked whether he could undertake a sharp, short look at the total site. That proved invaluable when, shortly afterwards, London Underground announced its intention to extend the Jubilee line with a new station on the phase 2 site.

The phase 2 site is the last opportunity to provide purpose-made accommodation in a new building close to the House. It is important, therefore, to know in detail what is needed. I am sure that the hon. Member for Ogmore listened to what my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South said about facilities for the disabled. In addition to what can be supplied in phase 2, I understand that further improvements are about to be put to the Accommodation and Administration Sub-Committee to improve facilities in the Palace.

It was agreed that the Sub-Committee should undertake what has become known as the space audit. It looked at existing accommodation—particularly offices—to assess both the needs and the shortfall. It involved a thorough review of all the existing accommodation. It is the first time that there has been a qualitative and quantitative assessment. It found that between 210 and 230 offices were needed for Members and for an equivalent number of staff.

It would be wrong to prejudge the views of the Services Committee on the proposals, but I understand that they have been generally well received. These recommendations, together with bids from departments of the House, form the basis of the proposed brief which will be available for hon. Members to consider on 21 March in Committee Room 7. I urge all hon. Members to visit the room. Initially, only about 60 hon. Members responded to the request made by the hon. Member for Ogmore for proposals.

What is the next step? The Services Committee will produce a final brief soon after the Easter recess. That is obviously another important stage. Then we shall have in place the site, the architect and the requirement, after which we shall be able to put forward a coherent set of proposals to the Treasury. We shall be seeking agreement in principle to funds amounting to some £60 million. At a time when we are urging everyone to provide value for money and to look carefully at public expenditure proposals, the House must apply the same criterion to its own proposals.

Much design work still needs to be done. The House will want to see the design proposals and to form a view. We must also consult the Royal Fine Art Commission at the appropriate stage and seek planning approval. A rough estimate suggests that another 18 months to two years' design work is necessary and that the construction period could take three or four years. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South will say that that is a long period, but I am confident that she will still be in the House at the end of the construction period.

One has to remember that this development is a little different from the construction of a new car factory in her constituency. Apart from its being a large development, it is a difficult site technically. It is the last remaining site to be developed in the sensitive Westminster-Whitehall area. It provides a backdrop to an internationally famous sight. It is crucial that we get it right, not just for the benefit of the House in functional terms but so that we can show that this country can produce late 20th century architecture that is worthy of the site. We want it to be something that we can show to the world.

This has been a most helpful debate at an important stage in the timing of phase 2. As a Department of the Environment Minister, I have found it helpful to gauge the feeling of the House. Moreover, the hon. Member for Ogmore has had the opportunity to put his toe in the water and feel the temperature. I conclude by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South and colleagues in all parts of the House for a most constructive and helpful debate.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at twenty-nine minutes past Ten o'clock.