5

Who is responsible for governing parliament?

Introduction

The UK Parliament has embedded arrangements for governing its support services in its two houses by establishing formalised governance structures to provide greater focus and continuity in planning and decision-making rather than concentrating only on the narrower perspective of oversight and scrutiny. The Australian Parliament has not formally adopted encompassing governance arrangements and relies on informal collaboration and consultation between the separate procedural and service departments without an established role for parliament’s members in strategic planning. Former DPS officials and advisers to presiding officers have suggested that governance tends to occur in a vacuum.¹ Even where formal structures exist, in the form of advisory and scrutiny bodies, there is little evidence of strategic planning and clarity of decision-making or of a ‘strategic conversation’ at the interface between politicians and administrators (Shergold 1997; Alford, Hartley et al. 2017).

In this chapter, I provide an overview of the governance arrangements in each parliament before examining three dilemmas confronting parliamentary actors. The first concerns who has legitimate authority for parliamentary administration and who can advocate for its reform; the second relates to financial autonomy and control; and the third discusses the concept of collective responsibility for outcomes.

How the UK Parliament is governed

Governance arrangements … must enable an organisation to meet its primary purposes … They must deliver clear decision-making, with a high degree of transparency and clarity, whilst incorporating appropriate levels of oversight, challenge and effective personal accountability. They must be practicable and resilient under pressure, taking account of how people behave. They must also have the support and confidence of those who operate within them. Good governance distinguishes between strategic and operational decision making, and has mechanisms in place to ensure that those decisions are then delivered and the objectives met. Central to all governance arrangements is a focus on the achievement of the main objectives of the organisation. (HOCGC 2014: 8)

The House of Commons Commission sets the strategic framework for the provision of services to the House. It meets monthly and is supported by domestic parliamentary committees including the Finance Committee, Administration Committee and Administration Estimate Audit and Risk Assurance Committee. The Commons Executive Board is accountable to the commission for delivering strategy and managing day-to-day operations. The Clerk of the House is accounting officer. The House of Lords Commission is supported by the Services Committee and Finance Committee, a management board takes strategic and corporate decisions within a framework set by the commission and the Clerk of the Parliaments is accounting officer. Several ‘sub-boards’ deal with bicameral issues, including digital strategy and joint investment. External members serve on both commissions, which also determine the annual estimate (or appropriations) for each house. Table 5.1 depicts the governance, financial and oversight arrangements in the UK Parliament.²

Table 5.1 Overview of governance, financial and oversight arrangements in the UK Parliament

How the Australian Parliament is governed

With the passage of the Parliamentary Service Act 1999, governance of the Australian Parliament was formally separated from the Australian Public Service, ending a long-disputed connection between the two institutions that had failed to sufficiently recognise the independence of the parliament and its presiding officers (Reid and Forrest 1989). The Act is more prescriptive than the House of Commons (Administration) Act 1978, the Clerk of the Parliaments Act 1824 or the Parliamentary Corporate Bodies Act 1992. It defines the constitution and role of the Australian Parliamentary Service and its independence from executive government, prescribes the powers of the presiding officers and heads of department and establishes parliamentary values, employment principles and a Parliamentary Service code of conduct. The Act makes specific provisions to protect the independence of the Parliamentary Library and the Parliamentary Budget Office as well as the advice provided to the Senate and the House of Representatives, and their members, by their clerks. The clerks are appointed by their respective presiding officer and have limited tenure of a single, non-renewable term of 10 years. Their appointments can be terminated only by a resolution of their respective house. The secretary of the joint department, the DPS, on the other hand, is appointed by both presiding officers, with advice from the Parliamentary Service Commissioner, for up to five years initially. Parliamentary departments, as Commonwealth entities, are subject to the provisions of the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013 (PGPA Act) and the Fair Work Act 2009 with their heads being the accountable authority for their respective departments.⁴ The presiding officers have formal control of the parliamentary precincts under the Parliamentary Precincts Act 1988.

The Australian Parliament’s first parliament-wide governance framework is set out in the Strategic Framework: The Parliamentary Service (Parliament of Australia 2020), but it does not specify a formal role for the presiding officers or other members and does not invite formal external input to governance. Meetings of departmental heads are held quarterly, a parliamentary administration advisory group of senior departmental staff supports department heads and the Parliamentary ICT Advisory Board meets quarterly to guide strategic elements of ICT service delivery. Formal joint meetings of the two house committees, where members of both houses used to meet to discuss corporate matters, were seen to be ineffective and these meetings no longer take place.⁵ Two bodies one would expect to be influential in the provision of key services, the Joint Standing Committee on the Parliamentary Library and the Security Management Board, are not mentioned in the framework. All parliamentary expenditure is funded under separate appropriation Acts for the parliamentary departments. Table 5.2 provides an overview of the governance, financial and oversight arrangements in the four departments making up the Australian Parliamentary Service.⁶

Table 5.2 Overview of governance, financial and oversight arrangements in the Australian Parliament

Discussion of governance arrangements in the Australian Parliament appears to have been limited to a focus on the efficiencies that might be achieved by a reduction in the number of departments rather than on clarity of decision-making, appropriate oversight or effective personal accountability, as emphasised by the HOCGC (2014), or on the simplicity of planning and implementation and clarity of objectives—the basic principles of the Baxter review (2015).

While there does not appear to be a consistent view of governance in the Australian Parliament, it is not devoid of governance mechanisms. Each house of parliament has a House Standing Committee (the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Appropriations and Administration and the Senate Standing Committee on Appropriations, Staffing and Security) looking at resources (broadly defined) and, as noted, the presiding officers are advised by the Joint Standing Committee on the Parliamentary Library and a number of bodies related to the joint services for which they are responsible. The parliamentary departments have their own departmental management structures. But as far as can be publicly discerned, there is an absence of ex ante engagement by members and senators in strategic governance issues, as opposed to ex post criticism of performance, and the governance framework lacks the formalised transparency and clarity of decision-making, delivery mechanisms and strategic intent highlighted by the HOCGC (2014) and the House of Lords Leader’s Group on Governance (House of Lords 2016a).

The dilemma of who speaks for parliament

The first governance dilemma relates to authority and advocacy. I have questioned whether MPs are constructively engaged in managing and governing their own parliaments. Key elements of constructive engagement are the extent to which members exercise authority or accept responsibility for parliamentary administration, and whether they are willing to advocate for management reforms (see also Norton 2017; Judge and Leston-Bandeira 2018). In this context, I contrast advocacy with scrutiny—a willingness to engage with and publicly support improvement and reform rather than a narrow focus on critiquing operational performance. Notwithstanding that we expect public managers to be greatly concerned with the lawful and efficient operation of their respective functional areas, there is little evidence of a collective responsibility among members for ensuring parliamentary effectiveness. Advocacy remains in short supply.

The concept in public management theory of engaging with an ‘authorising environment’, or a coalition of stakeholders, whose support is critical to achieve valued objectives proposed by public managers, has been hotly contested (Moore 1995; Rhodes and Wanna 2007, 2008, 2009; Alford and Hughes 2008; Alford and O’Flynn 2009; Benington and Moore 2010). Wanna equated the term with a ‘disarticulated negotiated environment’.⁷ It is unlikely the theoretical concept of an authorising environment has been seriously considered or applied in the parliamentary context, yet the idea lends itself to an environment in which there is an institutionalised blurring of the divide between political and administrative authority. In Lynn’s (2006) public management dimension of ‘structure’, there is (or should be) a clear line of authority between a minister and a departmental secretary. However, examination of the governance structures and processes in the UK and Australian parliaments, recent academic literature on parliamentary authority (Norton 2017; Judge and Leston-Bandeira 2018), the views of some interviewees aired in this chapter and other empirical evidence, including from the HOCGC (2014), shows that this normative relationship does not exist in the parliamentary environment. Paradoxically, Moore’s concept of a loosely described authorising environment, especially when conceived of as a coalition of stakeholders, may provide some value in navigating the complexities of parliamentary governance.

Even where legislated mandates or formal structures exist, the sources of administrative power and authority in the UK and Australian parliaments are not clearly delineated in practice, unlike in those countries’ respective civil and public services, and this was made apparent by many interviewees. A senior clerk in the House of Lords described the UK system as a ‘nice platter of different cheeses’; there is no final source of authority; everything must be negotiated.⁸ At a University College London (UCL) Constitution Unit lecture in the UK Parliament on 16 March 2015, Lord Lisvane, former clerk of the House of Commons, reinforced a point made in the HOCGC (2014: 9) report: the House of Commons is run by 650 members, all of whom are skilled at articulating concerns and making an argument. He observed later that members were not always sufficiently consistent or well-enough informed to be supportive of the role he was trying to discharge as clerk, but also they were not enthusiastic about handing too much power to one individual. The inevitable unpredictability of parliaments and rapid shifts of focus posed additional difficulties.⁹ Historically, the Speaker derives authority from the collective members of the House. The HOCGC (2014: 17), at the urging of then Leader of the House William Hague, reiterated that there should not be any sole figure in charge in the same way that a secretary of state is accountable for his or her department. Herein lies the dilemma of the ‘authorising environment’ (Moore 1995).

In the Australian Parliament, the observations are similar: in strict terms, the presiding officers have legal authority over their respective departments (except over employment matters) and the heads of department have strong powers and responsibilities to exercise their roles (see Parliamentary Service Act 1999). In practice, according to then Clerk of the House of Representatives David Elder, ‘parliaments do muddle along a bit without anybody in charge … it is a bit of a moveable feast’.¹⁰ One former president of the Senate did not believe it was the role of the president to become involved in the day-to-day management of the Department of the Senate or the co-management of DPS.¹¹ His successor believed that parliamentary administration was entrusted to the two presiding officers to jointly administer the parliamentary departments. He noted that while the two clerks have autonomous roles, under broad policy direction, administration of DPS was more at the whim of the presiding officers, with the departmental secretary having more of a direct reporting responsibility without the security of tenure.¹² One might expect that less autonomy would equate to more engagement with the presiding officers, but evidence from interviewees did not bear this out.¹³ Indeed, former DPS secretary Carol Mills claimed that when she arrived at DPS, her biggest problem was that it was ‘friendless’:

I kept saying, ‘We’ve got no friends. We’ve got no advocates. We’ve got no one in the positions of importance who put us as a priority.’ Our friends [should be] the presiding officers, but we’re not their best friends; their main friends are the clerks, and that’s understandable. There was no committee or anything that I could go to that was responsible for supporting us … There was no one that you could build a rapport with who would be held responsible for supporting you and making sure that you were doing a good job … It cuts both ways. I thought that was a really big problem. We just didn’t have any way to build friendships.¹⁴

In a joint submission to the SFPALC (2015d), then presiding officers Bronwyn Bishop and Stephen Parry claimed the role of the presiding officers in respect of DPS was similar to that of a minister overseeing a department of state, but the evidence did not support the presence of an advocacy role; instead, it suggested a blurred accountability in the context of limited ‘ministerial’ management skills and a reluctance to drive improvement (see Di Francesco 2012; Rhodes 2016). At worst, there appeared to be an abdication of the management or governance role of the presiding officers; at best, as we have seen in earlier chapters, it suggested a siloed approach towards ‘departmental’ rather than ‘parliamentary’ management. As Norton (2017) and Judge and Leston-Bandeira (2018) concluded regarding the UK Parliament, it appears there is no clear authority for promoting the Australian Parliament as a holistic institution or seeking to engage its members or the general community in thinking strategically about its future role.

The level of constructive engagement by members in exercising authority for administrative decision-making appears to be a differentiating factor between the two parliaments. Although in both there is no clear line of ministerial-type authority and accountability for their administration, the establishment of formal governance structures in the House of Commons and House of Lords administrations indicates a greater acceptance of the need for members to be involved. How effective that engagement has been remains arguable.

The tradition of independence of the office of Speaker of the House of Commons is also a contributing factor in the extent of engagement, including advocacy for reform.¹⁵ The incumbent is less fettered by any real or perceived allegiance to the executive and at greater liberty to argue for reforms that might be viewed as privileging the parliament over the executive, particularly in terms of reforming parliamentary procedures (see Chapter 7). According to the Institute for Government’s first Parliamentary Monitor 2018:

The current Speaker’s [Bercow] willingness to grant more of these [backbench] requests than his predecessors has renewed many of these procedures. Reforms to other mechanisms, such as petitions, have also offered greater scope for backbench involvement. Many of these changes have made Parliament appear more accessible, and relevant, to the public. (Lilley et al. 2018: 77)

It is unlikely, however, that the UK Speaker’s independence from the executive is the only factor explaining his or her engagement in administrative or procedural reform. The strong enthusiasm for engagement with administrative issues exercised by former Speaker Bercow stands in contrast with his immediate predecessors, Michael Martin and Betty Boothroyd (Boothroyd 2001; vanHeerde-Hudson 2014).¹⁶ Indeed, Martin’s incapacity to manage the unfolding crisis of the members’ expenses scandal and its effect on the UK Parliament’s reputation led to his resignation in 2009.¹⁷

According to many interviewees, Bercow’s strong engagement in administrative and procedural reform was driven by his personality.¹⁸ In adopting new beliefs and performing new actions, he would appear to be a classic example of a ‘situated agent’ (Bevir and Rhodes 2006), exercising his ability to transform practices embedded in tradition. Not all his parliamentary colleagues considered his engagement constructive, as is evident from the ‘Mills affair’ recounted in Chapter 4 (see also Geddes and Meakin 2018; Leston-Bandeira and Thompson 2018). Some have suggested that Bercow’s election to the speakership and his motivation for reform were designed to upset his former Conservative colleagues (see, for instance, Wheeler 2009; Wintour 2014). Many others believed he overstepped the role of Speaker (Hope and Krol 2017; Walker et al. 2017). But it must be remembered that he still required the support of a majority of his colleagues in the House to be re-elected, and his willingness to act as an advocate for institutional reform can also be associated with outcomes that are widely regarded as positive for the parliament in its three broad roles of enabling, scrutiny and deliberation, including his support for a greater role for backbenchers and his advocacy for greater diversity within the House Service.¹⁹ Bercow described his role thus:

I’m not always ‘cruising for a bruising’, always wanting to have a fight about everything—absolutely not—there is much to be said for periods of stability. But I have always said that you can either be a reforming Speaker or you can be an uncontroversial Speaker, you can’t really be both. If you choose to try to make reforms—some of your own initiative, others that require the support of colleagues—there will be opposition, there always is, that’s life. People, either because of their vested interests, because they are wary of change, they are comfortable with the status quo or they are people who have always been against you anyway and they see a chance to cause some trouble—they will oppose. My view is that it is not worth having an argument about everything, but where you think there is an enduring and significant worthwhile change that can be achieved it is worth going for it. If there is a bit of flak or a few people complain or there ends up being a bit of an argument or you get some criticism either from colleagues in the newspapers or whatever, so what? What is that old expression ‘one in five people is against everything all the time’.²⁰

In the House of Lords, the Lord Speaker and senior Deputy Speaker are also required to put aside their party affiliations for the period they are in office, thus removing the constraints of party allegiance on reforms that might affect the status of the institution. There is some evidence that they are taking a strong position on governance matters, partly to try to retain the Lords’ voice on issues of joint governance and to secure greater public regard (House of Lords House Committee 2016; Russell 2017b).²¹

The ‘independence’ tradition plays out differently in the Australian Parliament and in its two houses. Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Tony Smith pointed out that he was required to be ‘impartial’ rather than ‘independent’—the latter being an impossibility in a parliament where neither house could afford to relinquish seats.²² He did not demonstrate the strong advocacy role for parliamentary administrative reform displayed by Bercow; rather, he took the Lenthall view that this was a role for the House and not the Speaker, although his attempts to improve standards of behaviour in the House of Representatives chamber have been widely praised, particularly following his resignation as Speaker in late 2021.²³ The Senate President also is not independent of his or her party, although the ability to act independently is likely to have greater force in a house that is rarely controlled by an executive government.

The paradox of who speaks for the parliamentary institution is articulated by Judge and Leston-Bandeira (2018: 154), who claim that ‘those who “speak for” (most loudly and most persistently) and “act for” parliaments as institutions are not primarily elected representatives but rather non-elected officials’. They suggest that at a time when elected representatives are ‘cowed by populist claim-makers’ and confronted routinely by claims that are ‘intrinsically anti-parliamentary and anti-elitist’, this should be a concern in terms of representative democracy (Judge and Leston-Bandeira 2018: 169). Norton (2017) also addressed the problem of a declining public trust in parliamentarians, arising not just from recent scandals and perceptions of poor behaviour but also from broader societal and technological changes. In part, he ascribed the problem to parliament’s unique constitutional nature by which no individual can claim to speak for parliament. The solution, he claimed, lies not in adopting defensive responses to crises, such as the ‘rushed and flawed’ creation of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, but in the members in each house adopting an outward-looking, proactive rather than reactive approach: ‘[I]t is important that members come out of the bunker, guns firing’ to meet public expectations and convey a sense of public service (Norton 2017: 200–1). These viewpoints from established academics, one of whom is also a parliamentarian, help to clarify the representational problem of who speaks for parliament. On the one hand, they champion a greater understanding of institutional and representative claim-making; on the other, they urge members to become more engaged in addressing the relationship between themselves and the public. I argue, too, that institutional advocacy and claim-making, as well as accountability and responsibility, might be enhanced by members exercising collective authority for decisions affecting the administration of their parliaments through formal, transparent and engaged governance structures.

The shibboleth of financial independence: A dilemma that may need reframing

Few would suggest that parliamentary sovereignty justifies unlimited public funding. However, the parliamentary funding dilemma, particularly the question of financial independence from the executive, has emerged as a significant influence on beliefs and actions within the two parliaments. In the Australian Parliament, chiefly within the Senate, the dilemma has been framed as a threat to its ability to carry out its scrutiny role, but it is not clear how much of the argument is driven by government-enforced efficiencies (Verrier 2007). Breukel et al. (2017) reviewed key reports and literature on parliamentary independence and provided a jurisdictional comparison of Australian and other parliaments regarding parliamentary funding. They suggested that, in Australia, and particularly in the State of Victoria, ‘executive creep’ or encroachment had weakened parliamentary independence (see also Donaldson 2017)—a suggestion that resonated strongly with the documented views of former Senate Clerk Evans. Governance of the funding arrangements and the role the executive government plays in appropriating funds—who is in control of the purse strings—have long been a sore point, but many of the officials I interviewed felt the concern had been overplayed.

The arguments for an independent appropriation—where the parliament, not the executive, determines the level and direction of funding—stem from the belief that when the executive controls the amount of money appropriated to the parliament, it will exercise its power to limit the extent to which parliament can hold the executive to account or provide sufficient support to opposition parties. The UK Parliament has more control over its funding than the Australian federal and state parliaments (CPA 2005; Verrier 2007) and it is unsurprising, therefore, that concerns about financial independence are more prominent in Australia, particularly among clerks and Parliamentary Library staff (Evans 2005; Verrier 2007; Laing 2016a, 2016b; Breukel et al. 2017). Several mechanisms for resolving the issue have been proposed, such as an independent funding model, greater collaboration between the parliament and the Treasury and establishing a parliamentary corporate body (CPA 2005; Verrier 2007; Baxter 2015; Breukel et al. 2017), but there is no utopia of total parliamentary control. Sloane (2014) explained why financial independence is unachievable under Australia’s Constitution and its proponents have also conceded that true financial independence is not achievable in any publicly funded organisation. Even the much-vaunted financial independence of the UK Parliament is itself constrained at least in part by public opinion and this is prominently reflected in the establishment of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), which controls and authorises members’ remuneration and most of their allowances (Gay 2014). The Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA 2005) has acknowledged that public opinion is the ‘real counterweight’ to budgetary autonomy. The drawn-out debate on options for the restoration and renewal of the Palace of Westminster is also testimony to the power of public opinion.

One former Senate president did not think it appropriate that the Senate should have to be a supplicant to the Cabinet’s Expenditure Review Committee during budget discussions, refusing to appear before it and instead insisting that the Treasurer and finance minister should visit him.²⁴ Some officials considered such a view to be illogical or ineffective.²⁵ Parliament’s funding model was also taken up by the independent review of the DPS (Baxter 2015), which was set up apparently to satisfy the Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee that ‘something was being done’ about the department’s performance failures. As noted in Chapter 4, Baxter recommended inter alia that the funding arrangements for the parliament be consolidated into a ‘global’ or ‘whole-of-parliament’ model based on long-term strategic and annual operating plans, providing adequate coverage of essential modernisation and renovation of Parliament House; and that relevant parts of the ministerial and parliamentary services branch of the Department of Finance be transferred to the presiding officers. The review also reported that several senators and members had considered that it might be appropriate to establish a Joint Standing House Committee with appropriate terms of reference to oversee DPS, and its recommendations included establishing an overarching advisory board that would complement existing statutory and administrative arrangements. The proposals were not taken up.²⁶ Baxter suggested one reason was the potential reduction of staff numbers in the Department of Finance: ‘There are still those within the bureaucracy who regard the number of people they have in the department as a significant indicator of their power. And it exists here in this parliament.’²⁷

We can detect here a case of self-interest or public-choice theory at work and the purported sentiment is not too far from some of the thinking expressed in senate annual reports. According to Baxter, another opportunity to improve governance was missed:

I came back, after very lengthy discussions, not only with the Speaker of the House of Commons but also with members of the House of Lords and the House of Commons, with a very strong view that it [a governance body] would overcome a lot of the problems and issues we’ve got, particularly in the next 10 years when they’re going to have to deal with, if our population continues to grow, under the constitution, increased numbers of parliamentarians, which means in turn dealing with internal design within the parliament. They’re going to have to think about how they maintain the public’s view of the parliament as an important institution in our democratic framework. It is about how they try and rebuild the trust in the institution per se, as against whether you like the current incumbents of the ministries. I certainly would strongly argue for a role that’s similar to what they’ve got in the Speaker of the House of Commons in the UK.²⁸

In Australia, there has been a strong push for efficiencies in line with public expenditure constraints generally and earlier chapters have documented this increasing focus. The evidence suggested that parliamentary departments were traditionally seen as ‘hollow logs’ carrying over large surpluses and arguing for their retention to mitigate the potential problem of increased future expenditure (Evans 2003).²⁹ In the DPS—the department hit hardest by the executive government’s quest for efficiencies—the financial independence argument was not widely proselytised. David Kenny, DPS deputy secretary from 2005 to 2012, expressed no concern about being required to apply to the government for funding improvement through the Expenditure Review Committee; he did not think the existing funding model had worked badly:

No matter what you do, the parliament is not going to be raising its own money. So the money is always going to be coming from government. Wherever the decisions are taken as to how much money is provided to parliament, it’s still going to be getting it from the Finance Department.³⁰

Hilary Penfold, the first DPS secretary, said she had not seen a proposed independent funding model that would give her confidence that the parliament would not be squeezed in subsequent years in the light of unforeseen events, once it was given control of its own budget.³¹ Andrew Smith, a former Joint House Department senior executive, suggested that at the time of DPS’s formation, the presiding officers should not have allowed the Department of Finance to reduce its budget; they should have pushed back:

Because the presiding officers’ influence is fairly weak, it’s very hard for DPS or any of the parliamentary departments to get any innovative things up and running or to get increases in budgets or to stave off attacks on their budgets by the central agencies at any stage.³²

These arguments suggest that rather than gaining agreement from the executive that a budget prepared by the parliament should go unchallenged, which might even bring unintended consequences, a preferable outcome would be for the parliament to develop a stronger ability to argue for effective funding on a case-by-case basis. Smith argued that these skills were not prevalent within the parliamentary service.³³ Recent annual reports show that both houses have successfully negotiated additional funds for chamber and committee support (see Elder 2017; Pye 2017); it appears more difficult to secure funding for non-procedural activities.

As we know, in the United Kingdom the budget for the House of Commons administration is not limited by the Treasury, and it is conventional for the vote for the House of Lords administration estimate to go unchallenged (Breukel et al. 2017). But this does not mean the UK Parliament’s expenditure on its administration goes unchecked, as is evidenced by the austerity program after the 2010 election and the decision to limit the growth in expenditure in both houses;³⁴ the setting up of IPSA following the expenses scandal (Winnett and Rayner 2009; vanHeerde-Hudson 2011; Gay 2014); and the deep concerns about the costs of restoring the Palace of Westminster, which have continued to delay critical decisions (House of Commons–House of Lords Joint Committee on the Palace of Westminster 2017; Meakin 2017b; Meakin and Anderson 2019; Meakin et al. 2020; Engel 2020). Notwithstanding that the House of Commons Commission can determine its own funding without going cap in hand to the Treasury, efficiencies have still been regarded in some quarters as politically driven. This view was strongly articulated by Ken Gall, a long-serving House of Commons Hansard official who also served as a member of the Trade Union Side, which represents key industrial organisations within the parliament:

In my view, one of the biggest mistakes that has been made by the administration here has been an acceptance of a very politically driven narrative which involves efficiencies. It involves value for money, it involves savings and austerity. I’m not saying that there is a bucket of money that, once it is emptied, can immediately be filled up again and can be thrown at parliaments … But this constant fixation with efficiencies, value for money, the need to generate savings, has been bought into hook, line and sinker by the administration of the House and has caused … a blurring of what parliament is about.³⁵

But many other interviewees, particularly those more recently appointed, agreed on the need for restraint in the UK Parliament’s administrative funding, as evidenced by the following comments from Myfanwy Barrett, then finance director:

My view is that we are quite well resourced. There are relatively few areas that are under serious pressure. This is quite an important point because I think that if you’ve been here for 40 years since you left university and you’ve never worked anywhere else and you’ve seen us gradually become more critical, more scrutinising of the deployment of our resources and with tighter budgets, it feels to you like we have got far too much going on and we haven’t got enough resources and we are all under too much pressure. If that person went to work for a health authority for a fortnight, I think their view would be completely different.³⁶

Overall, there was a strong sense from across the spectrum of interviewees of the need for efficiency and reduced wastage accompanied by some scepticism about the extent of efficiencies that could be harvested from initiatives such as joint working.³⁷ Difficulties with deciding from where efficiencies should be sourced and how outcomes could be measured were also raised.³⁸ As well, strong views were put forward that finding efficiencies should not preclude spending on worthwhile initiatives such as public engagement.³⁹ There was little doubt, however, that without external pressure, the drive towards efficiency was tempered, even in seemingly harvestable areas like catering. As a former Clerk of the House put it:

The Lords wouldn’t want [their catering arrangements] to be taken over. They have a particular house style and if they can make money selling it, good luck to them with their spotted dicks and funny old puddings. A lot of people obviously like it because they buy it. They can always go somewhere else.⁴⁰

The catering services often came to the fore in terms of complaints, both internal and external,⁴¹ and there was an obvious frustration with the failure of the joint working program to make savings in this area. According to the former House of Commons director-general, the prospect of an imminent decant from the building appears to have served as an excuse not to rationalise the separate catering services and he conceded that the joint working program had become a matter of spending money without any outcome. However, he remained

utterly convinced that if you put the two caterings together, you could have at least as good a service, and probably a better service, and you could save a million or two pounds a year easily enough, and almost without breaking into a sweat. If we had the will, we could bring these two catering services together by next Easter, and we’d have 6½ years, even if we move out in 2025—a £2 million saving a year. Again it’s a really good indicator of glacial speed and glacial thought. So we’re walking away from £13 million in savings to the taxpayer.⁴²

Following his departure, Ailles reiterated a lack of resolve within the commission to drive down costs; members who seek to withdraw or adjust services for other members become unpopular.⁴³

We can see a difference between attitudes in the drive for efficiencies in parliamentary administration in both countries, which appears to be related to who governs those efficiencies. In Australia, from the Senate’s point of view, the issue is essentially the ability of the Senate to carry out its scrutiny role effectively. Similar arguments have come from the Parliamentary Library and its supporters about the importance of their ability to provide unrestricted research services to members, particularly opposition members (see especially Verrier 2008). We cannot downplay the need for either parliament to be effectively resourced to achieve its key purposes and it appears that the drive for efficiencies, particularly following the imposition of the efficiency dividend, has been greater in Australia than in the UK Parliament, where the two houses are somewhat ambivalent about the potential efficiency gains from joint services. Despite this, one could argue that the separation of powers argument in Australia, focusing on parliament’s need to assert its supremacy over the executive in terms of control of the proportion of public funds it receives, is unhelpful. The arguments have also been influenced by disagreements over the share of resources each department receives, which can manifest as an internal power struggle about the supremacy of the two house departments over the separate services department (see Reid and Forrest 1989; Adams 2002; Department of the Senate annual reports). Even strong advocates of financial independence for parliaments have conceded that true independence is not achievable; the parliament cannot appropriate its own resources independently of government. There are opportunities, however, to strengthen a parliament’s financial capacity through its governance arrangements, as demonstrated in the UK and other parliaments.⁴⁴ There appears to be little appetite for such a formal governance body in the Australian Parliament, or for closer financial collaboration between the two houses.

The governance dilemma: Are members of parliament missing in action?

I have discussed the differences in the two parliaments between their governance arrangements and the extent to which they galvanise the authority and advocacy of the presiding officers and other members and officials in ‘speaking for parliament’ (Norton 2017). For the Australian Parliament, a significant contrast lies in securing financial resources and the ability of its presiding officers to act independently. But to return to a key concern in this book—the constructive engagement of members in parliamentary governance and management—I draw on Verrier’s (2007: 73) acknowledgement that even a statutory underpinning would not be sufficient to ensure a parliament’s independence ‘in the absence of ongoing, consistent stakeholder interest in parliamentary administration’. The same sentiment applies to effective governance. The JCPAA (2008), SFPALC (2015c) and the Baxter review (2015) recommended seemingly sensible changes to the Australian Parliament’s governance, including joint meetings of the respective houses’ administration committees and the establishment of an overarching governance body. But, according to Quinton Clements, former senior adviser to then president Parry, the presiding officers believed there was ‘enough meat to the governance structure already’ and there was no need to add another body that might take away their authority. The potential dilution of authority was also given as the reason for resisting joint meetings of the appropriations and administration committees.⁴⁵ The Australian Parliament appears to have suffered from not just an indifference to proposals for strengthening governance, but also active resistance.

When Norton (2000, 2017) argued the case for greater agency for parliamentarians, he was also concerned with restoring public trust in parliament. Most recently, he saw the relationship between the parliament and the public as being under more significant challenge than at any time over the past century while parliament’s effectiveness in performing its scrutiny role was, in fact, ‘greater than at any time in modern political history’ (Norton 2017: 191; see also Russell et al. 2016; Russell and Gover 2017; Russell 2019a, 2019b).⁴⁶ Norton (2000) argued that achieving reform in parliament, whatever its nature, needs a window of opportunity, a coherent reform agenda and political will or leadership (see also Kelso 2009; Geddes and Meakin 2018; Meakin and Geddes 2020). Acknowledging the difficulty of achieving any change within parliament, the dilemma I have posed here is that of engaging members’ interest in parliamentary administration and reform at a time when they are also increasingly under pressure to meet the expectations of their parties, their constituents and the public at large. Advocating for a particular reform is likely to be controversial in terms of its influence on a member’s ability to fulfil conflicting expectations.

In my research, I sought the views of members who might be expected to contribute to their parliament’s governance through their membership of internal governance or procedure committees. Among those in the Australian Parliament who agreed to be interviewed, enthusiasm for advocating for administrative reform was mixed. Some strongly defended the status quo. Then Chief Government Whip in the House of Representatives Nola Marino was a member of both the House Procedure Committee and the House Appropriations and Administration Committee. Her key consideration in her procedural role was the ‘smooth management of government business to make sure that the government achieves its legislative aims’ and, on administrative matters, ‘in a similar way, just ensuring the smooth management and also that the appropriate level of scrutiny is applied’—a business-as-usual approach by a Government Chief Whip committed to achieving the executive agenda. She declined to comment on whether any joint discussion had occurred between the houses on an appropriate parliamentary funding model.⁴⁷

The Senate’s established response to administrative reform has been to safeguard its financial interests and constrain the power of other parliamentary departments. The senators I interviewed by virtue of their membership of the Appropriations, Staffing and Security Committee and/or the Senate Procedure Committee offered little to suggest a coherent reform agenda. Then Deputy President, Senator Sue Lines, gave priority to ensuring that procedural rules are fit for purpose in allowing the Senate to continue to play a strong scrutiny role.⁴⁸ Senator Katy Gallagher saw her then associated roles as Opposition Business Manager and member of the Procedure, Appropriations, Staffing and Security, and Finance and Public Administration committees (roles she was given, rather than aspired to) as facilitating or advocating the Labor Party’s interests.⁴⁹ So, is it up to the clerks in both houses and other senior officials to play a role in governance or institutional representation, as Judge and Leston-Bandeira (2018) claim to be the case in the UK Parliament? Should they be entering the ‘purple zone’ (Shergold 1997; Alford, Hartley et al. 2017) and, if so, at what stage of the reform process? Then deputy clerk, now Clerk of the House of Representatives, Claressa Surtees, suggested that departmental officials had been ‘a little bit coy in talking about the stewardship issue’ and they might be perceived as ‘stuck in the past’. She said: ‘We have to make sure that the narrative we’ve got around stewardship is a very modern and open one, so that people understand what it means. It doesn’t mean doing what you’ve always done and not changing anything.’⁵⁰

She advocated a more collaborative relationship between the parliamentary departments—‘you need to bring your partners on board’—and between officials and those members who, while insisting on a well-oiled administration, were not sufficiently interested in administrative issues. Several current and former senior clerks were supportive of a House of Commons–style commission or board, where members would actively engage with governance issues.⁵¹ The caveat was that their engagement would need to be at the highest level, rather than becoming involved in the ‘nitty-gritty’ or day-to-day operations—a theme that was consistent in both parliaments. Surtees advocated for greater unity among parliamentary officials:

I want people to think of themselves as servants of the parliament or supporters for the parliament rather than of this department or that department, and trying to promote the interests of one department against another department. I don’t actually think that’s very helpful for anybody, it isn’t going to deliver a better service, and it will make us look like we can’t get along. That’s not very professional. The rest of the countryside probably thinks it’s one organisation. And we are; we’re one parliamentary service. So let’s act like it.⁵²

Julie Owens, then a shadow assistant minister and Deputy Chair of the House Appropriations and Administration Committee, said she could not imagine the clerks would ever speak out on management issues, particularly funding, and would need to rely on members to do so. She thought members of the Appropriations Committee had done a good job but acknowledged that there had been increasing budgetary pressure over some years.⁵³ On the other hand, Senator Gallagher did see a role for the clerks, as the ‘best thinkers and experts in their field’, in promoting reform, in partnership with the parties and the crossbench.⁵⁴ The Clerk of the Senate, Richard Pye, and former deputy Maureen Weeks were more circumspect. Weeks described herself as an ‘old-school’ senate officer and did not consider herself an advocate for reform; rather, her role was to work with the president or deputy president to resolve problems or confusion in the chamber:

I see it as a very organic thing that evolves. To have it work, you can’t have someone taking a hard line and saying, ‘We must not do this,’ or ‘We must do that’ … It’s a very organic thing, and to try and place more rigid theories of management over it just creates difficulties and avoids possibilities.⁵⁵

Pye recognised the increasing governance responsibilities of the clerk’s position, particularly in terms of satisfying the requirements of the PGPA Act. Although very conscious of his role in negotiating resources and cooperation to provide the best possible level of services to senators, he also appeared less inclined than previous clerks to ‘jealously guard’ resources and functions within the Senate and recognised the potential benefits of a parliament-wide approach. Of particular interest given the discussion in the previous chapter, he questioned the effectiveness of senators continuing to demand more and more senate committee inquiries despite their lack of time to contribute effectively to them. The lengthy quotation below presents an alternative view of the Senate’s scrutiny role and the responsibility of the clerk:

We need to make sure that senators are constantly aware of how much work they have generated for themselves and how much work they have generated for senate committees, and how effective senate committee processes are being in achieving the aims of particular inquiries … There is lots of criticism of senate committee reports at the moment on that basis, that the time isn’t there for anybody to sit down and do that analytical stuff, and to come to agreement between the different political parties and independents who are sitting on committees. Instead, we get party policy positions stapled together, with some reference to the evidence that’s been taken. That’s not desirable, in my view. Part of it is desirable; it’s always desirable to get evidence from people, particularly people who are affected or people who are experts. But if you don’t round that out with a consideration among senators themselves of the possibility of compromise or the possibility of understanding each other’s perspectives, that is a real lost opportunity … Senators need to see for themselves that they need to step back from the number of inquiries so that they can give themselves the time to do it right. But they have to come up with the criteria for doing that. We can’t say to them, ‘This one’s worthy and this one isn’t’, because that’s not our role … What we can do is make sure that every agenda lists every reference that is before that committee at the time … to make it more visible. As I say, it’s not for us to arbitrarily determine where the line should be drawn, but we can help people to make that decision for themselves, which I think is a proper role for us.⁵⁶

It is possible these comments from the then recently appointed clerk represented a change in senate thinking from scrutiny and inquiry at all costs to a focus that included considerations of value. Pye’s approach was acknowledged by other senate interviewees.⁵⁷ But although he was positive about the ‘upswing of cooperation’ and the ‘partnership vibe’ across the parliamentary departments, particularly in the provision of IT services, he left little doubt that he, too, remained a ‘sceptical questioner’ in relation to governance issues.

In the UK Parliament, notwithstanding the existence of formal governance structures, views were mixed about the level of engagement in governance by members. Then Clerk of the Parliaments⁵⁸ David Beamish said:

[T]here are a number of areas where one wants to do what members want. And members want one to do what members want but it’s not easy to discern what members want. We have a committee structure, and members who aren’t part of that complain that they weren’t consulted. On anything controversial there is a variety of views. So you will probably find members who will complain that the clerks are running the show and things happen the way they want … I am hoping that the new structure will get the members of the relevant bodies behaving more like a board where they have a shared responsibility on behalf of other members for coming to a sensible conclusion.⁵⁹

Other House of Lords interviewees, including a former adviser to the Leader of the House and the Chairman of Committees, affirmed the difficulties in engaging members in governance matters: administrative decisions did not always reflect the views of the majority; a single spokesperson for the House of Lords was not practical in a self-regulating house; issues moved between shades of the political and the administrative.⁶⁰ The House of Lords was also concerned about losing its voice in arrangements for joint working; one example given was a controversial decision by former House of Commons Speaker Bercow to establish a parliamentary education centre within the parliamentary precincts.⁶¹

In the House of Commons, one senior clerk felt the new governance arrangements expected too much of members in asking them to set a strategic direction for staff, having seen little evidence of member engagement to the level of detail required to run a complex organisation.⁶² Others noted a lack of trust; still others were concerned about the involvement of members in the more important governance and management challenges and some claimed members were interested only in getting into government.

Views from members of the House of Commons Commission themselves about their roles and purposes were mixed, although mainly positive. Members of the commission were frank about the continuing need to reinforce the importance of strategic change and collaboration, including across the houses. Prominent Labour member and former commission member Chris Bryant was sceptical about the quality of parliamentary governance. He advocated a whole-of-parliament approach by suggesting a single committee of the parliament responsible for the running of all ‘management-type’ functions, leaving the Standing Orders and ways and means of doing business within each house.⁶³ For that to succeed, and for the parliament to run more efficiently and to create greater public value, he was adamant that the House of Lords and House of Commons would have to work together, with the Lords focusing less on its own identity and self-regulation. Labour member Nick Brown, then chair of the Finance Committee and member of the commission, was pragmatic about the difficulties, not only of getting the Lords and Commons to work effectively together, but also of actively engaging Commons members in reform and in reconciling the plurality of stakeholder interests. He was positive, however, about the role of advisers and the external members of the commission in providing assurance about the advice that the Finance Committee would provide to the commission, particularly on administration estimates and major capital projects.⁶⁴ His attitude contrasted with what we have seen from members involved in administration in the Australian Parliament, which suggested a culture of critical rather than supportive engagement.

Sir Paul Beresford, also a (Conservative) member of the House of Commons Commission in its former and reincarnated forms, and then chair of the new Administration Committee, displayed no concerns about lack of trust between members and officials, nor was he disparaging of the requirement for effective governance. He, too, was positive about the benefits of having external members on the commission. He challenged the view of members being interested only in getting into government, no doubt because, as a former minister, he had ‘been there, done that’, but he made a very good case for careful selection (or election) of members to their governance bodies. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that the chairs of the two supporting committees to the commission would be positive about the commission’s effectiveness—there is undoubtedly an element of ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’—and we can also look at evidence to the contrary (see later chapters).

Although the UK Parliament (as evidenced in both houses) appears to have established a greater potential for effective governance and management by virtue of formalised governance arrangements, and regular reflection on their adequacy and appropriateness, it is by no means assured of success.⁶⁵

Conclusion: A case of ‘not me, guv’⁶⁶ or benign neglect?

In this chapter, I have addressed the extent to which MPs are constructively engaged in the governance and management of their institutions, and how structural and other differences between the two parliaments inhibit or facilitate effective outcomes. To answer the provocative question heading this section, I do not conclude that either the UK or the Australian parliaments are bereft of responsible governance, but the evidence does show that members collectively seem to be missing in action and, in particular, both parliaments suffer from a lack of administrative advocacy and authority. Differing views have been presented of where the line falls between the responsibility of parliamentary officials and members for delivering effective governance and management and the oft-cited argument for parliamentary control over its appropriations.

The UK Parliament, in both houses, has established formal governance mechanisms, but many parliamentary actors were not confident of their current or likely success. However, there is greater potential, at least in the House of Commons, for the Speaker to exercise his or her independence and authority, and former Speaker John Bercow was an exemplar in this regard as I will further demonstrate (while also acknowledging his subsequent excoriation on leaving office; Independent Expert Panel 2022). In Australia, factors including the political strength of the Senate and a lack of agency from presiding officers have in the past influenced the extent to which parliamentary departments collaborate with each other, even though the Senate and the House of Representatives are served by a single services department. I have also argued that repeated calls for Australia’s parliamentary budgets to be developed independently of the executive could be better proselytised through more holistic, whole-of-parliament governance mechanisms. In the next two chapters, I explore the challenges of managing in the parliamentary environment and outline the case for continuity and reform in the institutionalised procedures and cultures of the two parliaments.