6

The challenges of managing in the parliamentary environment

Introduction

In both parliaments, the concept of ‘management’ appears to have been relegated to secondary importance after traditional and specialised parliamentary services. For many years, the approach to management in the United Kingdom was that of the ‘gentleman amateur’ (HOCGC 2014),¹ and this approach was also reflected in the Australian Parliament when administration was ‘something to be done on a Friday afternoon at the end of a sitting week’.² Management was viewed with suspicion—something for others to be concerned about. Administration was uninteresting and unnoticed—until something went wrong. Senior officials usually focused narrowly on their areas of expertise. But the early years of the twenty-first century have been marked by an accelerating pace of change. Both parliaments have faced significant management challenges while more public exposure has simultaneously ushered in a new age of public cynicism and loss of respect for, or deference towards, members of parliament. Among the challenges is the need for those in the management box seat to overcome resistance from those favouring the status quo—an ‘embedded political elite’ consistently rejecting or diluting reform agendas that threaten their privileged position; in other words, a clash between ‘aversive and aspirational constitutionalism’ (Flinders et al. 2018a). This challenge can also be seen as a clash between a historical institutional and path-dependent perspective, where change occurs only as a result of a crisis or accident (Kelso 2009; Russell 2011b; Flinders et al. 2018a; Petit and Yong 2018), and the strategically planned collaborative management approach that public management experts would advocate.

This chapter highlights issues of structural identity and institutional divides before examining three associated management dilemmas: multiple stakeholders and competing roles, balancing operational and strategic management, and coping with necessary but sometimes counterproductive scrutiny mechanisms.

Structural identity and institutional divides

When the organizational structure is well conceived … the process of identification permits the broad organizational arrangements to govern the decisions of the persons who participate in the structure. Thereby, it permits human rationality to transcend the limitations imposed upon it by the narrow span of attention. (Simon 1977: 288–89)

Fledderus et al. (2014) claim that identification-based trust forms when parties identify each other’s goals and understand and value each other’s wants. Such trust is not essentially cognitive but emotional. The UK and Australian parliaments have different organisational structures, but it is not evident whether either is conceived well enough to contribute to a shared parliamentary identity. Both parliaments have grappled with establishing joint working arrangements, as outlined below, but neither appears to have transcended the limitations imposed by narrow spans of attention or addressed an inherent hierarchy between the procedural and the managerial.

In the United Kingdom, the clerks of the two houses retain ultimate control over all non-procedural services, either separately or under a shared services arrangement where costs are split between them, generally under a 40:60 or 30:70 ratio. In 2007, the Parliament (Joint Departments) Act was passed to allow the corporate officers (the clerks) in both houses to establish joint departments, subject to the approval of their respective governance bodies. The only joint department is the Parliamentary Security Department, but more than 60 per cent of services are shared between the two houses, including digital services, procurement, archives, maintenance and outreach (HOCGC 2014; Torrance 2017). An outcome from the HOCGC (2014) was a commitment to review joint working in other services, including Hansard, the library and catering; however, this was later abandoned, despite its potential to offer significant savings, particularly in the catering function, as noted in Chapter 5. The Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Act 2019 established joint management and governance arrangements for the restoration and renewal program. These included the Sponsor Body, acting as a single client accountable to parliament, overseeing the Delivery Authority, which was responsible for the scope, budget and timescale of the program. The relationship between the Sponsor Body and the two house administrations was defined under a Parliamentary Relationship Agreement (Houses of Parliament Restoration and Renewal 2020).

In the Australian Parliament, the procedural and management functions were clearly delineated on its establishment in 1901, as set out in Chapter 3. The ‘personal fiefdoms’ comprising the clerks of the Senate and House of Representatives and the heads of Hansard, library and building management services were jealously guarded (Reid and Forrest 1989). The eventual amalgamation in 2004 of the three joint service departments following the Podger review (2002) disrupted the fiefdoms in one department only and left intact the structural division between the ‘procedural’ and the ‘managerial’. The ongoing structural delineation between the two ‘professions’ or skill sets could be seen as a catalyst or explanation for poor relationships between the clerks and other parliamentary service managers in Australia (see, for instance, Reid and Forrest 1989; Towell 2014, 2015).³ It is unclear, however, whether the evolution of management services under the authority of the Clerk of the House of Commons and the Clerk of the Parliaments (House of Lords) has led to a more unified service in either house of the UK Parliament. Indeed, evidence provided to the Governance Committee and observations made by scholars and practitioners suggest the hierarchy between clerking and managing has always been a strong feature of the parliamentary institution, with procedural services highly valued and support services less so (Crewe 2005, 2010; Silvester and Spicer 2014; Gay 2017).⁴ In both houses, the providers of longstanding traditional support services, such as library researchers and Hansard reporters, have fallen somewhere between the ‘procedural’ and the ‘managerial’ cleavage while arguing strongly for their recognition among the higher echelons (Weatherston 1975; Reid and Forrest 1989; Verrier 1995; Gay 2017).

In the face of such a hierarchy, Oonagh Gay, a former House of Commons Library official, was sceptical about the capacity to develop a unified, corporate House of Commons Service, while conceding that things could be changing:

If you work for DCCS [the Department of Chamber and Committee Services,] you are perceived to have higher status than other staff in the parliamentary administration … And that has been perceived for many years as a problem when we are trying to create a unitary corporate service. One answer to that is to do away with departments altogether and simply develop functional units … [T]here is no easy answer. But I think there is a real inheritance of dislike of the clerks as seeing themselves as different and superior to the rest of parliamentary staff and that is felt very keenly by many parliamentary staff. It may not be fair anymore but because so many parliamentary staff started their careers 15 or 20 years ago old feelings linger.⁵

Lorraine Sutherland, former head of the House of Commons Hansard service, was of a similar opinion. While she was extremely complimentary about the clerks’ knowledge and procedural skills, she lamented:

They have in the past just been too aloof and too hierarchical in their approach and they haven’t fully respected or appreciated anybody else who works for parliament. It is going to take a long time for people to get over that. It is going to take a long time for all the clerks to stop behaving like that. It is going to take a long time for the non-clerks to accept that they have changed and to feel that they are properly valued.⁶

Professors Jo Silvester and Andre Spicer, psychologists from Cass Business School, studied the working relationships between a small group of House of Commons staff and members. They found that if one took the view that parliament should have a ‘somewhat limited purpose of improving legislation and holding the executive to account’, the legislative process was the ‘core’ and all other services were there strictly to support that process:

The closer you are to this process, the higher the status and importance that is accorded to your role. The Clerks are seen to be at the core, the library service at some remove, with services like IT and catering at an extreme distance. (Silvester and Spicer, Cass Business School, in HOCGC 2014: 94)

The effects of differences in the management structures in the two parliaments can be interpreted in several ways. On the one hand, there might have been a greater opportunity, within a unified service, for staff at all levels with multiple functions to identify with the purpose, strategies and goals of the organisation, and this opportunity was, arguably, strengthened by the changes made by the incoming Director-General of the House of Commons (House of Commons 2016). These changes were likely, in turn, to have influenced the acceptance of change within the House of Lords administration based on its adoption of practices similar to those recommended by the HOCGC (2014). On the other hand, the accretion of responsibility by the clerks over decades for the panoply of increasingly complex managerial—on top of procedural—services has inevitably led to a prioritisation of the procedural over the managerial⁷ and this was borne out in the evidence taken by the HOCGC (2014) and in comments from interviewees.

Conversely, a separate services department might be expected to be more efficient and responsive than a hybrid department, provided there is a strong connection with the parliament’s purposes, strategies and goals. The concept of a unified service in the Australian Parliament was encapsulated at least in theory by the implementation of the Parliamentary Service Act 1999, but in the case of DPS, many interviewees saw the absence of a strong cultural identity as the harbinger of many performance problems after its creation in 2004.⁸ Since 2004, the clerks have also experienced a ‘hollowing out’ of their management responsibilities other than the more routine management and governance of their own departments. They have lost responsibility for the security function and, subsequently, IT responsibilities following a review of parliament-wide services (Roche 2012). As noted in Chapter 4, former Senate Clerk Evans saw the loss of functions as an institutionally inappropriate acceptance of private commercial concepts and, according to senate adviser Quinton Clements, communications between the Senate Department and DPS were at a very low ebb when the consolidation of IT services within DPS was first proposed by former Senate president John Hogg in 2012.⁹ Senate officials had been clearly of the view that they should not have to deal with DPS. According to Clements, they saw the department as a ‘usurper’ that should never have been created and the departments did not really communicate. The relationship between the Senate and DPS deteriorated further during the tenure of Carol Mills as secretary and the subsequent performance reviews by SFPALC, and these events have been well documented. Clements also noted, however, that successive clerks in the House of Representatives and Senate had brought a new form of pragmatism to their roles, realising they had ‘to just get on with it’ and concentrate on providing services to members and senators, and this was also evident from their interviews.¹⁰ Chris Paterson, senior adviser to the Speaker in the years after DPS’s establishment, doubted whether the model of a separately constituted services mega-department, responsible to two authorities, was appropriate. There were problems with the model, and the structure had never been accepted by those affected; it was something that had been imposed on them.¹¹ To Paterson:

It was an implementation issue. The problem is that the presiding officers change; with the new ones, it takes them a long time to get their heads around it. You may very well have a change of staff … As soon as you get a change, we’re all back to square one … I’ve always felt that the three departments really need to work in a more collegial fashion … [W]here they’ve created a DPS … in New South Wales [they] have regular meetings, with agendas, papers and decisions recorded … with both presiding officers … [Y]ou can get away from a ‘this is our turf’ type situation.¹²

In Australia, the continuing rivalries between departments have not been confined to disdain from the house departments towards the services department. Officials recounted the ongoing feud between former clerks of the Senate and the House of Representatives, even to the extent of refusing to be in the same room together.¹³ The examples I have recounted might be attributed to personality differences were it not for corroborating evidence of longstanding differences (Reid and Forrest 1989; Adams 2002). Even so, governance arrangements should transcend such differences or at least allow for their accommodation, but the forums in the Australian Parliament for discussing and enhancing parliamentary administration are limited. The evidence does not point to one best organisational structure in terms of management effectiveness. Instead, it appears that both parliaments have suffered from a lack of a common identity and purpose.

The governance structures in the UK Parliament, where members and peers are formally engaged in governance processes, appear to provide a greater potential for collaboration. Some members and officials in the House of Lords were also actively engaged in the HOCGC review (2014)¹⁴ and there are arrangements in place for the audit committees and commissions of the two houses to meet. But these governance arrangements are not without their shortcomings and do not guarantee collective responsibility or engagement in management decisions. Often there appears to be little common ground among members and non-elected officials on administrative reform. Silvester and Spicer (2014) noted that staff can tend to ‘mirror politicians’ behaviour’ by focusing on ‘handling’ the discussion rather than presenting options to resolve a problem, resulting in confused or no decision-making. The Ellenbogen inquiry into bullying and harassment in the House of Lords (see Chapter 7) described the relationship between peers and administrators as ‘transactional and paternalistic’ (Ellenbogen 2019: 74).

Members of the UK Parliament expressed a variety of views about the level of engagement and interest in management. Chris Bryant, former Shadow Leader of the House and member of the House of Commons Commission, was not confident that either the procedural or the management roles were being carried out effectively.¹⁵ He cited shortcomings in both political management (‘We are glorious amateurs; we love being amateurs and I dislike that. I would prefer us to be more professional’) and in the operation of the House of Commons Commission (‘It should be a management team … and it’s not run as a team in any sense at all … this is a place full of silos’). He claimed the whole parliament was ‘devoid of management techniques’ such as ‘away days’ to promote team cohesion.¹⁶ He was joined in this observation by Baroness D’Souza, then Lord Speaker, who spoke of the hostility she encountered when she suggested an ‘away day’ for fellow peers.¹⁷ Lord Laming, then Convenor of the Cross Bench in the House of Lords, thought serving on the administrative committees ‘ought to be seen as a privilege and a responsibility’ by peers and ‘something really important’ in their day-to-day lives, thereby implying that it was not.¹⁸

Bernard Jenkin, then chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, was not a member of the commission but claimed to have been instrumental in laying the ground for the HOCGC. He was emphatic about the need for a corporate structure—a board with non-executive and elected MPs to provide governance and leadership—arguing that a lack of leadership had been a more fundamental problem than whether to split the role of clerk and CEO.¹⁹ In the context of this book, that is a useful observation; it implies criticism of the lack of engagement of members themselves in the governance and management of the House of Commons. The difficulties of engaging members in management issues, as well as the value of so doing, were echoed by members of the commission.²⁰

Some members of the House of Commons Commission were also critical of a perceived disinterest in management in some quarters and a tendency for the commission to focus on the trivial rather than the strategic, which was attributed partly to the highly charged political environment and also to a constant concern with external perceptions: ‘What would the members think?’ or ‘What would the man or woman on the Clapham omnibus say about this?’ Some spoke frankly about the need for a greater appreciation of business processes and project management skills and suggested some of the ‘unique’ characteristics of the UK Parliament could be overplayed and there was scope for greater collaboration between the two houses. Others were confident that the organisation was moving away from its silo mentality while also being conscious of a culture of limited engagement that viewed change as doing the same thing in a slightly different way. Some were bemused by the way common services were provided by separate bodies and saw opportunities for joint working and collaboration. Speaker Bercow anticipated ‘more and more pressure over time to identify things that can be done together, more efficiently’.²¹ Along with Chris Bryant and Ian Ailles, he was one of a minority of those interviewed to see potential in an administrative structure that crossed both houses. Other, perhaps more ‘constitutionally averse’, interviewees saw the provision of joint services as flawed, and some were reluctant to adopt the ‘Australian model’ of a joint services department in the light of the well-publicised criticism of its performance. Indeed, more than one senior official stated off the record that the UK Parliament had managed a narrow escape with the termination of the recruitment process for Speaker Bercow’s choice of clerk.

In the Australian Parliament, officials have attempted more recently to limit the degrees of separation and enhance internal collaboration. The first whole-of-parliament strategic plan was published in 2017 following a thawing of relations between the Senate and DPS. Former Senate Clerk Laing was a driver of the plan and she welcomed the arrival in 2015 of a new head of DPS, who had, in fact, once been a senior clerk in the NSW Parliament.²² Her successor as Clerk of the Senate spoke of a new era of ‘rampant cooperation’.²³ But relations between members and officials, particularly management officials, have not been formalised to the same extent as they have in the United Kingdom. Officials are not members of either the Senate Standing Committee on Appropriations, Staffing and Security or the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Appropriations and Administration, and there is no published record of the two committees meeting, despite a change to Standing Orders that would have facilitated such administrative collaboration. Instead, some senators were opposed to joint administration either through these forums or through the Joint House Committee, which was also considered ineffective.²⁴ The SFPALC inquiries (2012a, 2012b, 2015a, 2015b) reflected a greater reliance on scrutiny and criticism than on engagement and collaboration—a dilemma that is discussed at greater length later in this chapter. Although there are moves to ameliorate conflicts in both parliaments, in the Australian Parliament there appears to be less evidence of a commitment to a broader parliamentary identity, a limited ability to ‘transcend limitations imposed by a narrow span of attention’ (Simon 1977) and less opportunity for members and officials to exercise collective agency.

The relationships between clerks and management officials, between members and officials and between the two houses in each parliament can be problematic. They have been influenced to some extent by structure, particularly in the Australian Parliament, as we have seen from repeated attempts at structural change and repeated criticisms of management effectiveness. For both parliaments to achieve their strategic aims—including ‘supporting a thriving parliamentary democracy’ and ‘securing Parliament’s future’ (House of Commons 2020: 13), ‘to support and strengthen the House of Lords’ (House of Lords 2020: 4) or in ‘serving, supporting and upholding the institution of the Parliament’ (Parliament of Australia 2020)—it might be expected that parliamentary administrators would display the public management skills of the future, including negotiating interests among an array of different groups, working more productively with citizens, enhancing communication and emotional skills and working across boundaries (OECD 2017). However, as I have suggested, parliamentary administrators’ agency is also situated within a web of beliefs and traditions (Bevir and Rhodes 2006), and parliamentary reform can be seen as dependent on actors’ beliefs and is ‘often wrapped up in power relationships between different actors’ (Geddes and Meakin 2018: 22).

The dilemma of multiple roles, multiple stakeholders and multiple relationships

The challenge of fostering a unified parliamentary service identity that encourages collaboration across houses and departmental or functional boundaries is compounded by a lack of unanimity about the roles and functions of parliamentary administrators and the stakeholders they are serving (Silvester and Spicer 2014). This dilemma is compounded by a diffusion in the ‘authorising environment’ (Moore 1995; HOCGC 2014; Silvester and Spicer 2014). Public managers have a public service ethos; they are serving the needs of the public, but they usually do so through the auspices of their minister, who is accountable for the performance of their department or agency. Parliamentary administration is seen by its practitioners as more complex: at senior levels in the two parliaments, there is not always a clear line of sight between service providers and their stakeholders, particularly in the Australian Parliament with its separate services department.

This observation might appear to be somewhat simplistic: public servants, too, are faced with dilemmas in terms of crossing the administrative–political divide and entering the purple zone, and when facing exhortations to be more innovative, strategic, responsive and accountable (Moore 1995; Shergold 1997; Alford, Hartley et al. 2017; OECD 2017). However, at least in theory, they identify strongly with their minister and his or her goals, and the value of the public advice, product or service they are providing is more readily articulated. The goals of 650 members and more than 800 peers in the UK Parliament and 150 members and 76 senators in the Australian Parliament are less discernible and the value to the public of an efficient and effective democracy is not easily captured. Given these issues, the questions ‘Who are the stakeholders?’ and ‘Whom do we serve?’ are presented here as a dilemma for parliamentary actors. In general, parliamentary administrators seem to identify very strongly with their particular roles, rather than with their organisation; they are role-oriented and task driven rather than goal driven. This can lead to conflicting priorities among different actors: managers, presiding officers and other members, clerks and other advisers.

In the Australian Parliament, senior officials in the DPS generally held outward-looking views of serving the public, as demonstrated by the following extracts from interviews with the then DPS chief information officer, chief operating officer and secretary:

I guess it comes down to our real customers or clients being the general public and the parliamentarians and their staff … [W]e are here to facilitate the work of parliament, and that includes members, senators and the staff … Then obviously there is the way that the general public interacts with that. They can read Hansard, they watch broadcasts and they visit the building. Those, to me, are our real customers.²⁵

In my mind, it’s primarily about supporting the operations of the parliament. But a big part of that goes then on to that visitor group that’s coming through and engaging with parliament. We’ve had to modify and adapt that a little bit with the security issues, but we still get a huge volume of visitors, a huge number of school children coming through each year, and we’re hoping to increase both of those.²⁶

My service priority is obviously to the presiding officers (as my ministerial equivalent), the parliamentarians, their staff and then parliamentary department staff who support the parliament. Because we are also a tourist attraction, there is the public value element in terms of visitors who are citizens of Australia and international visitors who come to Parliament House to learn about parliamentary democracy.²⁷

There also appeared to be a strong understanding of the need to manage the relationships between different actors with a view to accommodating conflicting needs, as recognised by Luke Hickey, Assistant Secretary of the Parliamentary Experience Branch:

I knew that there were some tensions in and around the different departments, between DPS and the Department of the Senate and the Department of the House of Representatives. My first objective … was to … repair and rebuild those relationships. For us, as a visitor-facing function, it is so important that we are telling [a story about] the work of the parliament as a whole, and for us to be able to tell that, we have to be able to understand what the Senate and the House of Representatives actually see as the important part of that story and how we can bring that over.

The other really challenging part to juggling this building is that it is a working parliament, a working building. What I might like to achieve from a pure visitor and tourism point of view in bringing people in and around the building the whole time simply does not work … particularly in a sitting week. So it is about juggling the tensions between attracting as many visitors as we can and helping to connect them not only with the building itself but with the parliament and to leave with a better understanding of the parliament and how it works. That is a really important part of DPS’s role. But how do I do that without disrupting people who are working in and around offices, who are trying to access the building and who have their own visitors and guests coming to meet with them on work-related topics as well? … [W]e have a really big advocacy role. Then there is a really important strategic job that we need to get to and spend more time on that often gets drowned out by the sheer volume of the operational work. It is a challenge. I’d love to be able to just go off and have autonomy in making decisions and coming up with great ideas, rather than having to go through and negotiate on everything. But it wouldn’t work. It would end up in the kind of issues that the department has had in the past.²⁸

These observations are telling given comments by the former departmental secretary Carol Mills, who was brought in to fix the department’s shortcomings after the ‘billiard tables affair’ and the first excoriating reports on the department’s performance discussed in Chapter 4 (SFPALC 2012a, 2012b). Mills was quite clear in her discussion with me as to what she had been brought in to achieve:

I made that really clear at all of my interviews. I said, ‘It seems to me that the distance between politicians and the community is getting greater. And when you think that DPS has the library, media recording, the IT systems, the building itself, the whole public side of parliament, there’s a real opportunity for us to more strategically help the community and parliament get closer.’

To my way of thinking, that was an interesting part of the job. So there was the change management aspect and the bigger picture about the parliament—not necessarily just the department but, through the department, the parliament … That whole culture of who does parliament belong to and so on seemed to me to be a significant issue. Because both of them [the then presiding officers, former Senator Hogg and former MP Peter Slipper] were very receptive to that sort of direction and were keen themselves to drive change and made it clear they were looking for a different way of both receiving services and engaging, I decided to give it a crack. I read a lot of the material about Parliament House, the building, and what it was designed to try and achieve. I thought those were all absolutely meritorious ambitions—pride in the building, Australian workmanship, access to the building, displaying for visitors, either official or tourists, the best of the country—and I thought lots of people were contributing well to that, but it wasn’t seen as important. One of the things I wanted to do was raise the profile of those people, to show the value of what they were contributing … [and] give a lot more information about what we did, and be much more on the front foot about it so that people could recognise the skills and efforts that went into things. When the new presiding officers came [former Senator Parry and former MP Bishop,] they weren’t interested in the kind of bigger picture stuff. They weren’t very interested in the fact that I was only just starting a change program.²⁹

Mills’s account suggests a disconnect between her beliefs as head of a multifunction services department and the beliefs of those to whom she was immediately accountable. When I interviewed former Speaker Tony Smith, I did not find that he was ‘keen to drive change and look for a different way of both receiving services and engaging’, as recounted by Mills. Reform was a role for parliaments; he saw the Speaker’s role as an umpire and his focus was very much on managing the business of the chamber, for which he received many plaudits after his resignation. In his public role, he placed a strong emphasis on his visits to schools. His approach was borne out by his colleague, Tony Pasin, the Chair of the Procedure Committee, whose comments on improving the public reputation of the parliament were directed at maintaining order in the House and using the Standing Orders to improve members’ behaviour. While these endeavours obviously have merit, neither the Speaker nor the Procedure Committee chair emphasised other activities that might have the effect of creating value for members of the public.

Former president Parry claimed to be a reforming president, saying: ‘[T]he simple thing would be for me to turn up here, do the same old, same old and have an easier life.’ In administrative terms, he appeared determined to wrest control over the Senate’s resources from the Department of Finance.³⁰ The clerks, as we have learnt, tended in the past to hold to a view of their roles as procedural curators, guardians and advisers with management seen as a peripheral function. Their stakeholders are predominantly the presiding officers and their deputies and other members, with the public receiving the end product. David Elder, former clerk of the House of Representatives, was keen not to overemphasise his role as a guardian of the institution, preferring to see himself ‘as the humble servant of the most meagre backbencher’. He and the Clerk of the Senate confirmed the hollowing out of management responsibilities in their respective departments, reflecting that their principal role now was to provide a ‘secretariat’ to their respective houses—a term that clearly delineates the very specialised nature of the role of the house departments.³¹ These two clerks did not appear to feel threatened by this loss of function or see it as ‘institutionally inappropriate’ (Evans 2005); on the contrary, the Senate Clerk particularly relished the prospect of devoting more resources to his primary function of advising the Senate and its committees, throwing open the possibility of ceding more responsibility in the IT space to DPS.

Elder remarked that the only ‘joint’ responsibilities of either house were to administer the Parliamentary Relations Office (from the House of Representatives) and the Parliamentary Education Office (from the Senate). To Pye, the purpose of public engagement appeared to be largely a function of presenting information about the work of the Senate; to Elder, the emphasis was on school visits, either of schoolchildren to parliament or of members (including the Speaker) to schools.³² The attention by each parliament to engaging with the public stands out as one of the significant differences between them and, in the case of the Australian Parliament, was acknowledged by the then Deputy Clerk of the House of Representatives as a missed opportunity, due mainly to a lack of resources.³³ This important distinction is discussed in more detail in Chapter 7.

Some of the frankest, but also pragmatic, views about the tensions within the UK Parliament among parliamentary officials, members and staff in their beliefs about their roles and purposes came from Paul Evans, long-serving House of Commons clerk and author on parliament. According to him, tensions exist between members and officials and between government and opposition members: first, in preserving institutional continuity while making the parliament more accessible to the public; and second, in a government being able to achieve its political aims without jeopardising its continuing ability to do so when in opposition—in effect, the maintenance of intraparliamentary comity. He emphasised the essentiality of a central parliamentary purpose, rather than a set of cultural values, while acknowledging the difficulties of achieving such an outcome:

You don’t expect everyone in an institution as large as this, even though it’s not very large, to be signed up to its cultural values. That’s a kind of hegemonic, fascist ideology that wouldn’t be desirable anyway. It’s good to have grit in the oyster. So we don’t want everybody getting up every morning and singing the parliamentary anthem and doing the parliamentary dance. We want people who don’t give two hoots about it as long as they are good at adding up sums or putting in toilets—that’s fine. I don’t think we have to make everybody sign up to the institution in that sort of vocational way. But you do want a culture in which you understand that the central purpose of the institution is to enable democracy to work and that includes people who hoover the floors and look after the plumbing and look after the finances. The central purpose is not to have an efficient financial system; it is to have an efficient and effective parliament and that message has to be very clearly communicated and enforced, to use a slightly coercive word. The risk is the more you managerialise, the fewer people who are conscious of the importance of that message and the means of communicating it.³⁴

The ‘doing sums, putting in toilets, plumbing and hoovering [vacuuming]’ view of management echoes a clerkly disdain for the management role; an analogy from the former clerk of the House and now Lord Lisvane was ‘keeping the lights on and emptying the bins’.³⁵ But in conforming with Crewe’s account of the ‘sympathetic yet cynical’ parliamentary servant, Evans also did not spare the procedural function in his frank assessment of reforms following the expenses scandal:

That’s the way we went because everybody was in a flat spin about the expenses scandal and that gave a window of opportunity for a particular MP in the shape of Tony Wright, who is one of the small handful—10 per cent, 5 per cent, 3 per cent—who are very interested in how the place works, to forward his own agenda with the help of some clerks and people like Meg [Russell].³⁶ There have been changes; I’m not saying they are changes for the better, they are just changes. They are changes in the direction that these people think are positive. What I had hoped would come out of the creation of the backbenchers’ business committee was a real focus for backbench culture—the government, the opposition and the backbenchers who would become somehow an across-party identity. I don’t think that’s really happened. They are the ones who would preserve parliament against the degradations of the executive, the front-benchers on either side. All they are interested in is being in government and doing things. Parliament is really just a blocker, not an enabler.³⁷

Other interviewees were frustrated with the plurality of the roles they were sometimes expected to play as head of a hybridised house service. David Beamish, then Clerk of the Parliaments, stated that he was ‘here to run a parliament, not to sweat the assets of the Palace of Westminster’ when describing a conflict over whether the House of Lords’ catering facilities should be operated on a commercial basis:

I’m running a legislative chamber and not a club. Although the place has some of the appearance of a club with its smart, historic[al] décor, banqueting facilities and so forth, I don’t see my skills as running that sort of thing … It is a bit different from being a chief executive where you are actually engaged in the business. To that extent it is a slightly unusual position, exacerbated perhaps by the fact that members sometimes have strong views on these things.³⁸

Unsurprisingly, more recently appointed officials on the management side appeared more enthusiastic about their public management roles, particularly after the appointment of the new director-general, Ian Ailles. They were oriented towards the general public, particularly in terms of participation, engagement and the digital service, and the director-general’s review introduced a range of initiatives that included a greater focus on the customer and working across boundaries and balancing customer service with stewardship—defined as a ‘continuing responsibility we have on behalf of the public for the good order, the effective running and the reputation of the House of Commons’ (House of Commons 2016: 12). Penny Young, librarian and Managing Director, Participation and Research and Information, displayed a strong public values approach to her role:

[T]hrough research, engagement and participation, we have a real opportunity—not by ourselves—to help to shift the reputation of the House through encouraging MPs to do certain things and through providing them with great information that they use and through reaching out to the public to explain and involve more. I think where we have got to with ‘supporting a thriving parliamentary democracy’ is wonderful … because there was a really boring draft one when I arrived, which basically could have been translated into ‘lie down and do whatever the MPs want’—not as simple as that.³⁹

Rob Greig, then director of the Digital Service, echoed this enthusiastic, outward-looking, public-facing approach:

There is a disconnect, or sometimes a disagreement, about who the customer is. If you talk to different subsets and groups of members, some will say the officials of parliament are here to serve members. That is it. They are not interested in us doing anything else. It’s about serving members. They will say to you, ‘You do not exist without us.’ I am not so sure about that actually … Just like there is diversity in the value sets of members—the opinions, the politics—there is exactly the same when it comes to digital. So there are those who think, absolutely we should be doing the public thing and there are others—a loud minority—who think, ‘You are here to service us.’ I firmly believe that digital has a responsibility for reaching out to the public, supporting democracy and telling the story of Parliament.⁴⁰

The continuing dilemma of multiple perspectives was insightfully explained by Ruth Fox, Director of the Hansard Society and a long-time advocate of reform, in relation to public engagement and working practices in both houses (2009, 2012a, 2012b). She was somewhat alarmed that a shift of power to new parliamentary actors after the director-general’s review represented a loss of ‘political capital’. People just ‘didn’t get it’, she said:

You have to engage with members; you have to bring them in; you’ve got to make them part of the process. You can’t stand apart and say ‘we are doing this anyway’. What worries me is people coming from outside who think that because of everything that’s happened in terms of expenses, reputation and so on they are going to come in, reorganise and clean up and they owe their responsibilities to the public more than to members and therefore they dismiss members as part of the equation. That’s what worries me … [I]f you take that approach, you won’t get it done. And, the services of this House are designed to enable it to run as a legislature. Of course, it’s got to have accountability to the public and so on, but it’s got to function as a legislature and that means you’ve got to work with members. I’m not sure some of the people I’m dealing with who’ve been brought in from outside in the last year clearly understand that.⁴¹

The evidence I have presented of the tensions between the more traditional procedural view and the newer management view suggests the dilemma has been more significant for the UK Parliament than for the Australian Parliament, particularly in the latter’s new era of ‘rampant cooperation’. But many observations about the UK Parliament would have been salient during Mills’s tenure in the Australian Parliament and could again be relevant in any return of the hostile relationships of the past. The evidence also suggests the UK Parliament has reflected more closely on its engagement with a whole range of stakeholders and placed a higher priority on its public-facing role than has the Australian Parliament, without dismissing the need to continue to provide an effective service to members. The scale of reflection and inquiry the UK Parliament has afforded to its governance and management has also allowed it to engage more collaboratively and strategically in planning for its future. But in later chapters, we will see there are still significant problems.

The dilemma of business as usual or designing the future: Balancing operational and strategic management

The case for improvement

The bias towards efficiency—at least in terms of spending less money—is stronger in the Australian Parliament, where it is the likely product of the blunt instrument of the executive-imposed efficiency dividend introduced in 1987, which has constrained expenditure in a parliament that does not set its own budget. The UK Parliament has not been subject to the same degree of external pressure (except in the aftermath of the expenses scandal) but has weathered continuing calls for efficiency through numerous management reviews over several decades in both houses. In 2010, following the then Conservative government’s austerity program, the House of Commons voluntarily imposed its own internal savings program, reaping a budget saving of 17.5 per cent over the next four years (Petit and Yong 2018). Rather than trying to compare the relative efficiency of each parliament, it is more useful to examine the priorities and actor relationships governing the allocation of scarce publicly funded parliamentary resources.⁴² As Geddes and Mulley (2018) point out, there are unanswered questions in terms of institutional support for MPs and the purposes and interests to which resources are directed, and these issues go to the heart of the dilemma I have discussed above. To these questions, I have added an emphasis on determining the broader public value of parliamentary administration.

There are continuing concerns about administrative effectiveness in the two parliaments. Petit and Yong (2018)—more than three years after the report of the HOCGC (2014) was published—predicted a key element of future governance and administration would be joint working, particularly on the restoration and renewal of the Palace of Westminster, but they also noted that the joint working program aimed at gaining efficiencies across the two houses had ‘fallen off the political radar’. (I have already discussed the lack of political will to join up the two catering services.) As Ian Ailles, the former director-general, surmised:

You can only do joint working if both sides want to do joint working. I always think of myself as being employed by the parliament, not by the Commons. But that view is not shared with people who have been here for a long time.⁴³

The former clerk of the House of Commons and now Lord Lisvane was credited with attempting to reform and modernise the management of the House, notwithstanding his well-publicised falling out with the Speaker. But he was ‘constantly haunted’ by the fear of a ‘catastrophic failure’ of the building’s services and was continually firefighting to head off adverse media publicity.⁴⁴ There is a long history of avoidance and delay in the restoration and renewal of the Palace of Westminster (see Crick Centre 2018; Flinders et al. 2018a; Meakin 2018, 2020; R. Kelly 2022; and later chapters of this volume). As we saw in the opening chapter and from the HOCGC (2014) report, there has been much criticism of waste and inefficiency directed towards building operations and facilities. The management and preservation of the parliamentary building, both as a functional workplace and a symbol of parliamentary democracy, are key elements of parliamentary administration. They provide a useful example of the challenges presented by multiple stakeholder perspectives and the emphasis placed on operational versus strategic management. As the former clerk of the House of Commons, David Natzler, put it:

We’ve had this concentration on R&R [restoration and renewal] over the last two or three years. It has become an almost overwhelming, almost obsessive priority, to the point where one forgets that we’re trying to run a parliament, whatever the building is. It has become an obsession and it has absorbed a lot of resources, including not just money but management time and resources, and political effort.⁴⁵

The HOCGC (2014: 35) may have reiterated that its inquiry was not the result of any failure in services to members, but it also emphasised that ‘good performance in the past is no guarantee of good performance in the future’. Notwithstanding the increases over time in the resources and facilities provided to members, a report provided to the House of Commons Administration Committee on the success of new members’ induction and their use of house services after the 2017 general election (Kenny 2018) indicated there is no guarantee that perceptions of good performance are universal among members and their staff. Concerns were expressed about ‘alien’ parliamentary procedures, information overload, office accommodation, digital services, catering and unclear communications. Many of the concerns had been highlighted previously and there was a perception that further action was required.

In the Australian Parliament, the Podger review (2002) was principally concerned with security administration and financial savings and offered little by way of a strategic path. Its author acknowledged that the parliament does not tend to look at its administration in a systematic way and that, as the Parliamentary Service Commissioner, he could have played a more substantial role in facilitating dialogue between departmental heads. He was annoyed that the implementation of the review was also compromised by an associated Department of Finance–imposed funding cut.⁴⁶ The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO 2006: 13) reported that eight of the nine Podger resolutions had been partly or fully implemented and DPS had absorbed the Finance-imposed reductions with ‘only minor changes to its services’. Nevertheless, it called for an improvement in the measurement and reporting of DPS service levels and concluded that the parliament’s administration could benefit from greater strategic planning for security and ICT and more formal processes for planning major initiatives.

A submission by another former Parliamentary Service Commissioner, Stephen Sedgwick, to the ongoing inquiry by the SFPALC into the performance of DPS noted that a 2009 review by his predecessor, Lynelle Briggs, had inter alia emphasised the ‘desirability of looking for better ways for the parliamentary departments to continue to work together to take advantage of strategic opportunities and achieve economies of scale not available to smaller organisations’ (Sedgwick 2011: 3). He concluded his submission by noting that he had not been approached by the presiding officers, either ‘to inquire further into these matters, or [to] undertake any further review’ (Sedgwick 2011: 4). As noted, the inquiries conducted by SFPALC (2012a, 2012b) into the performance of DPS strongly criticised its long-term approach to the management of Parliament House, lack of leadership and strategic planning, threats to design integrity and heritage values and poor employment practices. In 2015, it reported that it found it hard to identify anything positive coming from the many recommendations made in its 2012 interim and final reports (SFPALC 2015c).

This snapshot of management performance challenges in each parliament suggests a different tenor in the calls for a more strategic approach. In the United Kingdom, the establishment of and outcomes from the HOCGC (2014) were predominantly an acknowledgement of many competing views about the adequacy and relative importance of management skills; they also represented the extent of frustration in some quarters with the lack of ‘professional’ management. The committee made thoughtful recommendations for delivering effective strategic management. The senate committee inquiries into DPS’s performance were, on the other hand, excoriating and seemingly made little effort to restore a more cooperative relationship between the houses and between members and officials. In the context of the conflicting beliefs of institutional actors and consequent dilemmas I have identified, these inquiries appear to have been concerned with highlighting failures rather than encouraging success. The SFPALC has remained highly critical of DPS’s performance in relation to building works, security and IT, notwithstanding the progress on these fronts reported by DPS (SFPALC 2018, 2019a, 2019b, 2021; Stefanic 2018: 1–9).

Designing for future performance

My study compared each parliament’s strategic planning framework given calls for more effective strategic planning. Comparisons were made from planning documents viewed in 2018 and 2019, when much of the research took place and when many of the events recorded occurred. Strategic plans have since been updated in the two parliaments with minor changes in emphasis.

As noted, the Australian Parliament is included as a Commonwealth entity under Section 10 of the PGPA Act. A key focus of the Act is to ‘improve the standard of planning and reporting for Commonwealth entities’; good-quality performance information can, at the highest level, ‘help us all to judge whether Australians’ quality of life is being enhanced and whether public policy goals are being achieved’ (Department of Finance 2014: 6). Some parliamentary stakeholders saw the Act as having the potential to engender more productive, informed and less adversarial relationships between agencies and parliamentary committees, although others questioned whether better linkages between performance documents and the elevation of non-financial performance information would succeed in making the performance cycle more transparent (Barrett 2014). The former House of Representatives Clerk and his colleagues did not appear fazed by their responsibilities to manage efficiently and effectively under the Act.⁴⁷ The Senate Clerk was also sanguine, claiming to be happy with where the Senate had landed in terms of the Act’s requirements, although he did think it odd that his department should be describing what it does according to a system put together by ‘Finance boffins’, and he was not keen about throwing more people than he needed to at corporate tasks. He also noted that this type of governance expertise was more likely to reside within the DPS.⁴⁸

Tables 6.1–6.3 compare the planning frameworks between and within the two parliaments during the study period. Table 6.1 depicts characteristics in the strategies prepared by the UK House of Commons and House of Lords. Table 6.2 depicts the strategic plan for the whole Australian Parliamentary Service, while Table 6.3 sets out the main features of the corporate plans of the principal parliamentary departments. Inferences can be drawn from the different emphases placed on functions, including whether they indicate future-oriented action or business as usual, and internal versus external engagement. All the parliamentary services were committed to providing effective support for members—a business-as-usual outcome. The evidence also pointed to the House of Commons Service exhibiting a more aspirational, collaborative and outward-facing approach than the other services, including through expressions such as ‘supporting a thriving parliamentary democracy’, ‘facilitating’ effective scrutiny (with connotations of an enabling rather than a blocking motivation), ‘involving and inspiring the public’ and ‘securing Parliament’s future’. Officials were encouraged to be ambitious, collaborative, helpful and proactive (House of Commons Commission 2016). The House of Lords administration adopted a more conservative view, focused on services but also with an eye to improving the public’s perception of the House. Officials were expected to display values of impartiality, integrity, diversity, inclusion and respect (House of Lords 2016b).

Table 6.1 Strategic planning and reporting in the UK Parliament

Features of the Strategy for the House of Commons Service, 2016–21
Document	Business as usual	Internal facing	Future oriented	Outward facing
Strategic plan			Supporting a thriving parliamentary democracy.
Objectives	Facilitating effective scrutiny and debate: outstanding professional expertise, advice, research, facilities, technology.		Involving and inspiring the public: Changing for the better, facilitating representation, relevant and accessible, challenging misconceptions; securing parliament’s future, steering the House through challenges, preparing for the future.
Behaviours	Ambitious, collaborative, helpful, proactive.
Values	Skilled, united and diverse workforce, customer at centre, spending money wisely.		Maximising digital potential, working impartially, inclusively and in partnership.
Delivery plan	Actions, success factors, team, deadline.

Features of the Strategy for the House of Lords administration, 2016–21
Document	Business as usual	Internal facing	Future oriented	Outward facing
Strategic plan	Support and strengthen the House and its members in carrying out their parliamentary functions.
Objective	Effective services to facilitate work of the House.		Promote public understanding of House of Lords; make the House safer, more secure and sustainable.
Values	Respect for role of the House, impartiality, integrity, diversity, inclusion, respect.		Responsibility to taxpayers, society and the environment.
Measurement	Regular surveys of members, staff and public.	Evaluate impact and effectiveness.	Take account of best practice.	Improve performance-monitoring tools.

Table 6.2 Strategic planning and reporting in the Australian Parliamentary Service

Features of the Strategic Plan for the Australian Parliamentary Service
Document	Business as usual	Internal facing	Future oriented	Outward facing
Strategic plan	Serving and supporting the parliament.		Community access and engagement.
Purpose	Parliament and committees function effectively. Senators and members supported.
	Parliament House sustained as workplace and national institution.
	Independent, non-partisan parliamentary service enhanced.
Strategies	Continue to provide, deliver and manage advice and support; office accommodation; security, maintenance and accessibility of Parliament House; values, learning and collaboration across Parliamentary Service.		Develop, implement and explore innovative services and technology; support engagement, promote parliament.

Table 6.3 Strategic planning and reporting in the Australian parliamentary departments

Features of the Department of the House of Representatives Corporate Plan, 2017–18
Document	Business as usual	Internal facing	Future oriented	Outward facing
Corporate Plan	Support House of Representatives, advice and services.		Wider parliament, community and other parliaments.
Purpose
Activities	Advice, support to chambers, committees.
	Community awareness.			Publications, seminars
	Schools and school visits.		Interparliamentary relations, capacity-building.
	Members’ and corporate support.
Capabilities	Workforce, information, community, asset management, stewardship, collaboration.
Performance	Subscription data, client and staff satisfaction surveys.

Features of the Department of the Senate Corporate Plan, 2017–18
Document	Business as usual	Internal facing	Future oriented	Outward facing
Corporate plan	Secretariat to Senate.	Serving whole parliament.
Purpose
Objectives	Continued expertise, support committees, publish records.
	Education programs.			Community engagement.
Capability	Institutional continuity, IT governance, risk management.
Performance	Accuracy, timeliness, satisfaction surveys.

Features of the Department of Parliamentary Services Corporate Plan, 2017–18
Document	Business as usual	Internal facing	Future oriented	Outward facing
Corporate plan	Supports functions of Parliament House, work of parliamentarians through professional services, advice and facilities.
Purpose
Strategic themes	Effective stewardship of Parliament House; delivery of works program.		Respond to changing needs	Enhance community engagement.
Capabilities	Communication, innovation, customer focus, accountability leadership.
Contributing outputs/targets

The Australian Parliamentary Service is guided by legislated values; its officials are expected to be committed, ethical, respectful, accountable and impartial (Parliamentary Service Act 1999). The values were not reproduced in its first Strategic Plan for Parliamentary Administration (Parliament of Australia 2017b), which was developed in the period of ‘rampant cooperation’ that followed the Mills affair.⁴⁹ It appeared to be an acknowledgement of the Australian Parliamentary Service itself; it was descriptive rather than performative and included no associated performance outcomes or links to other planning documents. Collectively, the outward-facing elements of the planning documents across the three main Australian parliamentary departments (Department of the House of Representatives 2018b; Department of the Senate 2018b; DPS 2018)⁵⁰ indicated a commitment to community access and engagement, innovation in technology and a renewed focus on the preservation of Parliament House after SFPALC’s (2012a, 2012b, 2015a, 2015b) extensive criticisms.

As the tables show, each parliament is committed to formally documenting its plans and performance outcomes. (It was beyond the scope of the study to attempt to evaluate and compare their success.) However, the comparison of strategic planning frameworks indicates that in the Australian Parliament a greater emphasis is placed on ‘core’ business as usual, particularly in the chamber departments but also in the whole-of-parliament strategic plan, rather than on taking a more reflective and strategic approach. The public engagement role is expressed in terms of physical access to Parliament House, including school visits, access to publications and engagement with other parliaments. In contrast, the UK Parliament’s planning framework, particularly in the House of Commons Service, demonstrated a greater focus on outreach and dialectic engagement.

Examination of the latest planning documents in the two parliaments, however, revealed some changes in emphasis (apart from those relating to the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects on parliamentary operations, about which I say more in the final chapter).⁵¹ In the Australian Parliament in 2021–22, the focus by DPS on managing relationships was extensive, including with many customers and stakeholders external to the Parliament. Also to the fore was organisational innovation and capability, particularly digital capability. The Senate and House of Representatives departments expressed a commitment to digital technology as well, while recognising that the greater responsibility resided within DPS, and their commitment to engagement with other parliaments was reflected in the latest strategic framework. All departments emphasised the need to maintain productive or collaborative working relationships, focus on staff wellbeing and enhance policies to prevent bullying and harassment, acknowledging the Jenkins review (AHRC 2021).

Changes in emphasis have also occurred in the UK Parliament. The House of Commons’ strategy has been ‘refreshed’ and, at least until March 2023, its strategic goals now include creating a diverse and inclusive working environment. ‘Ambitious, collaborative, helpful and proactive behaviours’ became ‘collaborative, courageous, inclusive and trusted values’ (no doubt in response to inquiries into bullying and harassment, detailed in the next chapter). Interestingly, an earlier objective of involving and ‘inspiring’ the public changed to ‘informing’ the public (House of Commons 2019, 2021), perhaps reflecting a less ambitious approach to public engagement.⁵² In the House of Lords’ updated strategy, respect, collaboration, adaptation and innovation are priorities, reflecting in particular the inquiries into bullying and the need to work closely with the House of Commons administration on restoration and renewal (House of Lords 2022).

By exploring the planning frameworks of each parliament in some detail and observing gradual changes in focus, I have sought to demonstrate the difficult path both parliaments tread in balancing the present and future requirements of their internal actors while responding to the external environment, including changing public expectations.

The dilemma of party politics: An abundance of scrutiny or an excess of criticism?

Parliamentary scrutiny of government

To begin, I briefly address the scrutiny function ascribed to rather than of parliament—that of scrutinising the executive government of the day, including through deliberating on its legislative program, holding its ministers to account and examining the day-to-day operations of government departments and agencies. In theory, one could expect effective parliamentary scrutiny of the government to play an essential part in enabling the passage of government policy through careful deliberation and thoughtful amendment where appropriate, in both chambers of a bicameral parliament, thus avoiding the potential excesses of majority rule and protecting minority interests.⁵³ But this ideal is often at odds with the conflicting political goals of government and opposition: on the one hand, to pass legislation as quickly and efficiently as possible; on the other, to ensure the capacity of opposition parties or individual members to thwart those parts of a government’s legislative program that do not coincide with a particular set of interests. Parliamentary scrutiny can be directed to the pursuit of political advantage rather than effective policymaking or deliberation and I noted in Chapter 5 the Senate Clerk’s comments on ‘stapled together party policy positions’. In the context of select committee inquiries—generally considered effective forums for scrutiny and deliberation—committee chairs and members are also sometimes at odds in the way in which they exercise their individual styles.⁵⁴ Even the most staunch defender of the Senate’s scrutiny role, Harry Evans, conceded that to the average observer parliamentary scrutiny would appear to be ‘patchy, messy, inconsistent and of dubious effectiveness’, mostly carried out along partisan lines following issues raised first by the media or particular interest groups. He opined that question time was universally derided as a useless scrutiny tool (Evans n.d.). A longitudinal study of the attitudes of ministerial officeholders in the Australian Parliament towards executive accountability also found that high-achieving Cabinet ministers thought their accountability was primarily to the party rather than to the parliament and even less to public opinion (Walter 2012). I have also noted the scepticism from House of Commons Clerk Paul Evans about the willingness of most backbenchers to work across party lines in the interests of effective parliamentary scrutiny.⁵⁵ These issues are discussed at greater length in Chapter 7; for now, my purpose is to bring to the fore the challenges facing parliamentary administrators in responding to scrutiny of their activities by the media and by internal and external official scrutiny mechanisms.

Scrutiny of parliament by the media

Parliaments are trophy organisations for the media … [T]hat is the nature of parliaments, they are constantly in the public eye.⁵⁶

Scrutiny of parliamentary administration is not confined to regulatory mechanisms, audit oversight or parliamentary committee oversight. One of the great challenges to parliamentary administration is the risk of adverse media reporting.⁵⁷ A heightened and intrusive awareness by the media often promote distrust and suspicion from the general public.⁵⁸ Lord Lisvane spoke about the capacity of the media, including the ‘FOI brigade’ to influence management behaviours and decision-making within the House of Commons Service.⁵⁹ He saw it as an unavoidable frustration and, notwithstanding some regret about the original decision to include the UK Parliament in the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, he was not an advocate for its reversion. A former secretary to the House of Commons Commission also pointed to the inclusion of both houses of parliament under the Freedom of Information Act as making a huge difference to the level of transparency and openness in the twenty-first century. He saw this as having led, on the one hand, to a more proactive communication of issues by the parliament but, on the other, to a greater public distrust of parliament, particularly when other issues are brought to light, as evidenced by the 2009 expenses scandal and the havoc it wreaked on parliament’s reputation. Members themselves have no hesitation in airing in the House or to the whips their complaints about service⁶⁰ even though the House of Commons Commission does in fact have a nominated spokesperson in the House of Commons to deal with questions about its administration. In the absence of a political target, the media will often turn to criticising a parliament’s administration, particularly in a ‘fallow news period’.⁶¹ On a more positive note, Mark D’Arcy, the BBC’s parliamentary correspondent, dismissed the ‘familiar lament’ that the reporting of parliament continues to decline by pointing to a new golden age of public access provided by non-traditional media, and he noted that key actors recognise the need to engage with the media to avoid adverse publicity and enhance public understanding (D’Arcy 2018: 207).⁶²

Uhr and Wanna (2000) cited an absence of media commitment to mobilising positive public interest in the Australian Parliament and saw little prospect of subsequent parliamentary reform. The Australian Parliament is not covered by Australia’s Freedom of Information Act 1982⁶³ and there is no Australian parliamentary ‘FOI brigade’, but even the most minor issues of parliamentary management are similarly in the public eye.⁶⁴ Within the parliamentary environment, it is generally accepted as futile to rail against the media and its relentless pursuit of politicians—particularly those who behave inappropriately—and associated administrative issues, whether significant or trivial. Media reports of the expenses scandal in the United Kingdom and rows over parliamentary entitlements in Australia did nothing to enhance the reputation of MPs or parliamentary administration—quite the contrary—but they have led to notable reforms in both parliaments in the provision and oversight of parliamentary expenses. In the United Kingdom, the media disclosures also precipitated significant business reforms in the House of Commons (Russell 2011b). Recent television productions designed to enhance public understanding of how each parliament works have been generally well received, but even these did not escape criticism.⁶⁵

Promoting parliament to the public as an institution to be valued is evidently problematic, particularly in the face of public concern over the behaviour of individual politicians—a concern that is exacerbated by largely negative media coverage. Media scrutiny was cited by the Speaker of the House of Representatives as a key distinction between parliamentary administration and public management.⁶⁶ Simply disseminating information publicly about the work of the parliament, while probably necessary, is not sufficient to restore parliament’s reputation. Nevertheless, the UK Parliament directs considerable effort to its public engagement and participation function and the public engagement role could be strengthened within the Australian Parliament, including by taking a whole-of-parliament approach.

Official scrutiny mechanisms of parliament

Highly visible as it is, media scrutiny is not the way in which parliaments are officially held to account even though it may be a catalyst. Table 6.4 depicts the official scrutiny mechanisms that complement the governance arrangements in each parliament described earlier.

Table 6.4 Official scrutiny mechanisms in the UK Parliament and the Australian Parliament

Scrutiny mechanism	UK Parliament	Australian Parliament
Internal audit	✓	✓
	House of Commons Administration Estimate Audit and Risk Assurance Committee; Members Estimate Audit Committee; House of Lords Audit Committee oversees internal audit’s objective evaluation, advice and assurance.	Each parliamentary department has an internal audit committee to provide advice, oversight and assurance.
External audit	✓	✓
	National Audit Office audits financial accounts, may undertake value-for-money audits at parliament’s request.	Australian National Audit Office audits financial accounts; may also undertake performance audits.
Independent review of salaries and expenses	✓	✓
	Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) sets and administers salaries and expenses; operates within a ‘stronger integrity regime’ than the Australian Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority (IPEA) (Madden and McKeown 2018).	Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority (IPEA) monitors MPs’ travel and allowances, Senate and House of Representatives pay members’ salaries, which are determined by Remuneration Tribunal.
Members code of conduct	✓	✕
	House of Commons Code of Conduct upheld by Committee on Standards and Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards; Code of Conduct for members of the House of Lords (and members’ staff).	No similar provision (but see AHRC 2021). Members and senators are required to register interests and the Parliamentary Service Values and Code of Conduct apply to all parliamentary staff.
Internal committee scrutiny (for example, estimates committees)	✕	✓
	No similar provision but the House of Commons and House of Lords commissions together with their associated domestic committees provide financial and administrative oversight and authority.	Senate Appropriations, Staffing and Security Committee; House of Representatives Appropriations and Administration Committee oversees house budgets; Senate Finance and Public Administration Estimates Committee examines annual appropriations of the Department of the Senate, DPS and PBO.
Questions in parliament about administration	✓	?
	House of Commons Commission spokesperson answers questions in House of Commons chamber and written questions. Both House of Lords and House of Commons commissions publish decisions.	Speaker and president may (rarely) be asked questions about administration during question time in each house.

Sources: UK Parliament website and House of Commons and House of Lords annual reports (2018); annual reports of Australian parliamentary departments (2017); Madden and McKeown (2018).

Perceptions of the lack of effective scrutiny of parliament’s members and its administration are widespread.⁶⁷ To illustrate the dilemma of determining when too much scrutiny can become an excess of criticism, I will return to two events I have already introduced. The first are the expenses/entitlements scandals (in each parliament) and the second is the performance of the DPS in the Australian Parliament. I have pointed to the consequences of the expenses/entitlements exposure for parliament’s reputation and its future administration.⁶⁸ In the United Kingdom, according to Andrew Walker, the former head of the Fees Office to whom much of the blame for the expenses scandal was attributed, appropriate systems were proposed before the scandal broke, following the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.⁶⁹ But the proposals were rejected by politicians who believed in ‘self-government’ and who raised spurious arguments about constitutional sovereignty. They doubted—erroneously as it turned out—the public would be much interested in members’ expenses, failing to anticipate the consequences of the Freedom of Information Act. Members of the House of Commons were not enamoured of the independent regulatory authority set up in response to the scandal, IPSA, citing its failure to comprehend the intricacies of members’ representational duties (Gay 2014). It was seen as overly complex, bureaucratic and uncommunicative and members no longer received the ‘friendly guidance’ they had been used to from inhouse officials (Gay 2014: 181). Several interviewees confirmed this assessment:

The members don’t like it. It wasn’t created in a vacuum or in an atmosphere where all other things were equal. It was created at speed as a result of a crisis, not least a crisis of confidence between the public and their elected representatives.⁷⁰

[A]ll MPs hate IPSA. IPSA was given a dual role, which I think is difficult for it to fulfil: 1) to enable MPs to do their job and 2) to regulate MPs. I think those are mutually exclusive and that’s quite difficult for them.⁷¹

IPSA has been brought in for all the right reasons, it is independent and that sort of thing, but its officials’ understanding of what MPs do is sadly lacking and you can get some quite obtuse decisions from them.⁷²

In a public lecture in Australia, the inaugural head of IPSA, Andrew McDonald, recounted the ‘unrelenting’ hostility with which IPSA was initially regarded (quoted in Easton 2017). He observed that the expenses scandal in the UK Parliament inflicted more damage to its reputation than the parliamentary entitlements episodes have to the Australian Parliament; nevertheless, both are examples of how appropriate and timely intervention could have avoided public opprobrium.

In Australia, the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority (IPEA) was established in 2017, following numerous (and, by inference, ineffective) attempts to rein in the misuse of parliamentary entitlements.⁷³ In its early stages, some commentators questioned its independence, describing it as a ‘confidential advisory service designed to help [parliamentarians] avoid expense scandals’ rather than a way of restoring public trust (Easton 2017, 2018). But this response throws up further questions: Why should the chief purpose of the IPEA not be to guide politicians through the time-consuming, intricate process of claiming workplace expenses, avoiding errors and thereby reducing the potential for the further erosion of public trust? Or is public trust engendered by further examples of opprobrium and punishment? The IPEA’s corporate plan appears to suggest the former, presenting its twin goals as providing support to parliamentarians in exercising their functions as well as creating a culture of accountability and transparency, including through education and awareness. A statement to a senate estimates committee by the IPEA’s CEO confirms this positive approach (IPEA 2019; Godwin 2019). McDonald has suggested that to help restore trust in the Australian Parliament, the IPEA might need to ‘gently educate’ members to coax them ‘towards a better way of behaving’, where there is less risk of rorting (Easton 2017). He also stressed that the massive damage done to the UK Parliament would not be ‘made good’ by the IPSA (or, by inference, the IPEA); rather, MPs themselves would have to make it good—in essence, calling on the constructive engagement with which this book is concerned.

The second example—the management performance of DPS—illustrates how easily an abundance of scrutiny can also manifest as excessive criticism. The department has been subjected to continuing ex post scrutiny of its administration at the hands of the SFPALC, which has undoubtedly adversely affected its reputation, not just in the public domain, but also in the resulting damage to relationships between its officials and senators and members (SFPALC 2012a, 2012b, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2021). Not all interviewees, however, considered the level of scrutiny by estimates committees excessive. To one former secretary, it was a ‘really useful accountability model’ and an opportunity to fix up ‘things that were embarrassing for the department’ that might be raised.⁷⁴ But to other managers, the intensity of scrutiny at the parliamentary coalface was greater than they had experienced in other public organisations and could be seen as contributing to a culture of risk aversion.⁷⁵

Reactions from interviewees to the SFPALC performance inquiries were mixed. Senator Katy Gallagher joined the committee between its 2012 and 2015 inquiries into DPS. She was critical of the perceived lack of responsiveness of the incoming DPS executive team to fix past shortcomings and what she saw as ‘hostile engagement’ with SFPALC:

I was surprised on a number of fronts. One was the clear inadequacies that existed within DPS. Whilst I had come quite late to that saga, it was clear to me that even though they’d been under a fair bit of scrutiny, to keep presenting to the finance and admin committee as though ‘there’s nothing to see here and we’re not ready to answer your questions’ or ‘we don’t have that policy’ or ‘it’s taken five years and we still haven’t done something’, they didn’t present as a professional outfit at all … It spoke to me of a lack of leadership and a lack of direction to senior staff, which was flowing right through the organisation. That was pretty clear, I thought, from even the first hearing, without reading the back story.

The other thing that surprised me was the hostile kind of engagement [between the committee and DPS] due to years of frustration … The department hadn’t noticed that or hadn’t picked up on that or didn’t care about it … [A]gain, it didn’t speak well for DPS. You’ve got your key stakeholders: in DPS, you’ve got the President and the Speaker, you’ve got executive government hanging around. They fund you. You’ve also got the actual members and senators. To be so disrespectful of that was a surprise, and something I hadn’t really seen so blatantly before.⁷⁶

On the other hand, Carol Mills, the then secretary, told me:

I knew that I either had to get money or difficult decisions had to be made. But I was also aware of the reports and things, and I thought … ‘let’s take the positive out of that. Instead of working in a vacuum, we’re actually going to get a report with recommendations that we can hang our hat off, if we’re given the time to do it.’ When I went there, I thought it was a three-year task, to make the change. Within about six months, I realised it would be five years, because it’s just much more conservative, and change is slower than I would have ideally liked. But I thought it was a five-year transformation and, even if we didn’t have full parliamentary cooperation across all the agencies, we could actually transform DPS in a way that would become a role model for parliamentary services. I think we got some way down that track, and then we got another inquiry, plus the Auditor-General decided to do one, and I always wonder why that happened.⁷⁷

Gallagher also suggested that, after scrutiny, DPS management presented as ‘a more professional outfit’ and took a ‘more positive’ approach to estimates committee hearings. She acknowledged—perhaps somewhat contradictorily—that ‘you’ve got to give people the opportunity to improve, under new leadership. It’s not something that will happen overnight.’⁷⁸ As we have seen in earlier chapters, there was little sympathy for Mills, either internally or in the public domain, and her statement to the SFPALC at the time of her termination was perceived as an excuse for incompetent management.

To put these views into context, before Mills’s appointment was terminated, she was given two and a half years to rectify the management problems of a department already judged by Senator John Faulkner as the worst administered department he had ever seen (Australia, Senate 2012). The 2015 ANAO report on managing contracts and assets in Parliament House found there was scope for DPS to improve aspects of its strategic planning, risk management and performance reporting, and was critical of the lack of progress by DPS in responding to recommendations from the 2012 SFPALC inquiry. However, it also acknowledged that DPS had faced a substantial change agenda over the previous four years, which had ‘a significant impact’ on staff morale and turnover and more work was required to ‘build cohesion and engagement between DPS management and staff to encourage constructive working relations within an environment of ongoing external scrutiny’ (ANAO 2015: 119–20). The ANAO report also acknowledged that results from a joint ANAO–DPS survey indicated that parliamentarians were largely satisfied with DPS’s activities to support the operation of Parliament House. The greatest level of dissatisfaction (30 per cent) was with the Parliament House catering and food and beverage outlets—complaints unlikely to engender much public sympathy. Even more tellingly, only 33 of the parliament’s 225 members and senators responded to the survey—a response rate of less than 15 per cent.⁷⁹

It is unsurprising that Mills presented a defensive account of the change program in contrast to the conclusions of the SFPALC. She claimed that once she arrived at DPS, she realised it would take five years to transform it, citing as key inhibitors hostility from other parliamentary departments, an insular and ‘separate’ parliamentary culture that was resistant to change and a lack of interest in and support for administration from a series of presiding officers.⁸⁰ I have thoroughly examined the evidence relating to the unsatisfactory performance of DPS, which came to a critical juncture with the 2015 SFPALC inquiry and the subsequent termination of Mills (see Chapter 4). The validity of the evidence of poor performance has been largely accepted in parliamentary circles and by numerous commentators (including Mulgan 2014; Senate Committee of Privileges 2014; Lewis 2015; Peatling 2015). I have sought to add to the analysis of the Australian Parliament’s management performance by presenting factors that interviewees and other sources have identified that could have contributed to DPS’s perceived poor performance—many pre-dating Mills. They include poor implementation of the amalgamation of its predecessor departments; a lack of collaboration bordering on hostility between the parliamentary departments; the decision by the Department of Finance to impose a pre-emptive budget cut of $6 million in anticipation of poorly justified predicted savings from the amalgamation; a disregard for the cultural challenges involved in amalgamating disparate functions, notwithstanding a 100-year history of insularity and defensiveness; a lack of institutional continuity in the management rather than the procedural area; and an apparent shortfall in administrative leadership by successive presiding officers. These could be considered as mitigating factors in a period of relentless scrutiny from a small cohort of parliamentary actors and from the media.

Conclusion: Competing perspectives of effective management

In this chapter, I have addressed competing beliefs about the relative value of procedural and management skills, the extent to which MPs engage constructively in management issues and how structural differences between the two parliaments inhibit or facilitate effective management. In both parliaments, notwithstanding their different organisational structures, a higher priority has traditionally been placed by parliamentarians on procedural rather than managerial skills and functions. The UK Parliament has displayed more signs of an outward-facing and strategic approach to its management functions, particularly public engagement, and the Australian Parliament has had a greater (externally enforced) focus on efficiency. However, the absence of a cohesive parliamentary identity or vision, sustained leadership and authority, and poor relationships between procedural and managerial officials have emerged in both parliaments as explanatory factors in their effective management. Interviewees have pointed to tensions arising from different beliefs about the primary duty of parliamentary actors, whether this be to members, to individual constituents, to political parties, to the institution itself or to the public as a whole. But it also appears that these tensions can be at least partly explained by a relatively narrow interpretation of what effective management means. When it is concerned only with delivering ancillary support services such as facilities management, catering, ICT, human resources and financial systems, the challenges appear to be routine, operational and plebeian, if manifold. When effective ‘management’ of a parliament is seen as encompassing the achievement of all its principal purposes and maintaining its relevance, reputation and position of trust in a country’s system of democratic governance, the challenges become more complex, strategic and intellectually challenging. For MPs (principally in the House of Commons and House of Representatives) whose main focus is on serving their constituents (thereby securing re-election) and their party (thereby securing promotion and/or ongoing preselection), it is perhaps understandable that their interest in management relates narrowly to their own partisan interests in obtaining advice and resources that will help them to achieve these objectives, while simultaneously performing their representational and influencing roles. But a disregard for sustaining the reputation of the wider institution in an era of increasingly cynical media and public scrutiny and perceived shortcomings in parliamentary self-regulation have had repercussions. In the next chapter, I discuss the challenges of procedural and cultural reform to meet changing societal expectations.

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