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Speakership: House Committee Report

My Lords, one of the specific things about this House is its unbelievable ability to find difficulty in making up its mind. I speak as somebody who had the misfortune to be elected to the Select Committee to look at this matter under our chairman, who managed to make it work very well. I am appalled by the reactions of some people here. This is not a modest post, but if it does not have any value at all we might as well get rid of it very quickly. It is what your Lordships decided to investigate, however. I went along in a moment of madness, pressurised by the noble Lord the Convenor, and at the end of it—I was surprised because I thought we would never get to the end of it—we came back and had a debate in the House. The House was immediately determined that we should reform the committee and go through the same subject again with all the same witnesses. We are talking about the remuneration of a person who will, I hope, be the representative of the House of Lords. If people want to devalue that they can do so, but we are not terribly heavily regarded already. It is quite extraordinary that we come back to the House again to decide what to do. The total staff costs of this building top £23 million per annum. The total cash requirement for running it is £80 million a year. The sum of £100,000 a year is not a great deal of money. The amendment moved by the noble Lord suggests that that amount is disgracefully large. That may be the case if one is hiring a chief executive officer of a small engineering company in the Midlands, but it is a bit out of date by today’s standards. Given the amounts that we have behind us, we are wasting an awful lot of time talking about a level that is indefensible. The issue was pressured from the beginning by Members who came on to the Select Committee totally cynical from the outset. They have moved in the same way at each point, so that we are back here again. For us to go away now and say that we are going to start all over again, no doubt with a new Select Committee, would do this House no credit at all.