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House Committee: Fourth Report

My Lords, as I said before, we are not talking about the present Black Rod; we are talking about the future—next year, when the present Black Rod retires. That is as far as I can go on that. Various noble Lords queried the cost. As I said in my opening remarks, £100,000 is an indicative cost of the new post. We will obviously have to take advice on the appropriate grading of the post and the background to it, and there will obviously be one-off expenditure on recruitment, although it is highly unlikely that a vast new army of staff will be involved. The noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, referred to years gone by and said how, in his view, Parliament was much more effective 200 years ago than it is now. That is a matter of opinion but it does not have very much to do with whether we have a new Director of Facilities. I do not know how things were all those years ago but, in the present day, this person will be responsible for a budget of upwards of £35 million a year. How that compares with what it was when this place was built, I do not know, but we are now talking about a very much larger estate.