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Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I will come on to that quickly, and I am grateful to you, Mrs. Anderson, for that reminder. Obviously, it is difficult to explain what the chief executive is about without looking at what the chief executive does, which is preside over the Supreme Court on which the former Law Lords are judges. Although one might well have taken the view that it was quaint, quirky, anachronistic and so on to have Law Lords sitting in a small Committee room, the arrangement worked very well. However, it was decided that they should be moved across to the new Supreme Court. Obviously, that decision was taken at a time when the economy was booming, and no one worried too much about the costs. The original estimated cost was £30 million, which then went up. As we know, the ultimate capital cost of the Supreme Court came in at £58.9 million: a vast amount of money to locate those judges in a new building when they had a perfectly good place to sit already. I believe that only one Law Lord agreed, and publicly stated, that it was a good idea to move across to the Supreme Court. The other Law Lords were all opposed to the move. They felt that the existing arrangements worked extremely well. I will not dwell on the capital costs, however, because I want to consider the current costs of running the new Supreme Court. Let us consider the previous arrangements that were in place in the House of Lords. Of course, it is difficult to work out exactly what the costs were, but the cost of the Clerks, the Librarian and the other officials who serviced the Law Lords amounted to roughly £600,000. That was not a huge sum, and I think that it represented very good value for money. Back in July it was announced in a written parliamentary answer that the running costs of the new Supreme Court would be £12.3 million. That is a pretty staggering figure compared with £600,000. The new chief executive, who is the subject of new clause 21 —