Q51 Jim Sheridan: Those who send nuclear submarines to Scotland keep the Civil Service jobs in London and people get a little upset at that kind of thinking.
Mr Gieve: Yes, that is why we are looking at relocation at the moment. I expect, if we can raise the finance up front to finance the move, there are things we should move out of London and that is what we are looking at.
Q52 Jim Sheridan: On the question of finance, paragraph 10, page 3 says this site will accommodate new residential and commercial developments, for instance affordable flats. How much will that cost the taxpayer and who will occupy these affordable flats?
Mr Gieve: It is not going to cost the taxpayer anything in that AGP are separately developing the residential property and have reached an agreement to sell that on to a private sector housing company, Galliard.
Ms Aldred: The affordable housing will be owned by the Threshold Housing Association.
Q53 Mr Rendel: May I pick up first of all the point Mr Sheridan was making about who needs to stay in London and who does not? As I understood it, when Ms Aldred was asked the question she indicated that the reason for needing to be very close to the centre of London was that you needed to be within division bell area and basically the only people who need to be within division bell area are actually Members of the House who have to get in for divisions. Therefore it seems, given that we have a few ministers in your department, we are accommodating now 3,500 people in a building within division bell area for the sake of the three or four ministers who are going to need to get into the House of Commons when a division bell goes. Is that correct?
Mr Gieve: No, that is not correct. Obviously Parliament's location is important because the ministers need to be supported by staff. There are in fact seven ministers in the Home Office and they do need to be within easy reach of Parliament. Other officials have a lot of dealings with Parliament and with other government departments, most of whom are located here. We have experience of this. We moved most of the Immigration Department out of central London to Croydon, Liverpool, Sheffield and Leeds and we would not reverse that, but it certainly does cause problems and we have people more or less permanently on trains or hot-desking in central London.
Q54 Mr Rendel: Have you ever done an analysis of what the cost of moving people around for meetings is as compared with the capital cost of building within division bell distance?
Mr Gieve: No, but it is not so much the cost of train tickets, it is the cost of disruption and lack of service that would be the problem.
Q55 Mr Rendel: You have not done a financing cost. You have not checked whether it is actually cheaper to have people moving around rather than building a building.
Mr Gieve: That is precisely the exercise we are engaged on now.
Q56 Mr Rendel: Are you considering also the possibility of using more hi-tech equipment and having video conferencing and so on?
Mr Gieve: We do have some video conferencing, yes. Yes, we do look at increasing that.
Q57 Mr Rendel: I have to say that it staggers me that in this day and age it could still be more financially beneficial to keep 3,500 people in central London just because you need to have the ministers there and perhaps a few officials who directly service them. I should be very interested to see the results of your review, but if it comes out saying yes, you do need those 3,500 in central London I shall be absolutely amazed. That will depend on the results of the review. May I turn now to Figure 3 on page 11? Where in this comparison have you, if you have, included the benefit of being able to sell off some of your current estate if you move from the existing estate into the new building?
Mr Gieve: The main difference is that we will not be paying a capital charge. If you look at the top half, we have a capital charge on our existing properties which we will not have under the new arrangement.
Q58 Mr Rendel: Is that capital charge effectively what you expect to be able to get in notional interest from the money you will bring in from selling off the buildings?
Mr Gieve: No, the capital charge is the conventional charge we pay off our estimates to the Treasury, which is a percentage of a valuation.
Q59 Mr Rendel: If the notional value of the interest you make on the value of the properties you are selling off is greater than that, that has not been included in this calculation. If it is less than that, then you have overestimated for the value.
Mr Gieve: Yes; that is right.
Q60 Mr Rendel: That seems to me to be a very odd way of doing it.
Mr Gieve: I will have to come back to you.7