Select committees and Parliament
Committees are now one of the most high-profile aspects of the Commons' work, but how much influence do they have?
A couple of disclaimers: first, this is not going to be an exhaustive analysis of House of Commons select committees, because, while I have views, that would fill a book (and already has, and will continue to do so). Secondly, this is quite a niche subject, for parliamentary nerds only, probably, but I was a Commons clerk for 11 years and about half of that time was spent working for select committees, so it’s something I think about a great deal, and, however geeky and arcane it may be, I really do care.
I want to look at committees in the period since 2010. This is important because it was at the beginning of the 2010 Parliament that chairs of many select committees were, for the first time, elected by the whole House, rather than by the members of the committees according to the direction of “the usual channels”, that is, the party whips. (Some committees, like European Scrutiny, still use the older method, but the departmental committees and some others, which are the most prominent in the public gaze, now have their chairs chosen by all MPs.)
There has long been a wish—not always backed up by action—for the institutions of the House to provide a credible and worthwhile alternative to the ministerial career ladder for ambitious and talented Members. This was party (mainly?) because there are only around 100 ministerial positions to fill and a governing party with a healthy majority will usually have 320 MPs or more, so a parallel career track would provide advancement for more Members.
The more lofty reason was that the House has a job of scrutiny of government, a lot of which is carried out by select committees, and many felt (I was and am among them) that this important duty should not be a secondary ambition for the disappointed or the inadequate. The attitude of MPs to service on select committees can vary wildly: the chairs of important committees are genuinely sought after, but some Members are put on committees in which they have little interest. Such pressed men and women will not generally be assiduous or dedicated to scrutiny; some—this is not a joke—can go for some time without realising they are even on committees, or think they have “resigned” when in fact they are yet to be replaced formally.
The election of chairs, and the provision for additional pay (currently £16,865 on top of their pay as MPs of £81,144), was a significant step. It boosted the mandate of chairs, and, while the additional pay is not lavish, and may not even reflect the additional work involved, it is clearly nice to have if you are going to seek such a position. There are other perks: the chair of the Public Accounts Committee has a special office in the Palace of Westminster, for example; chairs will have extra speaking opportunities in the House when committee reports are debated, and, as some chairs have found more than others, the role carries with it a greater media profile than that of a backbencher, however well informed.
Some MPs also simply enjoy the job of leading a select committee. One for whom I worked told me that he’d set his cap at the chairmanship when he had observed that he spent far more time preparing for committee appearances (he had been a minister in the corresponding department) than he ever had done for oral questions in the chamber. Sometimes it allows Members to pursue a special interest with some influence. My first chair was Sir Kevin Barron on the Health Committee, who was a strong proponent of banning smoking in public; taking the chair in 2005, he led as one of the committee’s first inquiries an examination of the government’s proposals in that field, and the report which resulted had real influence on the eventual legislation, incorporating many of the recommendations which the committee had made. It remains one of the best examples of the real effect of committee scrutiny.
It was a logical expectation that, if committees were growing in influence and providing a parallel career path for MPs, there would sooner or later be some crossover between the two streams. There was much excitement in Westminster after the 2015 election when John Whittingdale, the Conservative Member who had chaired the Culture, Media and Sport Committee in the previous parliament, was appointed secretary of state for the department which he had spent five years shadowing and scrutinising. He had shadowed the portfolio under Michael Howard’s leadership before serving a full decade as chair of the committee, and so clearly carried weight in the policy area.
This seemed a perfect example of the alternative career path. Here was a senior Member who had led a departmental select committee for the maximum possible term, first as an opposition MP and then from the government benches, and David Cameron was, it seemed, recognising his expertise and seniority by giving him the substantive portfolio in a purely Conservative government (after the 2010-15 coalition). The previous five-year period had seen three secretaries of state—Jeremy Hunt, Maria Miller and Sajid Javid—demonstrating that it was too often a post for ministers on the rise for a short stay or for those who might not have the expectation of rising to the very top of the government.
(This is a perennial problem for DCMS. We have now seen 11 secretaries of state in 12 years and the department is a Whitehall minnow with little influence and a messy policy area: I discussed this in City AM back in April. My own view, to begin a small tangent, is that much of its remit should be elsewhere, and it tends to concentrate, badly, on the wrong things.)
Whittingdale’s promotion proved something of a false dawn. Cameron’s new ministry in 2015 included another committee chair, Rory Stewart of the Defence Committee, a position he had only held for a year. He was appointed a parliamentary under-secretary of state, the lowest rung of the ministerial ladder, at DEFRA, dealing with the natural environment, national parks, floods and water, resource and environmental management. I have heard Rory wax lyrical on his enthusiasm for these issues, but he had gone from a highly respected and effective committee chair, bolstered by his service in the Army, his possible connections with the Secret Intelligence Service and his responsibilities in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq: moving to a very junior post at a middling Whitehall department on a totally different subject did not look like recognition of his expertise and scrutiny.
A year later, there was another case in point. Graham Stuart, the Conservative MP for Beverley and Holderness, had chaired the Education Committee in the 2010 Parliament, and in 2015 had stood for the chairmanship of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee (vacated by Whittingdale), but had been defeated by Jesse Norman. The following year, when Theresa May formed her administration, he was appointed an assistant whip, the most junior sort of official government post. He would later be promoted to ministerial office at the Department for International Trade and is now Minister for Climate, attending (but not a member of) Cabinet. Nonetheless, a lowly place in the whips’ office was thin gruel for one who had been a prominent committee chair.
Reform in the House of Commons is not always swift, and that is doubly so when it is essentially culture change, as was (and is) the development of the alternative, scrutiny-focused career path for MPs. Select committees are an important part of the House’s work, and perhaps the most recognisable to the public, outside the performative rough-and-tumble of Prime Minister’s Questions. And chairs can be big beasts in the parliamentary jungle: recently one might think of Yvette Cooper’s time on Home Affairs (2016-21), Frank Field on Work and Pensions (2015-19) or the little-loved Andrew Tyrie at Treasury (2010-17).
It is hard to argue, however, that the parallel career path is even nearly as attractive to most MPs as ministerial office. I wish it were the case that chairing a prominent committee was seen as equivalent in prestige and influence to being a secretary of state, but, pace Mr Whittingdale, it is a difficult case to make. The chair of the relevant committee is sometimes bruited as a replacement when cabinet ministers leave office unexpectedly, but it has not yet come to pass. Chairmanships remain, almost universally, a prize for runners-up, except in those rare and strange cases of Members who would rather devote themselves to the scrutiny of a specific policy area than exercise executive power in Whitehall.
Can we achieve that parity? Will it ever be possible to see scrutiny as equally attractive to power? Perhaps not; but a degree of balancing can still be achieved. It might help to increase the modest additional pay for chairs, and perhaps they could be given more staff support for their select committee duties. Clerks of committees are in a strange position: formally and often practically, they serve the committee as a whole, but clearly they have most dealings with the chair, who has an important function in setting direction. I am also sceptical of the idea that committees just need more resources, especially when it is made by those who look enviously at congressional committees in the US. I have often in my previous life wished for another pair of hands to help with the pressure of work, and some chairs are impervious to the argument that staff time is a finite resource. But if staff numbers ballooned, the business of running a select committee would be altered beyond recognition, not necessarily, in my view, for the better.
But there might be some room for compromise. John Denham, an able Blairite minister who resigned over the Iraq War in 2003, was quickly compensated (within a few months) with the chairmanship of the Home Affairs Committee. He brought to the committee a brisk pace and high expectations: he was in effect still in ministerial mode, and regarded the committee staff as analogous to a minister’s private office, with all the pressure that famously entails. The staff liked him but felt the strain, and it may be that he had a point. Perhaps the resources might be found to provide some of that same kind of support.
However, such support would have to be provided by the House Service rather than party resources, and it would be essential that it remained under the overall supervision of the committee clerk. One of the most distinctive and important aspects of clerks is that they are strictly apolitical, able to serve politicians of every party with equal ability and dedication. Indeed, when I worked in the House Service, we were advised not even to be members of political parties, lest it come to light and affect our reputations with Members. Some MPs were curious about our political affiliations, and no doubt often drew conclusions which may or may not have been accurate, but my colleagues remained flawlessly inscrutable and non-partisan. That is a vital tradition, and could be compromised by the introduction of party staff into the equation.
It would also be critical to allot resources fairly, rather than giving them predominantly to high-profile committees like Treasury, Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs or Health and Social Care. Committees, manifested by their members and especially chairs, can be deeply jealous bodies, and in many ways rightly so: you may capture more column inches by quizzing the Governor of the Bank of England than delving into agricultural policy, but to recognise formally that one had precedence over another would be insufferable. So “private offices” would have to be rolled out across the spectrum of committees. Nevertheless I think it might be worth a try.
I would also suggest, gently, that the government could work more cooperatively with select committees. Perhaps this will happen under the new prime minister, but the Johnson administration has proved a low point. Ministers have cancelled appearances before committees at short notice (something that really makes chairs and members angry, as it indicates a degree of disrespect which may be accurate but is unacceptable); there is always a running battle over committees’ ability to see documents (which in my experience was at its height between the Defence Committee and the MoD, the latter taking as its default setting a firm “no”); and the government is shockingly lax at responding to select committee reports.
Again, a tangent, but this is important: the government is supposed to provide a substantive response to a committee’s report, either by memorandum or with a command paper, within two months of the report’s publication, but governments of all hues have neglected this responsibility in a cavalier fashion which riles MPs. Either responses were horribly late, or they were thin and failed to engage intellectually with the recommendations the committee had made. I would argue that robust and well-intentioned scrutiny can improve the business of governance and the creation of legislation to no small degree, but it is an argument which I know cuts little ice in Whitehall, which has in several respects a bunker mentality. If the process of report publication, serious government response and some analysis of the situation which results were taken more seriously, it would certainly give more attention and influence to committee chairs.
Select committees can do incredibly important work. They can genuinely put the government’s feet to the fire, offer informed and friendly but critical advice on policy, and highlight where processes are going wrong. (This is not always the case, but the inadequacies of committees are a subject for another day.) In general their work makes public policy better and improves the health of our democracy. But for the government to realise these benefits requires acts of selflessness incredibly rare in Whitehall. Any minister and most civil servants would have a much easier time if committees were not there. But they are, and they matter, and they help. If the new government could be bold enough and have sufficient vision to see the role committees could play in getting to effective public policy, despite having to make sacrifices of its ease and comfort, that would genuinely change the culture in which select committees work. Chairs would be lifted in importance and authority on this rising tide.
It is a nice thought. And as the new prime minister has had no opportunity to engage meaningfully with the House of Commons since her appointment, I am very happy to give her and the government the benefit of the doubt. It is not difficult to do in any technical sense, but it would require extraordinary forbearance. Yet it would be a lasting contribution to our political system and institutions. We shall, I suppose, wait and see.