The 2019 Liaison Committee report on the Commons select committee system: broadening the church, integrating with the Chamber
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In its recent landmark report, the House of Commons Liaison Committee recommended a widening of the circle of those that select committees should hold to account, and a turn towards the public in all committee activity, but also tighter links between select committees and the House of Commons Chamber.
As part of the celebrations it sponsored to mark the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the departmentally-related select committee system in June 1979, the House of Commons Liaison Committee (the committee which comprises the Chairs of all the other select committees) conducted an inquiry in the first part of this year into the influence and effectiveness of select committees. It did not manage to agree its report before the summer but, at an hastily convened meeting on 9 September, it managed to squeeze its report out before the possibility of a dissolution of Parliament triggered by the vote due to be held that evening on an early general election, under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act.
The report is now available on the Liaison Committee’s website. In contrast to its exhortation to other committees to produce shorter reports with fewer recommendations, it is lengthy (304 paragraphs) and recommendation-heavy (listing 84 conclusions and recommendations). Indeed, the summary alone is of the kind of length they seem to think other committees should be aiming for.
the almost-simultaneous arrival in that very post of Robin Cook, who had resigned as Foreign Secretary over the Government’s policy towards Iraq and who was determined to be a reforming Leader (a relatively rare bird), using his chairmanship of the Modernisation Committee as his vehicle.
The upshot was the implementation of a number of the reforms proposed by the Newton Commission and the Liaison Committee, and a very substantial increase in the resources allocated to support the select committees.
Part of the intended purpose of the core tasks was to make the select committees more accountable to the House as a whole for the tasks it had delegated to them, and the new report builds on this idea with some further proposals – including the revival of the practice of committees producing an annual report on their activities, which had fallen away after 2015.
This emphasis on broadening the church of those who are heard during, and involved in, committee inquiries is the report’s most dominant theme. The “research community” (publicly and charitably funded, and distinct from the think-tanks, trades unions, trade associations and lobbying charities with specific agendas to promote) is strongly encouraged to find ways of feeding its work into the committees’ deliberations.
The report considers two current problems at length, but without coming to any very definite conclusions.
Post-Brexit demands
The whole of chapter 3 is devoted to the role of committees in a putative post-Brexit world. The main message is that they will be needed more than ever to scrutinise the wider range of policy areas for which Parliament will become responsible (for example, agriculture, fisheries, energy, environment, medicines regulation), and more immediately to get a grip on the huge range of international trade and other negotiations (not least with the EU) which may be taking place over the next decade or so. The Committee enjoin flexibility of resourcing, and gently warn that more, rather than fewer, resources are likely to be needed to support this work.
As well as better engagement and accountability to the public, the report seeks to strengthen the relationship between committees and the House of Commons Chamber. In paragraph 46 of the report, the Committee touches briefly on the academic political science distinction between ‘talking’ and ‘working’ Parliaments – broadly, that between plenary-based and committee-based legislatures.
The report concludes that the House of Commons may not yet have fully come to terms with the shift, over the last 40 years, in the balance between its plenary and its committees in discharging its fundamental task of holding the government to account. The Committee suggests that the time may have come:
“to take a long and comprehensive look at the ways in which the select committees reinforce rather than compete with the work of the plenary, and … to make recommendations which would represent a step change in that settlement”.
That is one side of the story – the more technical role of select committees as the organs of parliamentary accountability.
But the report concludes that the committees:
“face both inwards to Westminster and Whitehall and outwards to the public — they are a bridge or a conduit between the two. As such they are as much part of that ill-defined organism known as ‘civil society’ as they are a part of Parliament. Much of what we have had to say in this report has been celebrating the success of the select committees in reaching out to and engaging with the world outside Westminster. We hope they will continue to act as enablers who make government accountable not just to small groups of elected representatives but to all those parts of our society who want to hold their temporary rulers to account”.
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