Since 2010, the chairs of most House of Commons select committees have been elected by MPs. In this post, Tom Fleming explores recent suggestions that these elections have become more competitive. Results from five rounds of elections suggest a more complicated picture. 

MPs elected the chairs of most House of Commons select committees in September. One excellent summary of those elections has raised the interesting prospect that they may have become more competitive over time. This matters, because select committee chairs are influential and prominent figures, with a leading role in parliamentary scrutiny of ministers. That makes it important to understand the process by which MPs win these positions. This blogpost therefore takes a closer look at the results of chair elections since they were introduced in 2010. 

How do these elections work? 

At the start of each new parliament, elections are held under Standing Order No. 122B to choose the chairs of (currently) 26 select committees: 20 ‘departmental’ select committees and six others (Environmental Audit, Petitions, Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs, Public Accounts, Procedure, and Standards).  

Before these elections, the chair positions are distributed between the parties. In the current parliament, Labour have been allocated 18 of the 26 chairs, the Conservatives five, and the Liberal Democrats three. This means that for each committee, only MPs from one specified party can become candidates for its chair. However, MPs of all parties can still vote in the election to choose among those candidates. 

The elections are held using the Alternative Vote system. This means MPs number the candidates in order of preference, with 1 indicating their first choice, 2 their second, and so on. They can list a preference for as many or as few candidates as they wish. If a candidate wins more than half the first-preference votes, they are elected. If not, the candidate with the fewest first preferences is eliminated, and their second-preference votes are redistributed among the remaining candidates. This process of eliminating candidates and redistributing their lower-order preferences continues until a candidate secures a majority of the votes. 

Further elections can also happen during a parliament if an incumbent chair resigns, ceases to be an MP, or is subjected to a vote of no confidence by their committee. However, this blogpost focuses only on the initial elections at the start of each parliament. It also excludes elections for the chair of the Backbench Business Committee, as these happen every session, and under slightly different rules. 

What is the evidence so far? 

Summarising this year’s elections, Marc Geddes and Stephen Holden Bates highlighted several signs of their competitiveness. First, there were reports of some MPs being frustrated by candidates’ intense electioneering efforts and the amount of campaign literature they received. Second, the authors show that an unusually low number of chairs were elected unopposed (and, conversely, an unusually high number of positions were contested). They outline a number of factors which might have contributed to this pattern, including the low number of incumbent chairs seeking re-election. 

The remainder of this blogpost examines two further measures of competitiveness for each set of elections since 2010: how many candidates took part, and how close the results were. 

Numbers of candidates 

The competitiveness of an election can be influenced by the number of candidates taking part in it. At one extreme, an election with a single candidate is not competitive at all: the result is a foregone conclusion, reducing the candidate’s incentive to commit time and effort to campaigning. But as additional candidates join the race, there may be more uncertainty over who will win, and greater pressure on candidates to out-campaign a more crowded field of rivals. 

There are several ways to calculate the number of candidates taking part in each round of select committee elections. Table 1 shows the mean and median number of candidates. The mean (i.e. average) is calculated by dividing the total number of candidates by the total number of committees. But as this figure can be overly driven by extreme outliers, the table also shows the median: the number in the middle when we list each committee from the smallest number of candidates to the largest.  

Table 1. Mean/median candidates in select committee chair elections
Candidates	2010	2015	2017	2019	2024
Mean	2.38	2.35	1.93	1.93	1.96
Median	2	2	1	2	2

These figures do not show any clear trend toward a larger number of MPs standing for election as select committee chairs. The median number of candidates in 2024 was two, just as in all other previous rounds except 2017. The mean number was slightly higher than that for 2017 and 2019, but – to a larger degree – lower than that for 2010 and 2015. 

To give a fuller sense of the patterns underlying these summary statistics, Table 2 shows the number and percentage of elections in each parliament with different numbers of candidates.   

Table 2. Numbers of candidates in select committee chair elections
No.	2010	2015	2017	2019	2024
1	8 (33.3%)	12 (46.2%)	17 (63.0%)	12 (44.4%)	7 (26.9%)
2	7 (29.2%)	3 (11.5%)	4 (14.8%)	10 (37.0%)	14 (53.8%)
3	3 (12.5%)	5 (19.2%)	2 (7.4%)	1 (3.7%)	4 (15.4%)
4	5 (20.8%)	2 (7.7%)	1 (3.7%)	3 (11.1%)	1 (3.8%)
5		4 (15.4%)	1 (3.7%)	1 (3.7%)
6	1 (4.2%)		2 (7.4%)
Total	24 (100%)	26 (100%)	27 (100%)	27 (100%)	26 (100%)

This echoes the earlier evidence that 2024 saw a record low number of chairs going uncontested: just seven out of 26 (Geddes and Holden Bates put this at eight out of 27, presumably due to including the Backbench Business Committee). However, those elections which were actually contested saw relatively small fields of candidates. More than half – 14 of 26 – had only two candidates. This is a higher number (and percentage) than in any previous parliament. By contrast, only five elections featured more than two candidates, which is the same as in 2019, but slightly lower than in 2017 and considerably lower than in 2010 and 2015. The clearest contrast is with 2015, which had 11 races with at least three candidates, and only three with just two candidates. Compared to previous years, therefore, the 2024 elections saw more contests, but with fewer candidates entering those contests. 

Winning margins 

Election winners’ margin of victory is a potentially more important indicator of competitiveness than the simple number of candidates. While each additional candidate may eat into a front-runner’s support, there is no guarantee that they will. In some situations it may be obvious that those additional candidates pose no real threat to the expected front-runner(s). To illustrate this, consider the flock of novelty candidates who usually stand in the constituencies contested by the Prime Minister and other party leaders at general elections. While this increases the number of candidates, no one seriously expected Keir Starmer’s bid for re-election in Holborn and St. Pancras to be harmed by Bobby ‘Elmo’ Smith (19 votes) or Nick the Incredible Flying Brick (162 votes). By contrast, a contest could involve just two candidates yet be won by a very narrow margin. Focusing on the margin of victory can thus help us to understand how close each contest came to being won by a different candidate. 

Table 3 shows the mean and median winning margins in contested select committee chair elections since 2010. This is calculated as the gap in votes between the winning and second-placed candidates. In cases where no candidate secured a majority of first-preference votes, this figure is based on the final stage of redistributing lower-order preferences. Table 3 reports these margins in terms of the raw number of votes rather than in percentages, given that the number of MPs, and therefore of (potential) voters in these elections, did not change during this period. Whereas in Table 2 larger numbers indicated more competitive elections, the reverse is true here: lower numbers indicate smaller winning margins, i.e. closer election results.  

Table 3. Winning margins in select committee chair elections
Margins	2010	2015	2017	2019	2024
Mean	73.8	113.3	96.3	125.7	124.5
Median	72.5	71.5	113.5	121.0	98.0

This shows that committee chairs elected in 2024 did generally win by narrower margins than their counterparts in 2019 (with medians of 98 and 121, respectively). Indeed, this year saw the narrowest winning margin yet, with Patricia Ferguson winning the election for the Scottish Affairs Committee by just two votes (237 to 235). This beat the previous record of three votes, set by the 2010 election for chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee. 

Nonetheless, taking a longer perspective, Table 3 also offers further signs that the 2024 elections were less competitive than the 2010 and 2015 elections. Both the mean and – more markedly – the median winning margins were narrower in those elections than the equivalent figures for this year. 

Summary 

Overall then, 2024 did not indicate any straightforward trend towards more competitive select committee elections (at least on the metrics used here). The number of candidates taking part in the select committee elections overall was very similar to the previous two rounds of elections, and was lower than in 2015 and 2010. There is a similar pattern in a more useful indicator of competitiveness: the margins of victory for winning candidates. These were slightly smaller in 2024 than in 2019, but still clearly larger than in 2015 and – even more so – 2010. So even if there was a slight increase in competitiveness compared to the last round of elections, this is in the context of a longer-term fall in competitiveness. 

This year’s elections did see a very low number of uncontested elections. But this came alongside a longer-term decline in the number of contests featuring more than two candidates. Putting these two developments together, the most distinctive feature of these elections may have been just how many of them were only two-horse races. 

About the author

Tom Fleming is a Lecturer in British and Comparative Politics at UCL. He is currently leading the Unit’s ESRC-funded project ‘The Politics of Parliamentary Procedure’. 

Featured image: Cat Smith MP (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by UK Parliament.