Tag Archives: select committees

Should we be worried about the decline of parliamentary scrutiny?

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Complaints about declining standards of government scrutiny by parliament have been commonplace in recent times – particularly during the troubled years of Brexit and Covid. But how can such claims be objectively assessed, and crucially, have scrutiny standards since recovered? Constitution Unit Director Meg Russell addressed these questions in a recently published journal article, summarised here. She concludes that there is significant cause for concern, and that standards actually worsened under Rishi Sunak, once the Brexit and Covid crises were over. To reverse the decline, both government and parliament need to act.

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Have select committee chair elections got more competitive? 

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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. 

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Select committee elections: how should a ‘proportional’ allocation between parties be calculated? 

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Chairs and members of House of Commons select committees are allocated between political parties in proportion to their strength in the House. But in practice, a proportional allocation can be calculated in a number of different ways, which produce different outcomes. As the House starts electing its committees, Alan Renwick and Tom Fleming discuss the options and their consequences. 

House of Commons select committees are a key vehicle for parliamentary scrutiny. It thus matters how their chairs and members are shared out between the political parties. In theory, these posts are allocated in proportion to parties’ strength in the House: for example, a party with 20% of MPs can broadly expect to chair 20% of select committees and contribute 20% of their members. 

However, this principle may be deceptively simple. There are multiple potential ways of calculating a proportional share of committee chairs and members, and different methods can produce different results. Yet the House does not publicly acknowledge or explain its chosen approach. 

This blogpost therefore outlines different possible methods and explores their implications. We argue that the House’s approach to this important question should be made public, in the interests of fairness and transparency. Doing so would provide an opportunity for MPs to evaluate the current approach, and to consider the possible alternatives. 

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Delivering House of Commons reform after the general election 

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How can House of Commons reform be delivered in the next parliament? A new Constitution Unit report explores past approaches to developing and delivering changes to the Commons’ procedures, and the implications for current advocates of reform. Tom Fleming and Hannah Kelly summarise the report’s findings and conclusions. 

Background 

House of Commons reform is likely to be on the political agenda in the next parliament. Recent years have seen a growing number of books and reports highlighting problems with how the Commons works, and arguing that at least part of the solution lies in reforming its internal procedures. These reform proposals come against a backdrop of deep public dissatisfaction with parliament that suggests a need for MPs to explore ways of enhancing their collective reputation. The election of a new parliament on 4 July may therefore open a window of opportunity for Commons reform. 

Given this context, there has been surprisingly little recent discussion of how such reforms might actually be delivered. This matters, because a number of different institutional vehicles can be used for developing and drafting proposals for procedural change. Moreover, past experience suggests that how the reform process is organised matters for the outcomes of that process. Politicians with an agenda for Commons reform should therefore be giving serious thought to the mechanisms for delivering that agenda. 

Goals of the report 

Our new report therefore provides an evidence-based assessment of four different previous approaches to developing and delivering proposals for Commons reform: 

  • Government initiative. Reform can come directly from government proposals, drawn up under the authority of ministers. Those ministers might respond to suggestions from elsewhere, and informally consult relevant MPs or select committees. But under this approach, the initiative for developing and bringing forward reform proposals lies wholly with the government. 
  • Permanent backbench select committee. Proposals can instead be developed by a permanent select committee of backbench MPs with an ongoing remit to investigate procedural questions. The primary past and current case of this approach, and the one we study in our report, is the House of Commons Procedure Committee, which has existed in more or less its current form since 1997. 
  • Temporary backbench select committee. The Commons can also appoint a backbench select committee with a temporary remit to report on a particular area or areas of procedure. We study the most recent such committee: the 2009–10 Select Committee on Reform of the House of Commons, better known as the ‘Wright Committee’ after its chair, the Labour MP Tony Wright. 
  • Government-chaired select committee. The final approach is something of a hybrid: appointing a select committee to review Commons procedures, but having it be chaired by a government minister. The key template for this is the Modernisation Committee which existed from 1997 to 2010 under the last Labour government. This committee combined backbench MPs with frontbench spokespeople from the three largest parties, and was chaired by the Leader of the House. Having a cabinet minister chair the committee was unusual, and sometimes controversial, given that Commons select committees usually only include backbench MPs. 
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The personal side of parliamentary reform

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The view that Westminster is not functioning as it should, and that reform would be beneficial, has become increasingly widespread in recent years. Greg Power argues that it is not sufficient to focus on technical details and process: reform efforts must instead understand what politicians believe to be important and offer them ways of dealing with those issues better.

There have been a number of good books in the last couple of years about what is wrong with Westminster and what needs to change. They all set out a compelling case and numerous ideas for reform. But most tend to focus more on the ‘why’ and the ‘what’, than on the ‘how’. There remains very little on which reformers can draw as to how we might engineer these sorts of sensible changes and how parliaments actually get overhauled.

This question of how to reform complex parliamentary institutions is at the heart of my new book, Inside the Political Mind, which draws partly on my own personal experience of working on such change: initially at Westminster as a Special Adviser to successive Leaders of the Commons, Robin Cook and Peter Hain, and since 2005 with parliaments and MPs in more than 60 countries around the world.

Every one of those institutions is different, and they each have their own peculiar problems. But there are common themes to the challenge of reform everywhere. And one of them is that parliamentary reform is hard. Really hard.

There are three standout reasons for this – all to do with the very way in which parliaments are composed and constructed.

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