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Selecting the select committees

What happens next?

Following the re-election yesterday of the Commons Speaker – John Bercow – parliamentary attention is now turning to select committees. These important bodies began to show real teeth in the last parliament. But who will chair and sit on them? Hannah White explains what happens next under the system of elections established in 2010 and considers the likely implications for Commons committees of the SNP landslide in Scotland.

1. The shape and size of the select committee system The distribution of chairs will be affected by the number of committees we end up with. In the last parliament there were 25 committees whose chairs were elected – including the Backbench Business Committee, the chair of which is elected on a sessional basis. The number of committees is theoretically a decision for the House as committees are established in Standing Orders. In practice any motion to change existing standing orders will be tabled by the new Leader of the House, Chris Grayling, and agreed by a government majority. In the absence of any machinery of government changes – continuity which the IfG welcomes – the number of committees is unlikely to undergo radical change. In terms of likely losses and gains, on the ‘minus’ side it remains to be seen whether the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee – created to scrutinise Nick Clegg’s constitutional portfolio in the last parliament – will survive. On the ‘plus’ side we already know there will be a new Petitions Committee and there has been some discussion about a new cross-cutting committee on Gender and Equalities. Another possibility is the creation of a committee to reflect the evolving devolution settlement in the UK – a select committee on devolution – a move previously recommended by the IfG to bolster scrutiny of the leaders of the four UK governments – or committee of the nations and regions. 2. Which select committee does each party get to chair? The chair of a select committee has a major influence over its agenda and working practices – more so since the introduction of elections in 2010 gave individual chairs greater legitimacy and personal authority. So who is eligible to chair each committee is significant. The broad principle is that the balance of committee chairs should reflect the party balance in the House of Commons, although there is some flexibility to accommodate political realities. Once the number of seats won by each party in the general election was known, the Speaker’s office will have applied a formula to work out how many chairs of committees should go to each party. Based on the result produced by this formula in 2010, when the Liberal Democrats had 57 seats and got two departmental committee chairs, it would be reasonable to expect the SNP – with 56 MPs – to get the same number. The usual channels (party whips) are informed of the number of chairs to which they are entitled and negotiate between themselves about which chair should be allocated to which party. Under Standing Orders the Public Accounts Committee has to be chaired by an opposition member. Treasury, Defence and Foreign Affairs are often taken by the government but there is no rule that this has to be the case. Parties will try to get the committees responsible for the policy areas in which their political priorities lie. The SNP are obviously likely to want the Scottish Affairs Committee (although this may lead to a difficult dynamic if – under current rules – the committee does not have any other SNP members). The other SNP chair is most likely to be of a committee dealing with a ‘reserved’ (non-devolved) matter – perhaps International Development. The result of the whips’ negotiation must be agreed by the House. The earliest this can happen is Thursday 28 May – the first day for which notice of the motion can be given after State Opening. 3. How will select committee chairs be elected? Once MPs know which chairs their party has been allocated they can start to think about which committee they might wish to chair and to campaign among their colleagues. Fourteen days after the Speaker announces the allocation of chairs (therefore probably Thursday 14 June) the elections for chairs will take place. The electoral system used is the Alternative Vote and all MPs have a vote on every chair (not just MPs from the same party). Last time round not all chairs were contested. Somewhat undermining the principle of election, the Liberal Democrats appeared to have decided internally who would chair the committees they had been allocated as only one candidate stood in each case and was therefore elected unopposed (Sir Alan Beith on Justice and Sir Malcolm Bruce on International Development). Given the strong party discipline exerted by the SNP whips in Scotland it is possible that the SNP may follow the same practice. 4. Who will the select committee members be? The process for electing committee members kicks off once the results of the chair elections are known so that unsuccessful candidates can stand. Once again the party balance of committee membership is intended to reflect the balance of seats in the House. In the last parliament a typical committee with 11 members, including the chair, had five Conservative, one Liberal Democrat and five Labour members. Some committees had additional members where minority parties particularly wanted to be represented (for example the Defence Committee had an additional DUP member, so 12 members in total). Again the finer details of this will be determined by the usual channels, but based on past experience the government would expect to have a majority on most committees. There was a suggestion from the Liaison Committee at the end of the last parliament that – in order to avoid committees getting too large – party representation could be balanced across the system as a whole rather than within each committee. This might have attractions under the current political circumstances – enabling the SNP to have some members on the Scottish Affairs Committee as well its chair and reducing (or removing) their representation on committees relating to devolved matters. Otherwise, applying the rules to the letter, the SNP (like the Liberal Democrats in the last parliament) will be entitled to a seat on most committees and, if the SNP take the chair, the Scottish Affairs Committee will otherwise have only members representing non-Scottish seats. This is because the SNP are likely only to be entitled to a single member (the chair) and the only non-SNP Scottish MPs are all already frontbenchers and therefore disqualified from membership. 5. How will select committee members be elected? Committee membership elections are held within each party. Each party uses a slightly different process. In 2010 the Labour and Conservative parties both used a two-stage process which meant the whole election process took around a month. The process used by each party will determine the time it takes this time around. Once each party has decided who will represent it on each committee, a motion setting out the membership of each committee has to be agreed on the floor of the House – in 2010 this happened on 13 July. That’s the theory – now we wait to see how the process works out in practice. More importantly we wait to see whether – once established – select committees continue to build on the gains their predecessors made between 2010 and 2015. This is the subject of a forthcoming IfG report which will be published in early June.

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