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Select Committee Question Time

Hannah White picks out eight things we learned from our recent event.

As part of Parliament Week, the Institute for Government hosted a Question Time-style event with three select committee chairs: the SNP’s Pete Wishart (Scottish Affairs), Labour’s Stephen Twigg (International Development) and Conservative Sarah Wollaston (Health). Questions were submitted in advance, posed by the audience on the night and put to the panel by the BBC’s Mark D’Arcy. Hannah White picks out eight things we learned from the event.

  1. Chairs are very conscious of the need to strike the right balance in their relationship with ministers. Sarah Wollaston said that “there’s a difference between being helpful and being constructive” – the former presumably being what the whips might hope for from a Chair who is also a member of the governing party – the latter being what she tries to achieve. Noting that she may not have been the whips’ first choice to chair the Health Committee, she observed that sometimes good scrutiny will be uncomfortable for government. This is something her committee demonstrated recently, when it pressed the Government to publish research it had commissioned into the idea of a sugar tax. But, as Stephen Twigg pointed out, clever ministers can also use the work of committees to further their own agenda by providing cross-party support for policy initiatives – so the scrutiny process can have benefits for Parliament and the Government.

  2. Continuing the theme of mutual benefit, there seems to be an emerging trend for select committees to work together to maximise the impact of their scrutiny. The Health Committee will be conducting a joint pre-appointment hearing with the Environment Food and Rural Affairs Committee for the new head of the Food Standards Agency. It is also considering joint work with the Education Committee on child and adolescent mental health. We heard that Scottish Affairs has been looking at the nature of its relationship with committees in the Scottish Parliament; meanwhile the Welsh Affairs Committee has conducted joint pre-legislative scrutiny of the Draft Wales Bill with the Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee of the Welsh Assembly.

  3. As well as engaging with each other, select committees are focusing more on engaging the public and looking for ways to make their work seem “less dry and sterile”. The Scottish Affairs Committee began its work in this parliament by consulting a wide range of Scottish interest groups as well as ordinary voters about what it should do and how it should do it. Pete Wishart said the committee had been surprised by the extent of the engagement this exercise had achieved – and had set out its conclusions in a report published last week. Stephen Twigg spoke about the potential of social media to engage new audiences for committees.

  4. Stephen Twigg felt that public engagement was particularly important for the International Development Committee, because of its unique role. All the main political parties are signed up to 0.7% of GDP being spent on international aid but the public are less convinced. So, he argued, in addition to the normal select committee role of scrutinising the policy, administration and expenditure of the Department for International Development (DFID), the committee also needs to think about convincing the public that the aid budget is money well spent.

  5. Meanwhile, the Scottish Affairs Committee is unusual because it is the only departmental select committee without a government majority (it has four SNP, four Conservative and three Labour members). And, for the first time, Scottish Affairs does not have a majority of Scottish members either – the three non-SNP MPs elected to Scottish seats at the last election are not members of the committee, so the Labour and Conservative members elected to the committee all represent English seats.

  6. The post-2010 arrangement under which committee members were directly elected has democratised the select committee system. Stephen Twigg (a former whip) argued that, although the whips might still attempt to influence the process, most MPs were independent-minded enough to make their own decisions about who to vote for. Sarah Wollaston noted that the SNP had undermined the democratic process by fielding only one candidate for each of its allocated committee chairs (Scottish Affairs, and Energy and Climate Change). Pete Wishart said that the SNP had felt that the select committee roles needed to be taken by experienced MPs – meaning only six longstanding MPs were in a position to take on the roles. Next time round, he assured us, the SNP will ensure that the House of Commons gets to exercise a choice over who takes up their Committee positions.

  7. Focusing on oral evidence sessions, chairs told us that expertise is important for committee witnesses but the ability to articulate that expertise is also essential. Articulate celebrities with an area of expertise bring the additional benefit of attracting media attention to a committee’s work. In light of their comments during the event, the prize for best witness and most effective campaigner seems to have been awarded – by Stephen Twigg and Sarah Wollaston at least – to Jamie Oliver. You can judge for yourself by watching the video of his recent appearance before the Health Committee here.

  8. Finally, as well as thinking about their own patch of parliamentary scrutiny, select committee chairs are concerned about the effectiveness of parliamentary scrutiny of delegated legislation. After the tax credits row in the House of Lords earlier this month, it was interesting that Sarah Wollaston MP raised delegated legislation as an issue in need of attention in this parliament. She told us that scrutiny of delegated legislation was in need of radical reform, Commons scrutiny was inadequate and members didn’t always get to sit on committees where their expertise could enable them to make the greatest contribution. Sarah Wollaston said she’d been put on a committee scrutinising secondary legislation on double taxation – on which she had no particular expertise – but not on committees examining health-related matters, which as a medical professional she might have contributed more to. When she first became an MP, the instruction she received from the whips before attending a Delegated Legislation Committee was to “Turn up on time, say nothing and vote with the government.” By now, the whips probably know better than to expect anything of the kind from the latest generation of select committee chairs.
Watch a video replay of the event here.

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