Posts tagged with ‘ Select committees ’

While attention has been focussed on the UK Border Agency hearings at the Home Affairs Select Committee, a lower profile hearing on Monday broke some new ground on civil service accountability. At issue was whether Home Office Permanent Secretary Dame Helen Ghosh would appear before the PAC to answer questions about the decisions she...

Creating a largely or wholly elected second chamber will be the most long drawn-out and bitterly fought legislation of this parliament. So there has been a widespread welcome for the creation of a Joint Committee of both Houses to consider the draft House of Lords Reform Bill. This is just the type of pre-legislative...

If the Government’s listening exercise can encourage ministers to clarify the lines of accountability, the decentralisation introduced in the Health and Social Care Bill may be more widely accepted. The Institute’s recent report, Nothing to do with me? put forward guiding principles on ministerial accountability within decentralised services.

Prime ministers have sought to bolster the numbers by appointing unpaid ministers and platoons of parliamentary private secretaries. Currently, 141 MPs, 22 per cent of the total, hold some sort of position. This seems at odds with David Cameron’s pledge to cut the cost of politics.

Lord (Chris) Patten will this Thursday be cross-examined by MPs on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee about his suitability for the role of BBC Trust Chairman, following his nomination by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

As part of its inquiry into civil service reform, PASC has set itself the challenge of developing a “framework of what constitutes good governance within which civil service reform can be effectively scrutinised and measured”.

That is the challenge the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) now faces. Its recently elected chair Margaret Hodge, Institute Senior Fellow Lord Bichard and the House Magazine’s Political Editor Sam Macrory addressed this at a lively debate at the Institute on 19 January.

John Bercow has been very active in his year and a half as Speaker of the Commons in leading a debate on strengthening the House – though his efforts have got much less public and media attention than the controversies he has become embroiled in with some, mainly Conservative, MPs.

We’ve produced our report, Read Before Burning. We had in the autumn the results of the Government review. Today, we heard coruscating criticism from the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) of the way the government carried out its review.

This Monday a pair of senior economists spent two hours defending their professional competence and personal independence to the House of Commons Treasury Committee. Stephen Nickell and Graham Parker are the Chancellor’s proposed candidates to join Chair Robert Chote at the new Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR).