Setting up select committees should be an urgent post-election priority


Boris Johnson has been anxious to emphasise that should he win the general election, he will get parliament up and running as quickly as possible. The prime minister’s priority is to “get Brexit done” by getting the Withdrawal Agreement Bill into law­—something he has somewhat implausibly claimed could be done by Christmas.

The PM is keen to restore parliament’s legislative function as soon as possible after 12^th December. But equally important will be setting up parliamentary committees so they can resume scrutiny of the government. Whatever the result of this election, with every possible Brexit outcome still on the table, the work of parliamentary committees will be more crucial than ever.

Setting up committees rapidly after an election is important if they are to undertake meaningful scrutiny. But in the past, too often, there have been significant delays. Although Lords committees can resume their work as soon as the Queen re-opens parliament because their members have not had to be elected, in the Commons there is usually a gap of weeks if not months.

This problem—which no government has much incentive to fix—is caused by two delaying factors. First, under Commons rules, committee chair elections—in which all MPs can vote—must take place within a month of the general election. However, there is no equivalent rule for the election of committee members. These elections are managed within parties (only Labour MPs can vote for Labour committee members for example) and the parties are often slow to conduct their various electoral processes.

As these processes take place behind closed doors—a lack of transparency that needs to be addressed—it is not possible to see what slows them down. But it must in part be due to the second delaying factor: committee roles are low in the parliamentary pecking order. After an election the parties start by appointing their front bench teams. It is a rare MP who would turn down a ministerial or shadow ministerial role to take up a committee position. For many it may even be worth waiting to see if they are offered a parliamentary private secretary job—the lowest, unpaid rung on the ministerial ladder—before considering standing for election to a committee. So filling committee roles must wait for lots of other jobs to be allocated first.

The delays caused can be significant. Theresa May’s unexpected general election brought much committee scrutiny work to a premature end in April 2017. Following the election, most select committees were not able to start new work until mid-September. Some were established even later. The European Scrutiny Committee, for example, was not set up until the end of October—a particularly unfortunate delay given its role in scrutinising Brexit. The delays also meant that the Liaison Committee, the senior Commons committee made up of all select committee chairs, could not elect its own chair until mid-November; five months after the election. That meant there was a gap of a year in its question sessions with the prime minister—May would normally have been subject to detailed questioning twice during the intervening period.

The Wright committee on Reform of the House of Commons established in 2009 argued that Commons committees ought to be nominated within six weeks of a general election. The Liaison Committee recently threw its weight behind this suggestion and recommended that its successor committee in the next parliament should be able to sit with an interim chair if necessary, to resume its scrutiny sessions with the PM as soon as possible. The Procedure Committee has written to the new speaker stressing the importance of establishing committees as early as possible in the new parliament.

The signs that Johnson might prioritise such reforms are not good: thus far the PM has not shown many signs of willingness to aid parliamentary oversight. Perhaps the most glaring example was his willingness to shut down parliament for five weeks in the run up to 31st October. On that occasion the Supreme Court was called upon to remind him of the importance of the legislature’s role in scrutinising the executive. There are other examples. In the four months since he became prime minister Johnson has faced Jeremy Corbyn across the dispatch box at Prime Minister’s Questions only three times due to a combination of recess, prorogation and the Queen’s speech. And on three occasions he has cancelled question sessions with the Liaison Committee.

Johnson’s most recent justification for his non-appearance—in a letter to the Liaison Committee chair Sarah Wollaston—was that he didn’t have time because he was focused on “delivering Brexit.” But this implies a misunderstanding of the value of parliamentary scrutiny. Scrutiny needs to happen not just through retrospective appraisal once a policy has been delivered, but through real-time evaluation as a policy is being developed and implemented. Good scrutiny makes for good government—as the late Robin Cook once argued—but it cannot be made to wait until after the executive has finished its work.

Over the past decade, and particularly since the 2016 referendum, the work of select committees when they are up and running has been one of the most effective aspects of parliament’s activity. Whatever government is returned in this general election should expedite the process of setting up committees and put in place permanent changes to the rules to ensure this becomes the norm.