Changes to Britain’s Parliamentary Select Committees

Adrian McMenamin is an associate director in APCO’s London office

Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 introduction of departmental select committees to the British House of Commons was meant to give backbench MPs a more meaningful role, but anyone hoping for bodies with power and influence rivalling the congressional committees of the United States will have been disappointed.

It is not that the committees were unimportant. Hearings could still lead the national news on their day. Certainly any witness could get in trouble with an over-confident yet under-prepared appearance. But ministers were not forced from office by a bruising committee session and the impact on policy was minimal.

And MPs got the message: in government Labour’s parliamentary managers struggled for years to fill their quota and to ensure those who were on the committees actually turned up.

In reality party managers saw select committees not as a means of increasing government accountability, but of exercising power and patronage. Seats on the most important committees were distributed as political rewards while the chairs of all the committees were essentially directly appointed by party chiefs. 

In this parliament, though, things will be different. A new approach to committee membership, a desire to be seen holding government to account and a chamber where no party has a majority have changed the rules of  the game.

While committee chairs were still allocated to parties, the chairs themselves were recently elected by the whole house, meaning MPs had to compete for cross-party support. Membership too has become something won through competition and not as a reward for good behaviour. With a house that includes a huge proportion of new members – a consequence of Labour’s defeat and the 2009 scandal over MPs’ expenses –  committee members will likely be both more awkward and less deferential than ever.

As before, the committees’ memberships will reflect the balance of the house as a whole, but, like the house itself, no one party will hold a majority on any committee. It is now possible for two of the three major parties to combine against the other to agree a critical report, though this may be complicated by committee chairs’ casting votes.

Mostly this will mean the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats voting together against Labour. But not always. Personalities – is the secretary of state someone that coalition partners like – could be as important as policy in determining how each committee’s politics work.

What is certain is that the committees will become thermometers for the temperature of the coalition and anyone appearing before them could find it suddenly getting very hot indeed.