Select Committee on Liaison First Report


SHIFTING THE BALANCE: SELECT COMMITTEES AND THE EXECUTIVE

Select committees and the public

Presentation of reports

93.  The format of select committee reports has remained unchanged - apart from an increase in page size in 1986 - for decades. Whether the material in them is racy or worthy, fascinating or not, they look boring. In their physical presentation they now fall far short of what an increasingly sophisticated readership expects in the publications of a major public body; and they do not do justice to the high quality of their contents.

94.  An early task of the new Select Committee Panel will be to approve a new format, allowing some variation within a recognisably "branded" appearance, and with graphic or photographic covers when required. To give a preliminary indication of the sort of thing that might be considered, we are releasing, at the same time as this report, an extract from it presented in several different formats.

95.  Select committees will also need to be able to draw upon professional design advice for individual reports (as is the case with many public sector bodies including the National Audit Office and government departments, for example). With advances in technology, and the House's increasingly tough commercial approach to printing and publishing, we see no reason why any changes could not be contained within current levels of printing expenditure. Design advice would conveniently be deployed from the central staff unit.

Publicity and publication

96.  At the moment each select committee handles its press relations and publication timetables independently. There is no co-ordination, and there are frequently clashes of events and publications which result in important committee work getting no coverage.

97.  Although information about select committee programmes has improved (all press notices appear on the Internet, for example), there is room for greater integration and accessibility of the material.

98.  There needs to be a communications professional in the Committee Office, probably located in the central unit. This person will provide expert advice to committees, co-ordinate press relations, and provide a single point of contact when necessary. The select committee system must have the sort of communications support which is routinely provided in a wide range of public bodies.

The Internet

99.  The House has made a huge quantity of information available through the Internet. In addition to the Official Report and a wide variety of other parliamentary papers, every select committee report is available on the Net shortly after its publication in hard copy. So too is all published written and oral evidence; and some transcripts of oral evidence by Ministers are now appearing on the Net the day after the evidence session, before publication in hard copy. We hope that this last category will be extended to evidence given by non-Ministerial witnesses.

100.  Select committee material on the Internet represents a massive information and research resource, released from what are often prohibitively high cover prices for printed material. It also represents a considerable achievement for the House (and a more extensive use of the Net than is the case with government departments).

101.  Access to text through the Parliamentary Web pages is extensive, but it could be made much more user-friendly - for example by active or "hot" links from footnotes to source material such as evidence and other reports.

102.  But the overall informative and educative performance of the Parliamentary site is low; public expectations are ever higher, and the websites of many public and private sector organisations are much more advanced than our own.

103.  The Parliamentary site as a whole is not our business; but public knowledge and understanding of select committees is. Whatever changes may be made to the parliamentary pages, the part of the site dealing with House of Commons select committees needs to be entirely rethought, to make it attractive, informative, and fully up to the standard of the best sites elsewhere. Additional elements in this will be the co-ordinated information we discussed in paragraphs 96 to 98, and links to related sites of interest to those following the work of particular select committees (and, of course, back-links from those sites to ours). Other improvements might include photographs of committee members and links to their homepages; the ability to download documents in pdf format, similar to the printed original; links to more general information about how select committees work and how to give oral or written evidence; and better monitoring of the use of the site.

104.  We expect IT to play a major part in making select committees more accessible, both to those who seek information and those who want to contribute. We see substantial benefits for committees themselves; for example, submission of evidence on disk, or by e-mailed documents, has a dramatic effect on printing costs.

Unfinished business

105.  We still have work to do on other issues. We have already foreshadowed our consideration of the accountability of the intelligence and security services. We also intend to examine the powers of committees to send for persons, papers, and records. We doubt whether these powers are sufficient; and, even where they are, we are concerned that in cases of difficulty they cannot be exercised easily and quickly. The application of Crown prerogative and Crown privilege will also be an important element. We will report again in due course.

Conclusion

106.  It is now twenty years since the setting up of the departmental select committees. Their establishment was a major step in making the Executive accountable to Parliament, and so to the citizen and the taxpayer. Over those two decades, the committees have done a great deal of valuable work; but their full potential has still to be realised. In this report we have set out a programme of reform and modernisation which will do just that. There are some who see the House of Commons as a toothless adjunct of an all-powerful Executive. We aim to disprove this.


 
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