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Mr. Tyler: I am listening with great care to the case that the right hon. Gentleman is making, which reflects concerns on both sides of the House, and it is extremely helpful to hear it come from him. Given that, to some extent, the Liaison Committee started the ball rolling
about reviewing the role of Select Committees, will he consider whether his Committee might take the initiative in looking again at this issue, with the example of the Hutton inquiry in mind?
Mr. Williams: I have already initiated the start of such a review by the Clerks to the Liaison Committee, and the Public Administration Committee is undertaking such an inquiry. It is inconceivable that, post-Hutton—we have to let Hutton get out of the way so that we can take a less impassioned perspective—we will not try to pick out what lessons need to be addressed by the House and by the Government if the Select Committees are to be seen by the public, which is what matters, as fully able to hold the Executive to account. That is crucial for the House of Commons.
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Mr. David Curry (Skipton and Ripon): I do not wish to be a fly in the ointment, but I am afraid that even though I would stand to benefit and my Select Committee is one of the four biggest in the House, I think that the entire concept of there being a scrutiny role separate from a Front-Bench or ministerial role is deeply intellectually confused and does not work in practice. I say that because it represents an attempt to graft the concepts of a Congress on to the practice of a Parliament, and I do not think that that works.
If we have separation of powers—if the Executive are separate from the legislature—we can have scrutiny Committees that work effectively, and people know when they are elected to that legislature that they are not aspiring to ministerial or Executive office. However, in the House, the attempt to make a distinction between those two things is very difficult to achieve in practice. I can see that my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) is getting agitated.
Mr. Forth: How well my right hon. Friend knows me. Does he believe that this pass was sold when we set up the Select Committees back in 1979–80? What we are discussing is a more mechanistic aspect, but the role and functions of Select Committees was an aspiration that we expressed back then and subsequently turned into practice. If he wants to query the role, purpose and existence of the Select Committees, I might be rather with him on that, but does he not think that we have passed that point?
Mr. Curry: I do not think that we have passed that point. I am not aware that the rationale for setting up the Select Committees was to create a parallel career path. That notion has been introduced a great deal more recently to the debate. If we look at the reality, one wonders whether we will see a break between what is happening now and what will happen in the future.
Those Select Committee chairmanships that are in Conservative hands are very largely in the hands of ex-Ministers. I am an example and, although I hasten to add that my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) would not benefit from the proposals, he is another example. Let us consider the most spectacular example of recent Labour practice. I think that I am right in saying that the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth
Affairs, the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin), was Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee. He was then made a Minister. He then reverted to being Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, in which role he made some serious points about how much more preferable it was to be in that position. He then became a Minister again. The Chair of that Committee was filled by the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), who had recently resigned from the Government. That is an example of the practice. Are we going to say that there will be a total break from that practice? I regret that example—there is much that is ill about it. The arguments for some sort of quarantine period are valid.I am pointing out the extent to which the present practice is likely to change if there is supposed to be a decent ethos. When we swap sides in this House, which I am sure will happen much more rapidly than the Chairman of the Public Accounts Commission, the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams), suggested a short while ago, I bet my bottom dollar that there will be a great many ex-ministerial candidates lining up to chair Select Committees. That is not a bad thing. The Select Committees are there to scrutinise Government Departments. Knowing how Departments work is an asset that can be brought to that role. It is not an indispensable asset—I am not saying that other qualities are not required—but it is important to have that asset too.
Of course, it would help if the control of the Whips were relaxed. The Leader of the House said that it has been; I will describe in a minute why I do not think that that has made a great deal of difference to the functioning of the Select Committees.
A practical consideration comes to mind. When people enter the House, are they going to sign up to say that they want to be on the scrutiny or on the ministerial ambition side? Will there be a red, green or blue channel—a trajectory that we describe for ourselves? Will it be possible to change channels? Can one buy oneself out of one channel and into the other if circumstances change? If the Prime Minister is good enough to say, "You've impressed me so much in your scrutiny role that I would like that dialectical and analytical mind at the service of my Government", is one going to say, "Sorry, guv, I've signed up for this role and I will forgo the services I can render to the nation in ministerial office"?
Andrew Mackinlay: Would it be unreasonable to expect someone who is selected to chair a major Select Committee at the beginning of a Parliament to shun offers from the Prime Minister during that Parliament? That is the point. It does not need to be in perpetuity, but there should be a convention—a discipline that if one signs up to chairmanship, one should see it through that Parliament.
Mr. Curry: That would be one way to deal with my concerns. It depends on how prescriptive we want to be—creating ghettos, as it were, in which Members of Parliament function. There is a serious problem attached to that idea.
If we want to pay Select Committee Chairmen and get people to focus on the scrutiny role, what about members of the Committees? What about the handful of
members of each Committee who do most of the work, if we are blunt about it? Should we not reward them too? After all, the competitive demands on hon. Members' time make life difficult if they are going to be assiduous Committee members, especially with our silly new hours where Westminster Hall, the Chamber, Standing Committees and Select Committees are all competing for the same windows of opportunity for work.
Sir Nicholas Winterton : My right hon. Friend has raised an interesting point. How would he treat those who do all three tasks to which he referred: Westminster Hall, Standing Committees and Select Committees? Does he believe that they should receive some form of recognition?
Mr. Curry: It is a simple matter of calendar. If one is working on a Select Committee it is difficult to attend debates in Westminster Hall. One has either to walk out of the Select Committee to do so or to renounce doing so, as one can never be sure what time one will be called to speak.
It is important that Select Committee members do not have to forgo membership of Standing Committees. We have to be in touch with the normal scrutiny work of the House. I like to serve on Standing Committees dealing with Bills that interest me and not simply to be confined to a particular activity. That is why my Select Committee meets on Wednesdays. We leave Tuesdays and Thursdays free, although Government managers often take six or seven members of my Committee to work on Bills, making it difficult for the Select Committee to function.
Peter Bottomley (Worthing, West): In essence I agree, if my right hon. Friend is saying that these new hours turn being a Member of Parliament from being a vocation into having a vacation, except for those who want to work hard. Is not the underlying truth that one can pay people equally to do different amounts of work, but one cannot pay them unequally to do the same amount of work?
Mr. Curry: I think that I will agree with my hon. Friend, but I hope that he will give me some time to reflect on whether I do. I am too cautious a man to agree to a happy formulation of words without realising what they actually mean.
We must not exaggerate the role of Select Committees, and I say so as a Select Committee Chairman. Their role is to supervise the administration of business and the way a Department discharges its responsibilities, to allow the ventilation of issues of current political concern or those that are likely to be of immediate concern, and to create a forum in which ideas can come together—to look over the hill a little—about future policy issues. Occasionally, it may be necessary to broaden one's experience to undertake that role.
Select Committee members are like geologists: they can only sink an occasional core into the work of a Department. The idea that they can scrutinise all the activity of the Department is nonsense. With my Select Committee, we have three Committees sitting all the
time because we have used the rules that allow us to have two Sub-Committees in permanent session, which rotate and succeed each other, but we only touch the surface of the work of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. We can never do more than that.I do not wish to make myself unpopular, but the real problem is attendance at Select Committees. The Labour party may have a new nomination system, but even in the case of people who have volunteered for a Committee—I am told that their colleagues have chosen them—their attendance is not always as assiduous as it perhaps ought to be. On occasions, we find ourselves scratching around for a quorum. It is a real problem. My Committee has 17 members. If one allows for people who come for a brief period and are recorded as being present but play little active role in the Committee, it boils down to a handful of people doing the work over and over again. That is a greater threat to Select Committee work than nobbling by the Government.
People have too many competing pressures placed upon them. Too many people are unwilling to select and to focus on one activity, given those competing pressures in the constituency and here. Added to that, we sometimes have a problem getting ministerial attendance and there can occasionally be the problem of ministerial interference. We need to tackle the practical workings of the Select Committees.
I am also apprehensive about what payment will do to the relationship between a Chairman and his or her members. My Select Committee is run extremely informally. I cannot remember the last time we had a division, and that is because a great deal of work goes on quietly, people know each other very well and trust each other—and I think we probably like each other. We are a highly productive Committee because of the way we work.
That work depends a great deal on trust. It depends, for example, on members being willing to allow me to decide which amendments matter to a report and which are simply technical tidying-up or improvements. If they did not give me their trust, we would not get through the amount of work that we do. I do not want to institutionalise my position to such a degree that it becomes part of the political contest itself. I am therefore very apprehensive about that aspect.
If I reject the concept of there being a separate scrutiny role, I am free to say that if we are going to start to pay people we should be looking a great deal more widely at the people whom we pay. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, on a point of agreement, mentioned the Chairmen's Panel—its members chair Standing Committees—and the Chairmen in Westminster Hall. Some of them are the same people. The real heart of scrutiny is what happens in this Chamber. It is wrong to suggest that scrutiny in the Select Committees is a substitute for, or comes anywhere near, the scrutiny of Government Bills as they appear.
I regret the timetabling of measures, which now happens so automatically. It has done more damage to scrutiny than almost anything else. I am now told that the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill is to have a colossal additional part added on further consideration. That is a real affront to scrutiny. The most important
people as regards scrutiny are the shadow Ministers who have to take Bills through Standing Committees. They have to do a colossal amount of work and give a colossal commitment in time, but have precious little support to enable them to do so. My hon. Friends who take complex Bills through Committee are the unsung heroes of this place and they certainly deserve more support. They may well deserve more reward than they get at present.
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