Appendix 2: Letter from the Chair of the
Committee to the Chair of the Liaison Committee on Pre-appointment
hearings
Rt Hon Alan Williams, MP
Chairman, Liaison Committee
House of Commons
Pre-appointment hearings
The Communities and Local Government Committee has
now held three pre-appointment hearings, dating back to a March
hearing with the Government's preferred candidate for Chair of
the Infrastructure Planning Commission. A further hearing with
the candidates for the two posts of Vice-Chair of the same organisation
in July was followed by last week's session with a prospective
Local Government Ombudsman. Members of the Committee have asked
me to write to you following a discussion which ensued after our
most recent such hearing.
Committee members see value in pre-appointment hearings
and have welcomed the opportunity to cross-examine the Government's
preferred candidate for each of these important posts. However,
members have expressed some frustration that the nature of the
process is such that they do not have available to them all the
information necessary to enable them to decide whether a candidate
ought to be recommended for appointment. Members feel that it
is not possible to come to a decision about whether the person
in front of them is the best candidate for the position in the
absence of any knowledge of the other candidates.
We appreciate that the process is not intended to
replicate the appointment process carried out by the Department
on the Minister's behalf; and that the role of the Committee is
to decide whether the Government's preferred candidate is suitable
for the position, not to make a choice between candidates who
have already gone through the appropriate recruitment procedures.
However, members feel that the step of recommending that a candidate
not be appointed ought only to be taken if they can be confident
that a better candidate is—or may be—available. Little
would be gained from seeking to prevent the appointment of a candidate
about whom the Committee had reservations if no other candidate
were available who would fit the post any better.
Although in such circumstances it would in principle
be open to the Committee to make a report setting out its reservations
and recommending the appointment only if no better candidate would
be available, the damage done to the standing of the candidate
by such a report would make this a highly undesirable course of
action. Nor would the option included in the Liaison Committee's
guidelines for pre-appointment hearings of "writ[ing] to
the relevant Minister with any opinions that it prefers to express
privately, to supplement the published report" offer a solution
in these circumstances. The Committee could not hope to influence
the appointment if its published report has already endorsed the
Government's preferred candidate.
The Committee has not discussed in detail the possible
solutions to this problem: but one obvious one would be to make
available to the Committee the CVs not only of the preferred candidate,
but also of those other candidates assessed by the recruitment
panel as suitable for the position and included on the shortlist
submitted to the Minister. If the Government's preferred candidate
displayed weaknesses in front of the Committee, Members would
then be in a position to assess whether a recommendation that
he or she not be appointed would or would not be likely to result
in the appointment of a more suitable candidate.
Such a procedure would also help Committees to fulfil
another objective of the pre-appointment hearing process, that
is, to expose—or to reject any suggestion of—political
bias in the appointments made by Ministers. A recent example of
this came in the controversy surrounding the Mayor of London's
appointment of Veronica Wadley as Chair of the Arts Council London.
It is at present extremely difficult for a Committee to assess
whether any such bias may have been present in the appointment
process. If all the candidates on the shortlist submitted to the
Minister have declared political activity for the same party,
accusations of political bias by the Minister him- or herself
would clearly be unfounded (though it may of course raise questions
about the rest of the appointment process). If, on the other hand,
a candidate who has declared political activity for the Minister's
own party is appointed ahead of a manifestly better-qualified
alternative candidate, a Committee would be right to raise questions
about that appointment. If the Committee concerned knows nothing
of the alternative candidates, they are not in a position to do
that.
My Committee is aware that a research project is
under way which may address some of these issues. I and a number
of other Committee members have let it be know that we are willing
to speak to the researchers and feed these points into the process.
Meanwhile, however, I am anxious to ensure that our reservations
about the process are known and discussed at the earliest opportunity.
I am copying this letter to Tony Wright as Chairman
of the Public Administration Committee.
Dr Phyllis Starkey MP
Chair, Communities and Local Government Committee
19 October 2009
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