6 Select committee resources and staffing
116. Committees' effectiveness depends on the support
which they receive from their small team of staff and specialist
advisers, the Committee Office Scrutiny Unit and other staff within
the House Service, and external sources of advice. While committees
greatly value the service they receive, there has been concern
among some chairs about turnover of staff in the Committee Office,
the balance between generalists and specialists among committee
staff, and the flexibility of the House Service to respond to
the changing requirements of committee members. We have also been
concerned to ensure that the current programme of cuts to the
overall budget of the House of Commons should not damage our capacity
to carry out effective scrutiny.
117. In 2011 we established a working group to consider
staffing and resources for committees. The working group began
by issuing a questionnaire to chairs and committee staff. It then
commissioned a paper on what the needs of committees might be
in 2015 and 2020. The next stage was to look at those needs in
terms of inputs, outputs and outcomes. A digest of this work is
published on the internet with our written evidence.[118]
118. One clear message from this work is that chairs
of committees are under considerable pressure to attend events,
make speeches and respond to media inquiries above and beyond
what used to be expected of a committee chairs. This means that
a higher proportion of a chair's time is spent on work related
to the committee, compared with other parliamentary and constituency
duties. In many cases part of this extra work is borne by the
Member's personal staff.
119. Looking ahead, we need to plan for greater support
for committee chairs. We envisage that this may take different
forms according to particular needs:
- In the longer term we would
like to see funding for an additional member of staff in a chair's
office to handle the extra committee commitments. Chairs would
need to demonstrate a business need and demonstrate that the money
was spent for the purpose intended. A possible approach would
be for the Commission to allocate a sum for this purpose to our
Committee and for us to delegate to our Chair the responsibility
for assessing bids and allocating the funding, as he already does
with select committee travel.
- As an alternative, some chairs might prefer more
direct support from their committee team, particularly in speech-writing
and diary management. There has already been an experiment with
one person from the committee staff working in the Chair of the
Transport Committee's office some time each week.
- There would be considerable advantages in efficiency
and coordination if chairs of committees could co-locate their
own office and that of their Commons staff with the staff of their
committee.
- Such co-located offices should also have the
facility for hosting meetings with advisers and stakeholders,
or have access to other private rooms for such meetings.
- Media coverage of committees would also be improved
if chairs could have access to reliable technology (such as ISDN
lines in constituencies) to allow for reliable quality broadcasts
when away from Westminster.
120. A second important area is media support for
chairs and committees. Some chairs are completely content with
the current level of support from media officers; others would
like to see more support. There is also a view that committee
staffs should be more media-aware and more directly involved in
media and communications work. The media officers have recently
suggested new approaches to how committees work with the media,
which should help to deliver more results. While the ideal position
would be for each committee to have a dedicated media officer,
we accept that this is not realistic in the current climate. However,
a small increase in funding would help considerably to spread
the media officers' time less thinly. We would also like to see
the recruitment of a multimedia journalist to the team to drive
improvement in the content of websites. We
recommend that the funding of the Committee Office Media and Communications
team be increased to allow the employment of one or two additional
media officers.
121. The working group has not received evidence
that the overall level of current staff resources is insufficient,
but there is considerable concern that cost pressures will lead
to a reduction in the current level of staff, and chairs have
expressed concern about the turnover of staff and the consequent
lack of stability in committee teams. In some cases, individual
committees have had several change of committee clerk in recent
years. In others, virtually all members of the staff team have
changed within one year. The Clerk of Committees has told us:
Staff are not moved to and from committees at whim.
The major drivers of moves are promotion, secondment or loan to
another post and maternity leave. I cannot prevent people taking
the steps which lead to these moves; I can only try to fill the
ensuing vacancies.[119]
Additional work arising from such
additional committees as the Parliamentary Commission on Banking
Standards could have the effect of reducing availability for existing
committees. We do not regard this as acceptable. Any substantial
extra committee work, beyond the normal work of existing committees
including joint committees, which is undertaken at the initiative
of Government should be fully funded by a transfer from the Treasury
to the House of Commons.
122. We would like to see fewer changes in committee
staff teams during a Parliament. We are concerned about recruitment
and retention of staff, particularly at the level of second clerk
(A2). Five committees have lost their second clerk in the last
few months without a full replacement. The House of Commons Commission
should be willing to consider reward arrangements and tackle anomalies
in the pay policy. We
recommend that committee clerks, and in some cases other key staff,
should normally remain in post for at least four years.
123. At the outset, we questioned whether all committee
clerks should be generalists with procedural experience. Some
chairs felt there was little need for procedural experience and
others attached importance to specialist knowledge of the subject
area. In his memorandum to the working group, the Clerk of Committees
explained the career background of the pool of committee clerks
and second clerks.[120]
We note that in the past few months a Library scientific specialist
has become Clerk of the Science and Technology Committee. We welcome
the greater flexibility being applied in appointing committee
clerks and trust that it will continue.
124. There is an argument for going further and opening
selection of specific committee clerk posts to external competition.
This would have the benefit of bringing in new talent, potentially
people with in-depth subject knowledge and wider experience. It
would also test the calibre of career clerks against the market.
It has been put to us that there are some risks in this approach:
a committee clerk who did not fully understand the requirements
of the House might require a high level of initial support, and
it might have an impact on the morale and retention of career
clerks. A change to specialist committee clerks would reduce the
House Service's traditional flexibility to move staff from one
job to another, and between committees and Chamber services, to
meet the changing demands of the House, and might therefore increase
the staffing requirement. None of these risks seem to us to preclude
the use of external competition for some committee clerk positions.
125. We would also like to see greater flexibility
in bringing in outside experts to support committees. We welcome
the initiatives by the Treasury Committee, for example, to recruit
specialists on secondment from other bodies. We believe that this
success can be built on, provided sufficient attention is paid
to transparency and conflicts of interest. The Scrutiny Unit is
ready to assist committees in identifying, recruiting and securing
relevant expertise. It is clearly in the interests of committees
to draw on staff support from as wide a field as possible. We
do not go as far as calling for a separate Committee Service,
but we think that it would be worth testing the benefits of open
competition of a high profile committee clerk on an experimental
basis. We recommend that,
if a committee wishes this and the Liaison Committee agrees, it
should be possible to recruit a committee clerk directly to post
by open competition, and
that there should be greater flexibility in bringing in outside
experts to support committees in their work.
126. At the same time, we would welcome closer working
between the House of Commons Library and committee staffs. There
is great value in the separate service that the Library gives
to Members of Parliament individually, but there is a case for
managing the careers of specialists in the Library and the Committee
Office in a more joined-up way, to improve retention and career
progression, and to ensure that Committees benefit from the best
specialist advice that the House Service can offer.
127. The House of Commons Commission has undertaken
that scrutiny of Government will not be affected by the current
savings programme. We accept that committees will need to show
that their resources are being used efficiently. We have supported
initiatives to make evidence more readily available on the internet
and for greater electronic working within committees. Technology
obviously gives select committees the opportunity to examine how
they work and apply resources as well as possible in support of
effective scrutiny.
128. We understand that the Committee Office will
be going through a change programme following a review under the
auspices of the savings programme. The objectives of this programme
include:
- Making oral and written evidence
to committees more readily accessible to the public — so
it is can be read more quickly and more clearly
- Providing committee members with easier access
to committee documents — so they can be read anytime, anywhere
- Making better use of staff resources —
by reducing current effort on preparation for printing
- Using IT more effectively
- And through these actions, reducing costs and
using resources more effectively.
We welcome this programme as an opportunity to improve
and modernise the service the Committee Office gives to committees
and to the public. It is important that it should be shaped not
just by the need to produce savings but by the longer-term goal
of increasing committee effectiveness. Now
may not be the best time to argue for increased resources, but
it should be the long term goal of the House to build up the capacity
of select committees, to improve their effectiveness and status,
to increase their powers and influence, and to improve their efficiency
by providing chairs and staffs with accommodation and infrastructure
to enable them to hold Government to account.
118 Ev w 85-110 Back
119
Ev w92, para 9 Back
120
Ev w91, para 3 Back
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