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Welcome to the eighth meeting in 2015 of the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee. I remind everyone to switch off their mobile phones, as they can affect the broadcasting system.
We have received apologies from Dave Thompson, and Colin Keir is attending as his substitute.
The first item today is an evidence-taking session as part of our inquiry into the election of committee conveners. With us we have Sir Alan Beith, who is the former chair of the Justice Committee and the Liaison Committee in the House of Commons.
Welcome, Sir Alan. Thank you for making yourself available. It is worth saying that the Presiding Officer has initiated this piece of work and is keen that we should look at it but that the committee is, perhaps, more sceptical than she hoped. We are happy if you wish to be an advocate as well as an informant, but that is a matter for you, of course.
I do not normally invite opening remarks—we usually go straight to questions—but, in these circumstances, we would be happy for you to lay out your stall, comparatively briefly, if you wish to do so.
Thank you, convener. In the committees that I have chaired, I have followed the same practice of not encouraging opening statements. However, in light of your opening comment, I should say that it is not for me to say how the committee system of the Scottish Parliament should work, and that there are quite important differences between the systems in the two Parliaments, the most important of which is that your committees have a legislative role, which ours do not. One of the reasons why we do not have that role is that, given the very strong whipping tradition in the House of Commons, we think that importing it would undermine the ability of committees to act in a collegiate and consensual way.
I am not sure whether that has implications for the way in which you elect the chairs, conveners or members, but it is a difference. The judgment is very much for you to make, but what I can say, very briefly, is that it is my view—which I think is widely shared—that the election of chairs of committees in the House of Commons has significantly enhanced the authority of the chairs and of the committees, and has added to a number of things that have caused ministers, civil servants and outside bodies to take committees more seriously than ever before. I am quite confident that the election of chairs has been quite important in that respect and has given committees a greater degree of independence from the Executive.
Thank you, that is helpful. We will move to questions. We have a list of pre-prepared questions but, as you would expect, we will go off script if that is appropriate.
You said that the election of conveners had raised the profile of committees and given committees and conveners more authority and independence. Why do you think that is?
It is quite clear that the person who is holding the chair does not hold it because they have been given that opportunity by the Executive and the whips system. It is also clear that that person has had to assemble the support of a range of members of Parliament in order to secure the mandate to achieve and, perhaps, keep the position. That is quite clearly strengthening to the independence of the committees.
If you observe the election process, it is quite interesting to see that the house has not always done what might be expected in its choice of chairs. Recent by-elections—if I can call them that—for two chairs have led to the appointment not of the most senior people to those positions but of people who, although they had a reputation in the appropriate field, were relatively junior as members of Parliament. It all illustrates that no one can say that it has been fixed by the whips. If I keep referring to that terminology, it is because it is historically very important in the way that the House of Commons operates.
Are there any other benefits in electing conveners, apart from what you have just laid out?
It is really all summed up in that independence and authority combination that I have described. In our experience, that outweighs any disadvantages that you might find from it.
In your opening remarks, you mentioned that the committees in the Scottish Parliament are different because we deal with legislation, which committees in the United Kingdom Parliament do not do. What does that difference mean when it comes to electing conveners to committees in the Scottish Parliament?
I know what difference it would make if we handled the kind of legislative process that goes on in our standing committees. In standing committees, the Executive—and indeed the Opposition—feels it necessary to assert its management of its members, and therefore there is great pressure to vote appropriately and not rock the boat too much, and all those things that are alien to the work that we do in a select committee.
However, in the committees of this Parliament, you must have achieved a way of combining those two functions that does not destroy their ability to operate as scrutiny committees. The judgment that I make about what would work in our system is peculiar to the traditions of our system, powerful as I think they are.
Almost all other Parliaments have committee systems that find a way of combining the scrutiny and the legislative roles. In some of them, it means that the scrutiny function is not carried out very effectively, but I cannot believe for a moment that that is true here. Of course, I have not made a study of it, but it appears to me that you have found ways of reconciling that challenge that would be difficult for us in the House of Commons.
Have there been any disadvantages to electing conveners?
The only disadvantages are probably from the standpoint of the Executive, which cannot use the system as a way of rewarding people; nor can it use removal from a committee as a way of threatening people. There is a disadvantage there.
I suppose that you could say that creating a career structure for members is less easy when you hand over the decision to the house as a whole. However, set that against the principle that the house should be able to choose who it wants to chair its committees and that pales into insignificance.
I want to pick up a couple of points that have come out of your contribution so far, Sir Alan. First, I have a technical question on the matter of removal. Here, one may leave a committee only when one chooses to resign. Forgive my ignorance, but is there a process by which an external initiative can remove somebody from a committee in the House of Commons?
That used to be the case. Indeed, I can recall—I am going back 20 or 30 years, which is a very long time in Parliament—hearing a member being told that his future on a particular select committee had been threatened by the rebellious position that he taken up on something. That was not a member of my party, I hasten to add. What happens now is that members are elected within the parties, normally by secret ballot, so the threat of removal has been taken away.
That is fine. My next question is from the point of view of an old cynic, as I would say I am. How have the whips adapted to the apparent loss of power that comes through the loss of their directly nominating and, essentially, appointing people? How do they now try to exercise their influence over the process? Or are you saying that they have suddenly taken a vow of abstinence and take no part whatever?
I think that they have largely given up trying to control the select committee process, realising that they cannot. You get the occasional row about whether a part of a report has been given to a minister or a parliamentary private secretary, and whether they have tried to pressure committee members to get it changed. I cannot think of a good recent example of that; you occasionally get allegations of that kind, but they are relatively few.
If you had a whip giving evidence, they would probably say that their job has been made far more difficult because they now have fewer means of telling members that, if they are helpful, the whips will be helpful in return, by giving them the opportunity to get on the committee that they want to be on and so on. Whips feel that their armoury has been raided and that most of their traditional weapons have been taken from them. They have to learn to live with that.
However, there has been some talk that there might be pressure in the next Parliament to pull back from those reforms. Some of the members of the Liaison Committee brought that to the committee’s attention, so we made it quite clear in our report—this is a committee of more than 30 chairs from all different parties—that there must be no going back on what we know to be the right reforms, which brought in the system of election.
There are significant differences between the Scottish Parliament and the Westminster Parliament, one of which is the number of members. I understand that one of the drivers for having elected chairmen in Westminster was the high number of members and the fact that so many of them, especially on the back benches, did not have any influence. Given that the numbers at Holyrood are so different, do you see that system as being workable here? So many people in one party are involved in running the Government itself that the number of members available diminishes as you go along.
In the House of Commons there is a large Executive component. I have not checked the proportions as to how the size of the Executive drawn from the legislature compares with that in the Scottish Parliament. However, the number of chairs did not change as a result of the election system, because the number of chairs is determined by the structure of Government. If the Government reduces the number of departments, then the number of select committees will reduce. Similarly, if the Government increases the number of departments, the number of select committees increases. We exactly parallel the Government structure.
There are other issues around numbers. Even though we have quite a large number of members—we are quite a large legislative body—there is a core of people who are very committed to select committee work and there are others who find themselves engaged in various other activities that conflict with select committee work. We also have a double structure, because we have committees dealing with bills, and there are many pressures on members to attend standing committee hearings, even at the same time as select committee hearings.
Even with our larger numbers, we have quite a lot of management problems. I cannot conceive of a way in which the system of election would be made more difficult simply because you are in a smaller Parliament.
Sticking to the issue of numbers, I note that, because there are 129 MSPs here, less the number of MSPs who are in the Executive, and most of us sit on two or even three committees, we become very familiar with one another and with one another’s attributes. What are your views on that? Is it a benefit?
In the House of Commons, where the numbers are larger, it is through the committee process that members become more familiar with colleagues and their attributes. As someone who has spent a lot of years chairing parliamentary committees, I find it a very valuable and constructive process. People start to learn that those with whom they fundamentally disagree on some major principles nevertheless have merits and something useful to contribute. I have been struck by the way in which I have been able to work with people of radically different views who, if you focus their attention on a particular problem, will apply their minds and come up with a common solution.
I digress slightly, but that is a very valuable process, although perhaps more so in a large Parliament such as Westminster, where there are fewer opportunities for people to get to know one another well. I may have missed part of the point of your earlier question.
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In that respect, is it a strength or a disadvantage that we are a small Parliament?
There is quite a strong view among committee chairs in the House of Commons that committees in our system are too large to work effectively. Many chairmen feel that a committee of six to nine members, all of whom are fully engaged, is a much better size of committee to question people, to undertake visits and to be in fairly constant communication with one another. If you have a committee of 12, 13 or even 16 members—there are various pressures that have led us to make committees bigger than the recommendations—you start to lose some of the cohesive qualities. The Liaison Committee has recommended that committees should be smaller than they currently are.
Roughly how many committee places are there per back-bench member? My understanding, which is informal, is that there are fewer committee places available than there are members who might be available to fill them.
That is arithmetically the case, but if you take out the almost 100 people who are in the Executive or are parliamentary private secretaries, and those who are carrying out other responsibilities, such as chairing standing committees, and those who choose to focus their activities on something completely different, you reach a point where the number of places as a whole does not exceed the number of members who are prepared to commit themselves to select committee work. Obviously, there are some committees that are particularly popular, and there will always be more candidates for the places. I am thinking about committees such as the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Treasury committees.
In the latter part of the Parliament, when vacancies arose, it became quite difficult to fill some of them. Ironically, I found myself turning to the whips sometimes and saying, “Your party does not seem to have produced a nominee for this place—why is that and do you have any suggestions?” That is not really how we intended the system to work and is partly a product of having those larger committees.
It appears to be the case, given the nature of Westminster politics, that the number of places available is more than sufficient for the willingness of members to commit themselves to committee work.
Do you think that the election of conveners would work well in different political environments? For example, how would independent members get on the schedule?
It is not something that we have really faced, because there are very few independent members in the House of Commons, other than people who have left their party after being elected. It would be perfectly possible for the election system to cater for independent members. The problem that they would face is the allocation of committees to parties at the beginning of a Parliament. The way in which our system works is that the arithmetic of party representation in the house determines the allocation of chairmanships between parties.
Are you using the d’Hondt system?
It is not exactly the d’Hondt system. My former clerk and I have been discussing precisely how one would describe the system that is used. It is one of those strange mysteries. The clerks, whom we trust implicitly, advise the Speaker and the Speaker tells us what the allocation is. At that point, the parties discuss between themselves how the numerical allocation will be reflected in the committees. There are some things that are established practice, such as the fact that the Public Accounts Committee is always chaired by an Opposition member. Similarly, the Government would probably want to have the chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
There is inevitably a process of negotiation, and there is no role for the independent member in that. It is quite difficult to envisage circumstances in which it would work. If there were one independent member of the House of Commons who was widely thought to be a suitable person to chair committee X, the committee would have to be allocated to independent members, and then the house would have to report that that person should become the chair. The process is not terribly well catered for. If there were a group of 25 or so non-aligned members, that might change the situation, but that is not something that we have experienced.
So, if there were a single independent member, he could not lobby to be chairman of a particular committee.
Well, he would have to lobby at the very beginning of the Parliament that a committee should be allocated to independent members. I do not think that that case would be heard very enthusiastically if he were the sole independent member.
And would the situation be similar in a situation in which there was a minority Government? Who would decide the make-up of the committees in that circumstance?
It would not change things very much. The clerks would advise the Speaker on the arithmetical calculation and the parties would then negotiate among themselves. What tends to happen in the Westminster system is that the formation of the Government delays the appointment of committees and, therefore, parties’ agreement on committees. We find that very frustrating and the Liaison Committee has expressed concerns about that. It can result in a situation in which, not because of the system of election but because of the allocation arrangements and the need to wait for the Government to be formed and news to be announced about whether any new committees will be established or old committees abolished, the process of election to committees can be set back, which can mean that committees cannot really get going before the summer recess in August.
This might not be a relevant question, but I am always interested in the extent to which joint committees play into this agenda. Are they affected by it?
They play into it very badly, and it is a matter of concern to the Liaison Committee.
Joint committees still work on the old system. Before I develop this point, I should perhaps add that they are usually created to consider draft bills, rather than in relation to specific subjects. Earlier, I said, by way of shorthand, that our committees do not do legislation. However, although we do not take part in the formal process of bills, we extensively consider draft bills. We also do a lot of post-legislative scrutiny and we sometimes make comments during the passage of a bill.
Sometimes, partly because it is under pressure from the House of Lords, where there are lots of people who are interested in certain key topics, a Government will create a joint committee to consider a particular draft bill. The result is that the committee is appointed on a motion of the house, which brings us right back into the whips’ territory. There might be a process of discussion or an implied commitment to ensure that perhaps several people from the select committee are on the joint committee but, at the end of the day, the election process for chairs and for members does not apply to a joint committee.
As I said, the Liaison Committee has been concerned about that, and that has led to us being a little more hostile than we might otherwise have been to the idea of draft bills being considered by joint committees.
That is interesting. However, I am not sure how it will inform our considerations.
You do not have the issues of the two-chamber legislature.
No, and if we had to have one, I suspect that there might be a majority in favour of one that would be structured with a rather different balance, shall we say. However, that is for another day.
That brings me into other territory.
Let us not bring raw politics into an objective analysis of where we are and where we are going.
Those who favour elected chairs here say that, under the current system, it is not always the best candidate who becomes the convener of a committee. Do you have any evidence that, through the changes at Westminster, it has been the best candidates who have been selected as the chairs of committees?
We certainly have very good chairs of committees. I have had the interesting task of chairing the committee consisting of all of them and I have got to know them pretty well. We have managed to achieve quite a lot by working together, which you might think surprising as they are all strong personalities.
I cannot really answer the question because it involves a value judgment about the people who have been elected chairs and those who might otherwise have got the jobs.
The two people who were elected as chairs of committees during the Parliament were not in the original selection but were elected because vacancies arose in the Health and Defence Committees. What is striking about those elections is that they led to the election of relatively junior members in terms of time in the house, and therefore not the people that the previous system would have tended to promote. Each had a reputation in the field that the committee covered. In the case of the Health Committee, it was Sarah Wollaston, who was a general practitioner; in the case of the Defence Committee it was Rory Stewart, who had extensive experience in defence and foreign affairs. That meant that the posts did not go, for example, to the most senior of the existing members of the committee. The house decided that those particular individuals had qualities and experience that made them a good choice to be the chair.
We have heard the same point from a number of sources during the evidence that we have taken. Could there be an argument, however, that all that has really changed is that a couple of wild cards have been put into the mix?
If you are thinking of those two as wild cards, I should point out that they were both elected, as it were, through by-elections. The elections did not happen at the beginning of a Parliament. I cannot imagine that the same two people would have been as likely to have been elected or to have put their names forward at the beginning of the Parliament, because they would have been completely new members at that stage. There is a difference.
Under the previous system, the executive and the party leaderships—not just the Government party but the Opposition parties as well—had the opportunity to say, “So-and-so deserves a turn in this position.” That did not prevent some very good and independent-minded people from becoming chairs. On occasions some years ago, when the executive tried to remove independent-minded chairs, the house resisted that. I am thinking of the case of Gwyneth Dunwoody.
I would not want to make a value judgment that said that the previous system produced bad chairs. I would simply say that those of us who have occupied the positions under the new system have felt an enhanced independence and authority because we have been elected.
Okay. You mentioned that elections take some of the control of the selection process away from party whips. One of my colleagues has brought up the point that, with our obviously smaller number of members, elections might make controlling the selection more difficult but they would not affect the final outcome.
That is a judgment that only you can make. I cannot make a judgment as to how an election system would work in the dynamics of the Scottish Parliament. I can say that, in almost any system, having to win the confidence of your colleagues across the chamber has the potential to enhance your independence and authority. The particular dynamics within the Scottish Parliament would be better judged by yourselves.
Sir Alan, you have used the phrase “enhanced independence and authority” several times in different forms. Can you give us examples of how you have achieved that? They are easy words to say, but they are perhaps more difficult to demonstrate. It would be helpful if you could do so or indicate what limitations there may be.
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Committees inevitably face a bit of a running battle with the executive to get the information that they want, to get it timeously and to get a satisfactory response to matters that they raise although, of course, the Government is formally required to respond to committee recommendations.
It is a judgment. I have found that senior departmental officials and ministers, including ministers with whom I have disagreed quite a lot, feel more obliged to appear to respect the position of select committees and their chairs than they did previously.
In addition, there is an increasing outside interest in the role of select committee chairs. They are invited to address conferences and to meet constantly organisations in the field with which they deal. They are seen to have more status in those fields. You might want to ascribe some of the strengthening of committees to other factors, but that is a major factor. Indeed, it is quite often cited to me by others that we are the elected chairs who have been put into the position by the house and they must take account of that.
That is a rather nebulous answer, but it is one about which I have genuine convictions. I can talk about how my committee—the Justice Committee—has achieved a significant change in how the Government approaches matters. You would then have to decide how far that is because the committee did an effective job and how far it is because chairs and members are elected. That is quite a difficult judgment to make.
Thank you for making that point. We could perhaps even measure how many more invitations to speak externally we get as a result of the change.
You specifically mentioned officials and ministers. Is there a difference in how the two groups have responded to the changes? There are Parliament officials and Government officials, so there are perhaps three categories of people. Are the responses to the changes and the effects different for those different categories of people?
Parliament’s officials serve the committees and they serve them very well. They did so before the election to committees took place and they do so now. In a sense, it is not so much of a change for them, except to the extent that the committees that they serve attract more authority.
Ministers and senior officials affect one another. If a minister makes it clear that he does not want the officials to engage more than they are obliged to do with the committee, that could influence the officials’ attitude—but not always. I have sometimes found officials are able to say, “I have to bring this before the committee.” There are plenty of stories of officials who say, “Minister, if this option was put in front of the select committee, I think that they would take it apart—they would have some very serious reservations about it.” Indeed, ministers’ memoirs will tell you things like that.
Some ministers naturally deal well with select committees; others think that they are a bit of a nuisance to them, which we perhaps should be.
The main problem that I have experienced with officials is them not ensuring that, down the chain, everyone deals with the select committee timeously and efficiently, and then, suddenly, an announcement is rushed out of which the committee has not had the proper notice that it ought to have had about it.
The process is continuous; it is not just affected by elections. We are digging away at the matter all the time and trying to establish a better working relationship—not one in which we become part of the executive, but one in which we know what the executive is doing all the time.
That very much echoes some of my experience when I was first minister—I do not mean First Minister with a capital F, but when I was first a minister. My party had two of the seven members of the committee that shadowed me and did not have the convenership, so the relationship between ministers and their committees can be quite interesting.
I think that I saw Patricia Ferguson, who is also a former minister, nod as I was saying that.
Are you trying to catch my eye, Cameron?
No.
Perhaps I should add that ministers will sometimes shrewdly recognise that the select committee is interested in developing policy in the direction that they want to develop it. When a minister is meeting resistance, either from other ministers or from within the department, the committee is potentially an ally on something that the minister cares about.
I think that the two former ministers on this committee recognise the strength of what you are saying there.
Good morning, Sir Alan. I am really interested in knowing whether there are any procedural safeguards that you would consider if you were setting this up. For example, should the nominations be from the parties that wish to have the convenership, so to speak? What type of voting system would you recommend?
The Wright committee went into some detail about the procedures precisely in order to protect chairs and to ensure that they were genuinely independent. In our context, I think that what we have works pretty well. The alternative vote system of election works well when you are choosing one person as opposed to when you have a multiplicity of people. In my view, the single transferable vote system is the better system, but if it is for one place, it is in effect an alternative vote system.
The nomination system is a completely open one. It does not depend on the party as an organisation sanctioning your nomination and the ballot is secret. All of that seems to work well. The ballot process for chairs is conducted by the staff of the house—by the clerks.
The system for election of members is still done within the parties. The decision to do it that way was partly born of a decision to try to get the system for chairs firmly in place and then see how we got on with the development of the system for parties. People were a little bit anxious about that. Reformers were a bit anxious about that. However, it seems to have worked satisfactorily. On paper, it would look better if the election of members within the parties was more formally conducted than it is at the moment.
Should parties continue to have conveners allocated proportionate to the number of seats that they have in Parliament?
My answer would be yes because I cannot think of a better principle on which to decide it.
Are there any other rules that you would add to strengthen that policy?
As far as we are concerned, it works. The allocation system existed before the election system so we have been used to it working over a number of years. The next Parliament might be interesting. The House of Commons, despite being quite traditional in some ways, adapts its procedures as time goes on to recognise new situations, but the basic principle that the distribution of places should reflect the composition of the house seems to me to be the only obvious way to do it.
You might have covered this point in some of your previous answers, but were there any other changes to committees in the House of Commons that supported the introduction of elected conveners?
The election of members of committees from within their parties was simultaneous with that. That was certainly relevant, and initially it was quite competitive for many committees.
As I said earlier, towards the end of the Parliament, it became difficult to fill casual vacancies on some committees because most members had committed themselves to other kinds of activity by that stage. I am thinking particularly of the last 12 to 18 months of the Parliament. That is perhaps the main simultaneous change.
However, the Liaison Committee has also worked pretty hard with the Government on a range of issues. For example, the Government has rules—which I would not want to go into detail about today—about how its officials engage with committees, which it calls the Osmotherly rules. Those are not rules of Parliament; they are the Government’s own rules.
We have quite a frank and free discussion with Government over a period of time about the extent to which we do and do not recognise the principles of those rules. In particular, we feel very strongly about ensuring that truthful and complete evidence is given to committees by officials. Various things like that are part of the continuing process.
The Liaison Committee sees part of its role as being to support committees when they feel that they need to challenge the way that the executive has interpreted its own rules, and on other issues, too. We come in quite often in support of a committee that we feel has a strong case for being granted something that it is being denied.
Thank you.
You commented on single transferable votes, which is something that I am interested in. All systems, of course, have flaws. In the 1945 election, two members were elected by single transferable vote but lost their deposits. They were university seats. One example was in Scotland, where the first two university members got elected with, I think, 44 per cent and 42 per cent. The third one had 4.16 per cent of the first-preference vote and the hurdle was 4.17 per cent. There was one in England as well.
Let me ask a couple of questions that arise from your contribution. With regard to support for conveners, particularly in environments where the Government party has a majority, is it absolutely necessary that there is demonstrable support from more than one party before a convener can be put forward or elected?
I will check. I cannot remember whether the nomination rules require that, although I do not think that they do. [Interruption.] No, they do not—I am confirmed in my recollection that they do not.
Interestingly, however, a motion to remove a chair requires support from more than one political party. It is a process that we have never had to test, by the way. Removal requires support from at least two members of the majority party and at least one member of another party.
Right. Okay.
I would like to correct an earlier piece of evidence. The process for removing a member from the chair does not require the consent of the house as a whole. It is a process that the committee can carry out, subject to that proviso that more than one party has to be involved. There are other rules: it cannot be done repeatedly and it cannot be done until a period of time has elapsed after the original election of the chair. It is quite a guarded process, and it has not been used.
The other point that arises from your earlier comments is that there are other administrations in the world in which all committee chairs have to be from opposition parties. Have you a view on the merits, or otherwise, of that?
Personally, I would not want our system to go that way. I can see that in some political contexts it might help, but in our system it would bring more harm than good. A committee’s authority is enhanced by the fact that a chair from the Government party can make a criticism of Government policy, with support from across the committee, because of some important problem that the committee has discovered with the policy. If all committees were Opposition led, that element would be taken away, and it would lead to a tendency to dismiss the committees as vehicles for their chairs. The mix and the fact that we support each other are much more helpful for presenting committee work as a different kind of activity in which it is possible to reach quite critical views but that does not engage in the party battle in the same way.
We can recognise that. The convener of our Finance Committee, who is a member of the Government party, has on two occasions in the last six months been quite robust, shall we say, with the Government. The Government has quite properly accepted that the committee convener was correct and that the Government was not performing to the required standard.
Good morning, Sir Alan. I was interested in your point about the two recent by-elections to committee chairs and the appointments of Dr Wollaston and Mr Stewart. As I understand it, your point was that those individuals had experience of the topics of the committees of which they were elected chairs. Is that an overriding qualification, or is the ability to effectively manage and control a committee a better attribute for a candidate?
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Members have to make those judgments when they cast their votes. If somebody was put forward on the basis that they knew a lot about something, but others felt strongly that they could not manage a group of people effectively and productively or that they were very divisive, that would become an issue in the election process, and members would take that into account. That is an entirely relevant consideration. If I were casting a vote on who should chair a committee, I would certainly have in mind whether the person could work with a group of people. Sometimes, chairs develop that ability although it might not have been thought that they had it to start with.
At the beginning of the meeting, the convener referred to the fact that the committee is perhaps not as yet convinced of the need to change our process, or at least to change it in the way in question, but many of us are convinced that there is a need for greater scrutiny in our committees. They have a dual function, but some of us at least are not convinced that the system operates particularly well. If you had a blank sheet of paper and you were asked to design a committee system, what would your priority be in the organisation of a committee to ensure that it had the best possible chance of being an effective body for scrutiny of the Government?
I would want a process to create its membership that was not heavily influenced by either the Government or the formal Opposition, because that is not in the interests of either. They want to get business through, to stop business getting through or to make things very embarrassing for the Government that gets its business through. That is a different process.
I would want a process that brings together people who are prepared to engage in something quite different, and I would want to give them sufficient resources to enable them to do that. I am not a big spender in that sense, but there should be good core committee staff who understand that role and can research and support that role and draw in the necessary research from elsewhere to enable it to be carried out effectively.
I would also want to ensure that there was a process by which the Government had to respond—as our Government does—to things that committees put forward and that the house had adequate opportunity to draw on the work of committees, sometimes in the way that it debated reports and sometimes simply in the way that it used them, perhaps to draw on what a committee said about an aspect of a bill in considering amendments in more detail in the legislative process.
Off the cuff, those are three things that I would want to be certain of. They are in addition to having a chair who has a feel for doing things in that way.
One thing that has not come up so far is where the people whom we serve fit in. I would like to probe that for a minute or two, as we have made no reference whatsoever to it. Have the changes that have been made created more opportunities for those who elect members to interact directly with committees, influence them and be informed about what they are doing, or are they broadly neutral? Is that question really for a different domain of interest?
In so far as the election of chairs and committee members has enhanced the role of committees and the recognition that they are independent bodies that are not arms of the Government or the Opposition, that has helped the public at large and specialist groups in the public to see that those committees matter. At the same time, the committees have been emboldened to an extent by the status that they now have and have gone to considerable lengths to engage the public more.
Public engagement with Parliament is probably greater in the world of select committees than in any other aspect of the life of Parliament. Every week, our committee corridors are filled with people who are engaged in an enormous variety of activity—for example, in the health service or the judicial system—who have come to give evidence to committees. That includes of course those who are affected by the system. For example, in the Justice Committee, we talked a lot to victims of crime and ex-offenders—that was a very large engagement. In addition, new technology has allowed committees to carry out e-consultations. For example, we did a big one on prison officers that informed our report on their role.
The committee system offers massive opportunities for people to engage with Parliament, because it looks at the kind of things that they deal with in their everyday lives. The enhanced status has emboldened committees to do more of that.
Do committees meet outside the Westminster campus?
Yes. My committee—the Justice Committee—was here in Edinburgh and met in Cardiff. We do a lot of visits, as well as having formal hearings elsewhere. Sometimes, there is merit in having a formal hearing somewhere else, and various committees, including the Scottish Affairs Committee, do that. However, there is also a lot of merit in undertaking less formal visits, such as simply getting into an institution.
I can give an example of such a visit, although it exemplifies something slightly broader than the topic of this discussion. Quite early in the Parliament, my committee decided that it wanted a better understanding of how its department worked. We therefore said to it, “We want to go all over the department and all we want with us is somebody who has got the keys to every door. We just want to talk to anybody we meet and find out what they do. We have no particular agenda; we just want to get a feel for how the department is working.” The department’s initial horror was replaced by the realisation that it would probably benefit from our having that level of understanding.
Perhaps even the more junior officials benefited from the opportunity to make their views known directly to those who make decisions on their behalf.
You mentioned the issue of status, Sir Alan. Does the fact that chairpersons in Westminster are paid for the job that they do enhance their status or is the mere fact that they do that job status enough?
I think that being paid enhances their status, although that is one of those difficult things to judge. That in turn benefits the committee system, although part of the motivation for deciding to pay chairs in the first place was the slightly different one of suggesting an alternative career structure for MPs that means that they do not have to spend their entire time in Parliament hoping to be a minister and conducting themselves in a manner that they think most likely to lead to their being a minister.
People say that there is more than one route, but nevertheless the feeling was that having a recognised career structure in which a committee chair was financially recognised and got at least as much as a junior minister would enhance the committee system, and I think that it has done so. On the extent to which chairmen think when they get up in the morning, “I am paid to do this, so I’d better get on and do it to the best of my ability,” you must make your own judgment.
In the private sector, people are recognised through the wallet. Already, conveners here definitely do more than committee members—I think that that is a fact. Is it part of the consideration in Westminster that there is more work for chairs and that it is not just about status?
I think that it is. The chair’s burden is very large. A large number of organisations want to engage with the chairs and the chairs feel an obligation to engage with those people on behalf of their committee. Moreover, the opportunities to explain the work of a committee and its proposals at conferences and so forth add to the considerable burden on chairs. It is probably helpful for them to say, “We are paid to do this job, so we must get on and do it even though it is very time consuming.”
I think that Sir Humphrey might have described that contribution as courageous, but there we are.
My question was about conveners being remunerated, but it has been partly answered However, were the chairs of Westminster committees always remunerated, even before the Wright committee?
Yes, the payment of chairs started before the election of chairs. There is a downside to that, because it was another job that the executive could offer to somebody because it was remunerated, which might add to its attractions. Most of us think that the election of chairs and their remuneration fit better together than the old system did.
Our inquiry is on the election of conveners. Am I right in thinking that the Wright committee reforms to the election of chairs and membership of the committees were simultaneous? I think that you said that.
That has been achieved but by an internal process. The parties are responsible for conducting their own elections of committee members. As far as I am aware, there has been no challenge or criticism that they are not doing it properly. Certainly, in my party, although the election of committee members is not conducted by the clerks in the way that the election of a chair is, we go along and put pieces of paper into a ballot box in much the same way.
Did the change happen at the same time?
Yes. Well, the chairs were elected first. A rather curious delay followed before the election of committee members by the parties. That is the sequence of delays that I mentioned.
Right. However, it was all part of the same reform.
Perhaps I should add for explanation that I had two jobs: I was chairman of the Justice Committee but I also chaired the Liaison Committee, which is the committee of all the chairmen. That had not been provided for—it was not an elected post. The previous practice was that somebody who was not the chair of a committee was appointed on a motion to the Liaison Committee on the basis that the committee would be kind enough to elect them chair. The members who had been elected to chair their committees and who would become the Liaison Committee when it was formally set up got together informally over a number of meetings to prepare for the changed system and came to the conclusion that they wanted to elect their own chair. I got landed with the job as a result of that process.
My other question concerns resources, which we have touched on a little. Has there been an increase in the amount of resources?
The Liaison Committee began an initiative about two years ago—that is, just over halfway through the Parliament—to enhance the resources that were available to select committees. As a result, the House of Commons has made a commitment of just short of £1 million of expenditure from within the total house budget—it is not additional money—to enhance the resources of committees in a variety of ways. Some of the money is to offer better support to chairs of committees, some of it is to improve our use of technology and social media as a means of disseminating the committees’ work and some of it is to strengthen the press assistance that is available to committees.
In the new Parliament, the members will have access to increased resources as a result of work that the Liaison Committee did.
I do not see anyone else who is bursting to come in with further questions. Is there anything that we might usefully be informed about that we have not questioned you about? Do you wish to make any brief concluding remarks?
You have covered the ground pretty thoroughly. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of anything that you have missed. Obviously, you must make a judgment that is based on your Parliament. I suppose that the question that you have to answer initially is whether the election of conveners would strengthen the ability of committees to do their scrutiny role and strengthen the position of the legislature in relation to the executive in ways that would benefit Scotland. That is a judgment not for me but for you.
Thank you very much for your contribution, which I found interesting and informative. I think that I am entitled to say that on behalf of the entire committee.
I suspend the meeting for five minutes before we move on to the next item.
10:29 Meeting suspended.