Andrew Tyrie: Select committees are bringing back democracy

THE elections for chairmanship and membership of select committees brought renewed energy to Westminster before the summer recess. What began as an experiment with elections five years ago is becoming entrenched, empowering Parliament, and for the better.

Democracy is making committees more independent, more meaningful, more responsive and more effective. As a result, Parliament is reviving as an institution after decades of post-war executive dominance, capped by the recent expenses scandal. Everyone – government, back benchers and the wider public – seems to agree that select committees matter.

Most agree that they were a success in the 2010-15 Parliament. The Home Affairs Committee investigated G4S and the Olympics, the Public Accounts Committee pursued multinational companies’ tax minimisation and the Treasury Committee’s persistence achieved major reforms to the Bank of England. Parliament had the self-confidence to entrust the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards to investigate a major public scandal, the first such inquiry for a century.

Decision-makers – not only ministers but also quangos, companies and powerful individuals – can now expect to be required to explain their actions. The media are watching. This can be double-edged, though. Select committees will need to resist the temptation to play to the gallery, even at the cost of the odd headline.

Select committees are increasingly offering a new style of political discourse, less adversarial and partisan, more conversational. Their cross-party work fits increasingly with how voters wish to take much of their politics. It also matches more closely what people see and experience in their daily lives.

Executive recidivism – an understandable desire to rein back the independence and effectiveness of committees – remains a risk. Committees do not exist to make life easy for ministers and Whitehall.

So select committees need to entrench their gains. Their role in public appointments, which has grown in recent years, should be strengthened further by building on the precedent of the Treasury Committee’s veto on senior appointments and dismissals at the Office for Budget Responsibility. The liaison committee’s three sessions a year with the Prime Minister should probably be more frequent, and more topical. Parliament should at least consider proportionate, useable sanctions against those who refuse to give evidence or provide papers.

Committees could consider new ways of scrutinising the executive. For example, they may conclude that there is merit in sending specialist advisers into quangos, to check out their concerns from within, as the Treasury Committee did with the Financial Services Authority (now the Financial Conduct Authority), in order to get to the bottom of the failures of RBS and HBOS. Quangos should not be permitted to investigate themselves – at least on big issues like bank failures – without external, preferably Parliamentary, oversight.

For the first time in a hundred years, Parliament had the self-confidence to launch and run its own inquiry into a major scandal. The Banking Commission set a valuable precedent for Parliament, creating a new tool of parliamentary inquiry – in this case to investigate Libor.

Parliament would probably add more heat than light were it to seek to set up a similar inquiry each time a plausible opportunity arose. The Banking Commission worked because what it sought to examine was amenable to a particular type of Parliamentary investigation. It was addressing a clear and identifiable problem with a high level of public concern and salience, and capable of being addressed with proposals for reform. It was able to muster all-party agreement at the time of its creation. And it was a problem not better dealt with by an existing Select Committee, a judge or expert-led inquiry. The conditions for use of such inquiries will recur, sooner or later. When they do, Parliament should seize the opportunity.

Not long ago, the power of government looked set to reduce Parliament to little more than a prime ministerial poodle. After the expenses scandal, one could not be sure even about the dignity. Yet that crisis has triggered a Parliamentary revival, led by more independent and effective committees. The poodle is biting back.

Andrew Tyrie is Chairman of the Treasury Committee and Conservative MP for Chichester. ‘The Poodle Bites Back’ is published by the Centre for Policy Studies.