Andrew spoke about the 2010 intake of new MPs, the coalition in the Commons, new time frames they work to, Select Committees, backbench business and scrutiny in the House, concentrating on recent developments and emerging issues.
Lecture transcript
Good morning. I am going to talk to you about a number of recent developments and emerging issues that are happening in Parliament.
My name is Andrew Kennon and I am Clerk of Committees in the House of Commons which involves responsibility for Select Committee activities – the system, powers and resources - as well as putting on a wig and gown and advising Members and the Speaker in the Chamber.
The six aspects I am going to cover are the 2010 intake of new MPs, the coalition in the Commons, the new time frames they are working to, fourthly Select Committees, fifthly backbench business and finally a bit about scrutiny in the House.
I am hoping I will provoke you into a lively discussion afterwards and we can follow up on a whole range of things, whatever you want to talk about.
Firstly the 2010 intake of new MPs.
2010 intake of new MPs
Every school is used to the idea that each autumn you get a new year group joining, perhaps 20 per cent of the school, starting at the bottom. In each university every autumn perhaps you get a third new students coming in.
But the 232 new MPs who joined the House of 650 Members in May 2010 - a House I have to say quite demoralised by the expenses scandal - that constituted nearly 40 per cent of the House. Now that is not quite as big a turnover as we had in 1997 but arguably it is a more significant renewal of the body politic.
It is clear that the 2010 new MPs have made a great impact on the House. I think it might be quite an interesting area for future academic study to see how much difference they make over the years ahead as well.
Some characteristics are obvious – in terms of gender, ethnic background and disability the House is much more diverse. We also for the first time have the leader of the Green Party, a member of the Northern Ireland Alliance party as well as an MP independent of party.
More subtly, quite a number of the new Members have come to the House without a full past career in politics – so they bring to the House wider experience of the private sector, the voluntary sector and the public sector.
So a lot more experience has come in, particularly as there are some Members who have come in, in their forties and fifties.
And also, as Philip Cowley of Nottingham University has pointed out, this generation of new MPs are quite independent-minded – they are quite more willing to stray from the party line when voting.
In some cases this reflects the way in which they were chosen – for instance Dr Sarah Wollaston was chosen as a Conservative Party candidate in Devon as a result of an open primary, you could say gives her a greater degree of authority and independence
But there are two things I have observed in particular - and make me proud to work for the House - the commitment of these new Members to public service and how they really apply their knowledge of their constituency in pursuing their objectives.
This applies on all sides of the House. As I sat in the Chamber - in clerkly wig and gown - in the summer of 2010 listening to all the maiden speeches, I heard Members showing great understanding of the issues in their constituencies and a genuine passion for making things better.
That spirit has continued long after the maiden speeches have been printed and framed.
The important thing here, however, is to make sure that the House continues to attract capable people contributing to improving the running of the country.
And one of the interesting things we will see as we lead up to the next election is that with the number of MPs reduced from 650 to 600, many of those existing seats will have to be contesting some sort of reselection procedure for constituencies with revised boundaries; so that will generate quite a lot of political interest.
The coalition in the House of Commons
Secondly I was going to talk about the coalition. I have often been asked how well parliamentary procedure works with a coalition government – something which has not happened since 1945. The short answer is: it works surprisingly well.
Before the general election we did some work on scenario-planning on what might happen if no party won a majority. Twice in my career here which goes back nearly 35 years I have seen situations where a party doesn’t have an effective working majority.
One of the conclusions I came to is that parliamentary procedure is not just a book called Erskine May but it is a bit like a garden tool shed – there are some tools you use every day or every week and there are in the back corner that maybe you only need to get out every ten or twenty years.
A simple example is the casting vote, the Speaker only needs to exercise a casting vote if votes are tied, and clearly, in a situation where no party has got a majority, you are perhaps more likely to get tied votes than you would do when the Government has a clear majority.
We felt reasonably prepared for those situations but were quite surprised that actually a coalition was formed, a coalition which was able to command a majority in the House.
It has settled down in the House surprisingly easily – it is fascinating seeing Conservative and Liberal Democrat backbenchers on the same side of the House referring to each other as "my honourable friend" rather than "the honourable member opposite".
So most of the procedures have actually worked quite smoothly and slight adaptations have been made where necessary.
One aspect of this is that standing orders provide for there to be a second largest opposition party which has certain rights in debate and in time and the Liberal Democrats have obviously been in that situation for many years.
But now we have no official second largest opposition party and the benches on that side of the House are occupied by the Democratic Unionist Party, Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) of Northern Ireland, Alliance and Green – quite a range of people.
Interestingly enough quite a number of those political parties, although small and independent of each other, are used to working in the same political group in the European Parliament, so a degree of cohesion amongst them is something they are used to.
And I wonder whether there is any validity in my impression that actually those minor parties have got more attention in this parliament because they are not competing for space on those Opposition benches with the Liberal Democrats?
Thirdly let me talk about time frames.
New time frames in the House of Commons
One consequence of the coalition is that Parliament has passed the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011. I can now reveal, but not exclusively, that the next general election will take place on 7 May 2015.
In the past, Governments with a working majority have usually lasted for about four years or a bit more and then they have chosen the most propitious moment to go to the polls before the absolute deadline of five years. But in many other countries and certainly in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland there are absolute fixed terms when elections are held.
When the Bill was being discussed, one of the arguments being put forward was that we ought to have a fixed term but it ought to be four years instead of five. But it has now been decided that it will be a five year term. Now we wait to see how this works out in practice – my guess is there will be hidden benefits and probably unpredicted snags as well.
Another change is to alter the parliamentary year. The usual parliamentary session runs from November with the Queen's Speech through to the following November, so it was out of phase with both the financial year and a couple of months late on the academic year.
With elections normally held in May or June in recent decades, that meant the first session of a Parliament ran from May/June through the November to the November of the following year making it a very long session and the last session of the five year Parliament was a very short one.
So what the Government has now decided to do is to run the sessions from May to May - so in an ideal world we will have five equal one year length sessions in every Parliament. But to achieve that they have had to go for a two year session in this first stage of the Parliament so we are actually coming up to the end of nearly two years which is very odd.
One of the things that all statistics will show is that the number of Bills passed, questions asked, everything else in this session, will be exceptionally high and people may think 'why was that?', the answer is 'it is a very long session'.
So for those of you who are interested in statistics of that activity there is a simple solution to this, when you are trying to compare uneven things, just divide by the number of sitting days and it will show you the longer term trend.
The House will still carry on sitting for about 150/145 days a year spread over about 35 weeks and now we have much more information about when those sitting periods will be, so we have the dates already up to December 2012.
The current sitting week is a balance of two difficult things – two competing pressures on individual MPs time to work at Westminster and to work in their constituencies and also the different needs of Members whose constituencies are near London and those who are far away.
These are never easy things to reconcile. One thing to look out for is the current Procedure Committee inquiry into sitting times, and among the options being considered, and we may see developments on this, is an idea to move to more morning sittings with the House rising every evening early rather than at ten or ten-thirty at night as it does on Mondays and Tuesdays and dispensing with Fridays. Today is actually a non-sitting Friday but it might be a day on which we were considering Private Members' Bills.
I am now going to move on to my principal area of responsibility, which is Select Committees.
Select Committees in the House of Commons
The main role of Select Committees of course is to hold the Government to account - or perhaps ensure that the House makes a positive impact on Whitehall. I would like to think that even during the expenses scandal there were some parts of the House’s work which carried on commanding public respect.
Since the election there have been some interesting developments.
The first is the concept of the directly elected committee chairs. You will know that the party balance on a select committee reflects the party balance in the House.
So a committee of, say, 13, will have six Tories, one Liberal Democrat, five Labour and one minor party; it exactly reflects the balance of the House. For every size of committee, there is a calculation that says what the party balance will be.
In the past, once the members of a committee were appointed, they then chose the chairman from within themselves. In practice there were informal agreements about which party would have the chair of each committee – and that also reflected the party balance in the House.
This was thought to give too much influence to the party whips and so a new system was proposed by the Wright Committee shortly before the last election.
The new process is:
- Firstly you calculate what the party balance on each committee should be.
- Then there is agreement between the parties about which committees should have a Conservative chair, a Liberal Democrat chair, and a Labour chair.
- And then when that agreement has been formalised, we have elections to those slots. So if it is a committee, say the International Development Committee which is designated to have a Liberal Democrat chair, only a Liberal Democrat can stand for that, but the whole House can vote. In practice what has happened, particularly in the Liberal Democrat cases and in a number of others, is that the individual party put up only one candidate, so that person was elected unopposed. We did have quite a lot of competition for some of the committees, particularly those that are Conservative-led. I think I’m right in saying there were six candidates for the Foreign Affairs Committee, so there was quite a lot of voting. And the fact that there was a lot of interest in it is very good; it shows that these are sought after posts, and those elected chairs feel that they have got enhanced authority because they are directly elected by the House.
- After they were elected, then within each party there was a process of electing the other members of each committee, so each party has its own internal process for filling its slots on the committee.
So direct election of the chairs certainly has enhanced their standing. The fact that they were elected before the rest of the committee means they have got on with planning committee inquiries, and they are on the whole experienced members who have served in previous Parliaments, whereas most of the other committee members are part of the 2010 intake.
So, I think it will be very interesting to look at over the next few years and longer ahead how much of a difference this makes to our committee system and the standing of Parliament, and how attractive those posts are for Members as opposed to seeking advancement within their own parties and onto the front benches and Ministers.
A second important development recently has been pre-appointment hearings for public office holders. This has grown gradually over the years and if you are interested there was a study recently by the Constitution Unit at University College London (UCL).
The basic idea is not that committees select from among candidates for key posts, but that they should take evidence from and express an opinion on the person who has been selected by whatever process within the Government department and proposed by the Minister.
Committees tend to be more interested not in individual civil service appointments but in posts with some sort of oversight or regulatory role – for instance the Office of Fair Access to universities, the chief inspector of prisons; the head of Ofsted, the education examination body.
Those sort of posts which, understandably, Parliament feels they want to be assured that the people appointed to them are people of sufficient calibre and independence.
To ensure fairness of process and to avoid deterring good candidates, committees have to follow a strict procedure of what they can and cannot ask about - though ability to stand up to robust questioning in public is a requirement for all these posts anyway.
There have been dozens of these hearings so far but in only five cases has a committee recommended or reported against the candidate – I think in a number of these cases it has shown not so much weaknesses of the candidate, but weaknesses in the system for selecting them.
In three of the cases the candidate stood down, and in two other cases the Minister decided to go ahead with the appointment, even though the committee had recommended against it.
I think we’ll see this as an increasing growth area. To a certain extent we are mimicking what happens in the US Congress, and from time to time there are bound to be clashes on that.
The third area of select committees I should discuss is their powers.
Committees have long had powers to require the attendance of witnesses and the production of papers. In the rare cases where this has caused problems in the past, it has usually been when the committee are trying to get information from the Government, from Government officials or from Ministers.
You may have seen last summer that Rupert and James Murdoch were originally reluctant to appear before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee during their inquiry into phone-hacking.
The Committee then produced a formal order for them to attend, and they acceded and did come along, although the event was rather marred by a member of the public pressing a foam pie into Rupert Murdoch’s face. That Committee is now investigating whether other witnesses in the same inquiry misled the Committee.
There have been one or two other examples of people being reluctant to appear before committees, and the Public Accounts Committee also recently to put one witness on oath because they didn’t feel he was answering their questions fully.
The reality is that the House no longer has the power to fine or imprison people who refuse to attend or who mislead it. It is matter for discussion how serious a problem this is and whether there is any solution other than to involve the courts, which would involve the passing of legislation Perhaps we can talk about that later.
Can I leave you with one other thought we might discuss later – what are the implications for committees of the reduction in the number of Members to 600 and of a directly-elected House of Lords with its own committee system?
Now I want to talk about one completely new committee – the Backbench Business Committee.
The Backbench Business Committee
You may know that certain parliamentary days are set aside by Standing Orders or by convention for Opposition days, Private Members’ Bills, certain Debates, and within each day a certain amount of time is allocated for Questions and Adjournment Debates.
Apart from such set time, all other time is at the disposal of the Government – though it negotiates with the Opposition about what the business will be for the week or two ahead. The big change in this Parliament is that the Backbench Business Committee is given the right to choose subjects for debate on 35 days a year.
This is a really good example of how things can evolve in the House of Commons, partly through a flexible approach to procedure and partly through the dynamism of one or two individuals.
The chair of that Committee, Natascha Engel, she herself has made a huge impact through the way she has led that Committee. The Committee conducts a sort of 'Dragons Den' each Tuesday, at which MPs pitch for the subjects they would like debated.
New Members in particular have been assiduous about using these opportunities, often combining with colleagues from other parts of the House to ensure the House debates matters which might not otherwise get aired. The key thing is that this provides a chance for a specific proposal to be put to the House in a motion rather than in a general debate which leads to no specific conclusion.
Inevitably, demand exceeds supply and the Committee is dependent on the Government allocating specific days - usually Thursdays. Although such debates command high interest among Members - more interest than general debates in the past - it is not always popular for a motion to be voted on as well as debated on a Thursday, partly because Members are often wanting to head back to their constituencies then.
If the Government disagrees with the motion it understandably expects its own backbenchers to stay behind in the House to help vote it down – at a time when that is not always convenient for Members. There have been some memorable debates on prisoners voting rights, Afghanistan, the Hillsborough tragedy etc.
This has led to a certain creative tension - some might think that the most effective motions have been those which push the government just a little bit in the direction it does not want to go but not so far that it will turn out a whipped vote against the motion.
It remains to be seen, I think, what the long term impact will be in Whitehall and on specific policy changes.
One awkward problem has been the Government’s decision to go ahead with an electronic petition system - within government but with an undertaking that Parliament would debate any petitions that got more than 100,000 signatures. The Government then said that these debates will need to come out of backbench time.
Sometimes the objective of the petition does fit in with the priorities of backbenchers for debate; sometimes it doesn’t.
I would be interested to hear what you feel, or what impact you have registered of the Backbench Business Committee.
Finally I am going to come to scrutiny in the House, returning from committees.
Scrutiny in the House of Commons
I would like to draw your attention to two developments and indicate some changes perhaps in long-standing practices.
However secure the coalition is in terms of a parliamentary majority and with three years to go before an election, it does get questioned on the floor of the House.
Oral questions come round for each department about once every four or five weeks, and now include topical questions. Prime Ministers Questions continues to be the focal point of each Parliamentary week. But in the period immediately after those questions sessions and before main business, the Government is under increasing scrutiny.
As the Leader of the House has pointed out, the Government has made more statements than its predecessors and the questioning on those often runs for an hour or more. Equally the Speaker has allowed more Urgent Questions than his predecessors. So on most days there is either a Statement or an Urgent Question, if not both, to hold the Government to account on a topical matter of the day.
On the other hand we may begin to see a decline in the famous Early Day Motion – traditionally a way an individual member can express an opinion and canvass support from others – whether on a matter of public policy or the success of the local football team. There was a debate recently in which new Members in particular expressed doubts about the continued usefulness of this device.
At the same time the volume of parliamentary questions for written answer remains high but there is dissatisfaction with the timeliness and quality of answers. In a world where much more government information is available on the internet, there is an argument that the quantity of questions is defeating quality.
So I’d be interested to hear what you think about that. Have we moved on or is it still a valid device?
That’s where I’m going to stop now and I am very happy to answer any questions or get a discussion going on any points which you want to raise.
END