New select committee chairs (2)

Another 18 committees now have chairs, including those which oversee Whitehall departments, so who are potential stars? This is an initial examination

Today the House of Commons elected chairs for most of its select committees. On Monday, eight chairs were announced who had been the only candidates, and I looked briefly at them yesterday. But 18 chairs were elected today (the result for chair of the Scottish Affairs Committee, which I once clerked, will be announced tomorrow, but the contenders are Gregor Poynton and Patricia Ferguson). These are important results for how the House of Commons scrutinises policy and holds the government to account over the next four or five years, so they should be examined in detail, but at this stage I just want to set out the results and highlight a few points of interest.

The successful candidates were as follows:

• Business and Trade: Liam Byrne (Lab)

• Defence: Tan Dhesi (Lab)

• Education: Helen Hayes (Lab)

• Energy Security and Net Zero: Bill Esterson (Lab)

• Environmental Audit: Toby Perkins (Lab)

• Foreign Affairs: Emily Thornberry (Lab)

• Home Affairs: Dame Karen Bradley (Con)

• Housing, Communities and Local Government: Florence Eshalomi (Lab)

• International Development: Sarah Champion (Lab)

• Justice: Andy Slaughter (Lab)

• Procedure: Cat Smith (Lab)

• Public Accounts: Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Con)

• Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs: Simon Hoare (Con)

• Science, Innovation and Technology: Chi Onwurah (Lab)

• Standards: Alberto Costa (Con)

• Transport: Ruth Cadbury (Lab)

• Women and Equalities: Sarah Owen (Lab)

• Work and Pensions: Debbie Abrahams (Lab)

I made some predictions about select committee chairs in July; I guessed that Liam Byrne and Sarah Champion would seek to stay on in their existing roles, and both were re-elected; and I identified Patricia Ferguson as a possible candidate for Scottish Affairs and Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown for the Public Accounts Committee. I’ll take that as a reasonable rate of return, given that I didn’t know at that point which parties would be given which committees.

There will be some disappointed Members of Parliament this evening. Sir David Davis (who previously chaired the committee 1997-2001) and John Glen were strong candidates for the Public Accounts Committee. Barry Gardiner has declared his interest in the Environmental Audit Committee early and had campaigned hard, though this odd video may have been a step too far for some of his colleagues. Derek Twigg, who stood for chair of the Defence Committee, is a veteran MP who was a defence minister (2006-08) and sat on the committee (2013-15 and 2020-24). Dawn Butler, defeated for the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, is a senior and high-profile Member (though I have had disagreements with her in cyberspace) and was a more than plausible committee chair.

Nevertheless, every election means unsuccessful candidates. It is worth noting that none of the winners is a new MP: there had been some bristling among longer serving MPs at those newcomers who stood for chair positions, but the House seems to have decided against novelty (except on Scottish Affairs, where both candidates are newly elected). My former colleague Dr Hannah White, director of the Institute for Government, suggested a new MP should not be disbarred from being a select committee chair:

As Sarah Wollaston and Rory Stewart [then Tory MPs] demonstrated in the 2010 parliament, there is no reason why a first term MP cannot be an effective select committee chair. Although a new MP chair would be well advised to reflect and learn from the experience of his or her predecessors, it can be a very good thing to have an injection of energy and new thinking into the select committee system at regular intervals.

Up to a point I agree, though both Wollaston and Stewart were elected late in the 2010 Parliament, when they had been MPs for four years rather than being fresh to the House. (I also am something of a Wollaston sceptic; I didn’t think she was an outstanding performer and there was something about her manner which sat poorly with me. But that may have been a ‘me’ thing.) Certainly I wouldn’t say a new MP should never chair a select committee. However, I think some experience of the Commons, of procedure, of working with colleagues across the House and of understanding its atmosphere, is very valuable.

At this stage, let me just highlight a few new chairs who will be significant players in the Commons during this parliament.

Foreign Affairs Committee

The most obvious, perhaps, is Emily Thornberry. Shadow attorney general from 2021 to 2024, and having served in senior shadow cabinet positions under Jeremy Corbyn and Sir Keir Starmer, she was surprised not to be given a ministerial post in July and was the highest profile casualty of the Labour Party’s transition from opposition to government. The role of attorney general went to an outsider, Richard (now Lord) Hermer KC, who had worked with Starmer at Doughty Street Chambers in the 1990s and 2000s and acted as his junior in several cases. Thornberry was understandably disappointed and didn’t work too hard to conceal the fact—why should she?—but quickly identified the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee as a possible new role as a backbencher.

Thornberry has some experience in foreign affairs though she would not be described as a “specialist”. Significantly, she was shadow foreign secretary from 2016 to 2020 (although she had an early row with Sky News’s Dermot Murnaghan when he tried to catch her out with some unexpected questions), she had spent six months as shadow defence secretary from January to June 2016 (again there was a “gotcha” moment when she was overheard asking what “Defcon One” meant) and she served as shadow international trade secretary for nearly two years in 2020-21.

She is a difficult person to judge. Her manner is spontaneous and natural, to which some people warm, but it can lead to her making remarks which are unwise or have consequences: famously, she had to resign from the Labour front bench in 2014 after posting a photograph from the Rochester and Strood by-election on social media which appeared to sneer at a house displaying flags of St George, with a white van parked outside. When she said in 2018 as shadow foreign secretary that popular support for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria had been “underestimated”, she may have had a valid point but it was expressed clumsily and raised eyebrows.

Thornberry sought to contest the Labour Party leadership in 2020 and was able to find 22 fellow MPs to sign her nomination papers but could not muster the backing of the required number of constituency parties and affiliated organisations, which may sum her up, in a way: she unquestionably has ability, and at the despatch box was often sharp and incisive. But she has as many detractors as supporters, ironically probably for the same reason, those either put off or made uncomfortable by her manner as opposed to those who are attracted to it. She will need to cultivate a greater degree of collegiality to be an effective select committee chair, and will have to balance her own fierce views with those of the other members of the committee (when they are chosen). At the same time, she is likely to be a formidable inquisitor and an able champion of the committee’s interests.

Home Affairs Committee

I was surprised that the behind-the-scenes negotiations over which parties would chair which committees resulted in the Conservatives being awarded the high-profile Home Affairs Committee. Chairs are allocated in proportion to strength in the House of Commons, so Labour have taken the majority of committees, and in 1997, when Sir Tony Blair won a landslide of a similar scale to Starmer’s, Labour only ceded four departmental committees to opposition parties: Conservative MPs chaired the Agriculture, International Development and Northern Ireland Affairs committees, while the Social Security Committee was given to a Liberal Democrat. It may be that the Labour whips were playing an elaborate game of three-dimensional chess and thought that allowing a Conservative MP to chair the Home Affairs Committee will somehow exacerbate internal divisions over immigration and borders; if so, I think that was excessively ambitious. Four beats to the bar, lads.

Dame Karen Bradley beat fellow former cabinet minister David Mundell to the influential post of chair. A friendly and approachable former tax manager at KPMG, she was elected for Staffordshire Moorlands in 2010 and made rapid progress up the ladder of promotion: a junior whip in 2012, promoted within the Whips’ Office in 2013, junior Home Office minister in 2014 and then elevated to cabinet in 2016 by Theresa May, being appointed culture, media and sport secretary. At the beginning of 2018, she moved unexpectedly to the Northern Ireland Office when the late James Brokenshire stood down due to ill health, and she was not a success in that complicated and demanding post. The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee criticised her inaction on potential discrimination against military and police veterans from the province, and in September 2018 she was interviewed by The House magazine and made an extraordinary admission. “I had no idea how wonderful Northern Ireland was,” she began unpromisingly.

I freely admit that when I started this job, I didn’t understand some of the deep-seated and deep-rooted issues that there are in Northern Ireland. I didn’t understand things like when elections are fought for example in Northern Ireland, people who are nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice-versa. So, the parties fight for the election within their own community. Actually, the unionist parties fight the elections against each other in unionist communities and nationalists in nationalist communities. That’s a very different world from the world I came from.

This was either refreshing honesty or catastrophic naïveté. She was not included in Boris Johnson’s government in July 2019, but for the last parliament she was chair of the House of Commons Procedure Committee. It is very much an inward-facing role but a vital one, and she was widely regarded as an effective and popular chair, dealing with potentially difficult issues like social distancing and remote working during the Covid-19 pandemic and the scrutiny of a foreign secretary in the House of Lords after David Cameron’s return to cabinet in November 2023. She also served as co-chair of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation dear to my heart, and stood for election as a deputy speaker of the House in July, missing out on the third and last position to Caroline Nokes by only nine votes.

Bradley clearly has the temperament and experience to manage a select committee in a consensual, collegiate manner. Although she is only 54, she is presumably not seeking a return to front-line politics (though many stranger things have happened) and will not seek to use the Home Affairs Committee as a platform for personal ambition. But she needs to be ready for some sharp and politically charged moments, given how prominent issues of immigration and law enforcement have already been in the new government’s short lifetime. It will be interesting to see whether she has priorities of her own she wishes to explore, or whether she is content to act more as a referee while other committee members pursue particular interests.

(One should note that both the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, and the policing minister, Dame Diana Johnson, are former chairs of the Home Affairs Committee.)

Housing, Communities and Local Government

This is a policy area which has had perhaps more names over the decades than any other: local government and planning; housing and local government; local government and regional planning; environment; environment, transport and the regions; transport, local government and the regions; communities and local government; housing, communities and local government; levelling up, housing and communities. When the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, was appointed to head the Whitehall department in July, she decided to scrap the “levelling up” part of its title, as it had been a particularly Conservative policy, and it was renamed the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. (Anyone who can provide a rationale for it being a “ministry” rather than a “department” wins a prize.)

For many years, scrutiny of this unglamorous but central policy area was the domain of Labour MP Clive Betts, a former leader of Sheffield City Council who chaired the select committee through three separate identities from 2010 to 2024. Replacing him is Florence Eshalomi, MP for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (previously Vauxhall) since 2019. She was previously a member of the London Assembly for Lambeth and Southwark, and chaired its Transport Committee. Appointed an opposition whip in April 2020, she resigned that December after abstaining on the Future Trade Agreement between the UK and the EU, but in May 2021 became parliamentary private secretary to Angela Rayner as deputy leader of the opposition. Eshalomi then served as spokesman on the Cabinet Office (2022-23) and democracy (2023-24), but was not given a ministerial position after July’s general election.

Eshalomi is relatively young and inexperienced for a select committee chair, having served only one parliament, though she was a member of the predecessor to her new committee in 2021 and 2022 as well as serving on the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the Committee on the Future Relationship with the European Union and the Speaker’s Conference examining working conditions in the House of Commons. More striking, however, is that she chairs the committee scrutinising a department headed by her former boss: she was Rayner’s PPS and then served under her on the front bench from 2022 to 2024. One website perhaps mischievously spoke of her as part of Rayner’s “faction”, although it was careful to distinguish between Eshalomi, “from the right wing of the party”, and Rayner, “positioned from the soft left”. This connection is hardly a disqualification but it is unusual.

Housing, Communities and Local Government covers some issues of central importance not just to the government but to voters. The housing crisis is almost a cliché of British politics now, and Rayner has made major statements on regional devolution, housing targets and planning reform. The portfolio also includes building regulations, acutely relevant given the recent report of the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire, and the department has just introduced the Renters’ Rights Bill to strengthen the rights of tenants and impose additional duties on landlords.

Eshalomi has a delicate course to navigate. At 43, she can still expect a substantial political career, and while she was passed over in July, there is no reason why she should not aspire to ministerial office. It is worth noting that nine current members of the government, including four cabinet ministers, have previously chaired select committees. She may need to demonstrate her independence from the executive, especially given her close association with Rayner, but she will find little reward in a confrontational and antagonistic approach. Ultimately she should aim for the Platonic ideal of select committee scrutiny, robust but fair and constructive criticism, but, like most Platonic ideas, it is not easy to achieve.

Conclusion

Other policies will come into the select committee spotlight from time to time: the Justice Committee under Andy Slaughter will want to examine the government’s approach to sentencing, probation and the prison system; Tan Dhesi as chair of the Defence Committee can expect the publication of the Strategic Defence Review in the first half of next year as well as ongoing arguments over spending; the Transport Committee’s new chair, Ruth Cadbury, has a gradually renationalised rail network and policy on aviation and electric vehicles to scrutinise. No doubt this is a subject I will be returning to frequently.