Poor bloody infantry: membership of select committees
We concentrate on the performances and styles of select committee chairs, but any committee needs a quorum to function
I’ve written elsewhere about the status and influence of select committee chairs, and it is a subject to which I will no doubt return. But there is an often-overlooked aspect of the work of committees, which is the other members, however many they may be. They are the necessary ballast and allow the committee to function (the quorum for most departmental committees is three, or the chair plus two). However, they should not think of themselves as spear-carriers or room meat, merely set dressing for the chair. A good chair will know his members and their strengths, weaknesses and special interests, and managing an evidence session involves guiding them like a conductor guides an orchestra.
However, one must also understand the mentality of “ordinary” members of a select committee. One of my earliest but most important realisations as a committee clerk was that we operated from a completely different perspective from members. For them, it was one of many duties they performed in the House, and in terms of live action it would amount to anywhere between a couple of hours one day a week to three hours or more twice a week. (Committees can meet more often than but would only do so in a crisis, in my experience.)
Some members would read their papers diligently, some would skim and some would grab a new set from a member of staff as they entered the room. Some would be on committees in which they’d always had an interest; honourable mention here must go to Sir William Cash, chair of the European Scrutiny Committee, on which he has sat since 1985. Yes, 1985. Others, though few will admit this outside Westminster, are there either without enthusiasm or even against their will. Places must be filled and sometimes there are committees not sufficiently attractive prima facie to entice a full complement of MPs. Whips will then generally twist some arms.
The staff of the committee will understand all of this; if they do not immediately, they will quickly come to do so. For them, as I quickly learned, the committee is their whole working life, their reason for coming in to Westminster and the reason they are given a salary. The week falls into pre-meeting, meeting and post-meeting, and that is as it should be. Much of the routine work which has to be done will never trouble the members, and may not even trouble the chair. But a committee staff member who fails to grasp this dissonance, between members and staff, will not live a happy life.
The style of the chair will have a major influence. Some are almost obsessively consensual, dodging conflict wherever possible and hoping to make any decisions without disagreement. This is no mean thing: certainly when it comes to agreeing reports, a committee which agrees its reports unanimously will have a much stronger basis for pressing the government with its recommendations than if the document was driven through by a majority, especially a partisan one. Chairs who represent an opposition party will always be aware that they cannot command through crude party loyalty a majority on their own committee for anything, and are wise to approach decisions more inclusively.
Most chairs, like a good many MPs in general, will have something of the tyrant about them. This is more the case since 2010, now that many of them are elected by the whole House and keenly aware of the mandate that gives them. They will have a close relationship with the clerk and the rest of the committee team, and will take a strong lead in terms of agendas, scrutiny and inquiries. Such chairs should—but may not always—acknowledge the wishes and priorities of the other members, and keep an eye on the partisan effect of the committee’s image. Members will become restive if they feel the committee is forever criticising the government, or lauding its extraordinary achievements.
When committees are formed at the beginning of each parliament, new MPs will often be deployed, or their as-yet-undimmed enthusiasm exploited, to fill the membership of committees. This is done by internal elections within the different parties, but it is unrealistic to imagine that these elections, unlike those of the whole House for chairs, produce results which differ hugely from what the whips would have arranged. So the neophytes may find themselves in committees with unfamiliar policy areas.
New MPs often speak of feeling overawed when they first sit on a select committee. Some of this may be for effect, but it is easy in any new institution to imagine that everyone else knows exactly what to do while you are left floundering. They ought not. Anyone who gets as far as the House of Commons will have some of the skills essential for serving on a committee: hiding gaps in your knowledge, bluffing, speaking when you have something, however slight, to say, and sensing with whom you should agree. There is a good chance that the chair may indeed have considerable subject expertise, but other members may well not.
The most important thing for members of select committees to learn is that HELP IS AVAILABLE. It is an understandable fallacy but a fallacy nonetheless that the clerk and the staff work for the chair; I cannot say too often (and I had to say quite often when I was a clerk) that the committee staff works for the whole committee and is available for help, advice and guidance. Much of this help will be provided to you automatically. For each evidence session you will receive a briefing on the subject and suggested questions for the witnesses, and you can make these a life raft or a serving suggestion as you wish. Any formal activity of the committee will come with some kind of helpful notes, and if you read these, you will not go far wrong, nor embarrass yourself in public.
But committee staff are (seriously) happy to help. If you ask a member of staff for advice or clarification on a certain point, you will be met not only with politeness but likely enthusiasm. The staff are really, really good at what they do, and know a huge amount both about the subject matter of the committee and about Parliament more generally. Even if a question stumps them, they will know whom to ask and will happily connect you with that expert.
A great deal depends on the attitude of members of committees. If you are engaged and diligent, and you make your interest known to the chair, you will likely be invited to contribute on your special interests in evidence sessions. If your questioning is deft and uncovers interesting information, you will probably be allowed to pursue these matters at greater length. The chair is the ringmaster when it comes to calling on members to ask questions, and most try to be fair, but it is simple logic that if you do a good job you will get more leeway and time.
Some members will engage after careful reading and study. There is no substitute for knowing your stuff, and you will have to work hard to be more familiar with the subject than a lot of witnesses: they are, after all, generally called because they are experts. You may feel obligated to do this, or you may have your interest piqued. (Do not worry; there will always be members who come in and say as little as possible but make sure their presence is recorded.)
Others—more gifted, for good or ill—have by instinct or training the ability to seize the essence of an argument, digest it and then engage immediately in debate upon it. As neither is now in the Commons, I will mention two whose ability in this regard particularly struck me.
Jim Dowd, the Labour MP for Lewisham from 1992 to 2017, had enjoyed a brief government career in the first flush of the Blair administration, but by the time I encountered him in 2005 he was an experienced member of the Health Committee. I hope he would not mind me saying that by that time he was not a man to create work for its own sake, and he rarely joined our meetings when they started at 9.00 am on Thursdays. He would arrive and almost always sit next to me, and would often ask for clarification on what the committee was discussing that morning. Perhaps he had forgotten, perhaps he had not read his papers very closely. That is not a matter for me.
Jim had an extraordinary ability to catch up with the flow of a meeting. He would (it seemed to me) skim-read the briefing the staff had provided, listen to a few minutes of back-and-forth with the witnesses, and would then often raise his hand to indicate to the chair (Kevin Barron) that he wished to intervene. His swiftness of comprehension was dazzling to watch. He asked blunt but not rude questions, which often managed to strip out a lot of obfuscatory detail, and would then have the nous to run with the ball which he had picked up. Time and again, he would either clarify something which no-one else had been able to do, or he would ask a question which staff had been longing to hear asked. It was a high-risk strategy, but in a year serving that committee, I never saw him slip up or get caught out. I think he just “got” issues very quickly and could achieve clarity with exceptional speed.
The second member who was very skilled in this matter was Simon Reevell. He had a cameo appearance as Conservative MP for Dewsbury in West Yorkshire from 2010 to 2015. (Improbably, given his polished tones, he is a native of the West Riding.) Simon was a barrister by trade, specialising in courts-martial after injury had forced him to leave the Army, and his time at the bar had honed his quick wit and tenacious inquiry. He and I encountered each other, again improbably, on the Scottish Affairs Committee; during the 2010 Parliament there was only one Conservative MP in Scotland, David Mundell, and he was guaranteed a ministerial place at the Scotland Office, so the available places on the Scottish Affairs Committee were filled by Tory MPs who were themselves Scottish—Eleanor Laing came on board briefly—or had some other, however slight, connection with Scotland. Julian Smith, later a fine Northern Ireland Secretary but at that point a rather wild-eyed right-winger, turned out to have been born in Stirling; Mike Freer, the MP for Finchley, had spent some time at Stirling’s university; and Sir James Paice, a gentleman-farmer from the Fens, owned a herd of Highland cattle (I swear that I never found a closer link to Scotland than that).
So by some quirk of fate Simon joined my committee, perhaps mollified by assurances from the chair, the Glasgow Labourite Ian Davidson, that he need not attend more often than he found convenient. The Conservative members took this dispensation to heart—it was a perfectly fair bargain they had reached with the chair—but Simon did turn up from time to time, and when he did, he was a model for the others which sadly they did not heed. He is mild-mannered but would seize a word or a phrase from a witness and pursue it with single-minded focus. If anyone had spoken carelessly, he would chase down the mistake and expose it. It was a demonstration of the barrister’s art: he was playing with the witnesses’ words almost theoretically, forcing them to measure against what they thought they’d said, or what they’d meant to say. He did it without unpleasantness or rancour, but it was hugely effective.
It would be unfair to dwell by name on some of the weaker members. Some would sit meekly and take the question or questions allotted to them, performing a basic function for the committee in getting an answer on the record where it could then be used as evidence. Sometimes, however, even this humble task proved a bit much. It wasn’t frequent, but I have sat listening to members fail even to read out a question printed in front of them, chewing my fist in embarrassment or trying to hide somehow. All I can say is that Parliament does indeed represent the country, and some of our citizens simply aren’t very bright. They, too, deserve to be represented.
My essential message here is that simply being an “ordinary” member of a select committee is not a dead end. If you have the interest, the talent and the diligence (or even two out of three), you can be an effective inquisitor and properly scrutinise public policy in the way committees are supposed to do. Of course you will not have the influence of a committee chair (or the additional salary), but there is work to be done, if you want to do it.