Will no-one think of the accountability?!

Last week Rishi Sunak shuffled Whitehall, and there will be repercussions in Westminster

Last week I wrote two pieces on the machinery of government changes in Whitehall, one anticipating them and the second looking back and analysing them. I accept that this is already high-level geekery, of interest to few outside the civil service and the Institute for Government. I’ve explained elsewhere that I have an odd fascination for the structure of Whitehall, partly for organisational and systemic reasons and partly because how the personalities interact keeps me rapt. I can trace the evolution of the Department of Trade and Industry from October 1970 to the present day with excessive ease and alacrity. So I accept without rancour (there’s a great SDP-related joke to be made but no-one these days understands it and it loses a lot in explanation) that this is a consideration which will have occurred to a very select band, and that is no criticism.

One of the lesser-noticed knock-on effects of machinery of government changes is on the select committees of the House of Commons. If a department is simply rebranded, such as when the Department for Constitutional Affairs was transformed into the Ministry of Justice in the summer of 2007, then it is an easy enough matter to rename the relevant departmental select committee, usually without a significant time lag. If there are more substantial changes, with departmental portfolios being swapped around among organisations, the renaming of the select committee can take more time as it is decided whether it is a new committee or simply one with a new title. This matters because there are term limits on chairs’ tenure, so it makes an important difference if a Member simply rolls over into his (say) fourth year as chair or is deemed now to be chair of a new committee and the clock reset to zero.

A quick recap for casual readers: each government department is scrutinised by a select committee which is responsible for examining the expenditure, policies and administration of the department. (There are exceptions to this: for example, there was no committee to supervise the Northern Ireland Office until 1994, whereas the Scottish Office and Welsh Office had oversight from the beginning of the system in 1979.) The current system, which seems admirably, and perhaps unusually, logical; it stems from the dying days of the Callaghan government in 1978-79.

Select committees—that is, literally, a committee of MPs selected from the membership of the House for a specific purpose—are very old. They first enter the written records in 1571, when the Journal of the House of Commons notes the appointment of various committees, but it is likely that they are much older than that, perhaps almost as old as the Commons itself. However, there was no systematic and ongoing form of scrutiny of government in the sense we understand now until the relatively recent past. Similar ideas had been entertained in the 1960s, when Richard Crossman was leader of the House of Commons, but the real life spirit of the modern committee system was kindled in the late 1970s.

In June 1976, the House of Commons passed a resolution to set up a select committee on procedure “to consider the practice and procedure of the House in relation to public business and to make recommendations for the more effective performance of its functions”. It did not hurry about its work, and took evidence for many months, eventually issuing its report on 3 August 1978 (very little good happens in Parliament in August, as MPs’ patience will be almost at its end, it is often fearsomely hot in the Palace of Westminster, and there is a sense that they should not be here). While The Times hailed it as “a historic document in British parliamentary history”, the government had never been enthusiastic about the committee’s direction of travel; no government sincerely welcomes more effective scrutiny, and the committee’s proposal for a coherent set of committees to keep the administration honest was clearly likely to entail awkward questions to ministers and time-consuming explanations of policy.

For several reasons, one, of course, being that the government was hesitant at best, the Conservative opposition championed the ideas in the Procedure Committee report. For once, a party was loyal to a pledge which could easily have been forgotten and would cause them inconvenience, and after the general election of 1979, the newly appointed leader of the House of Commons, the inimitable, irrepressible and sometimes inexplicable Norman St John Stevas, kept the proposals alive, and on 12 June 1979 moved a motion to appoint 12 select committees “to examine the expenditure, administration and policy of the principal government departments”.

These committees did not reflect the departmental structure of Whitehall in every detail. For example, a committee on industry and trade was proposed which would scrutinise the Department of Trade and the Department of Industry, which had been separated in 1974, though they would be reunited as the familiar DTI in 1983; there was also a “Treasury and Civil Service Committee” which would look into the affairs of HM Treasury, the Civil Service Department (which was abolished in 1981, its functions split between the prime minister’s office and the Cabinet Office), the Inland Revenue and HM Customs and Excise; a deliberate decision was taken to exclude two small departments, the Lord Chancellor’s Department and the Law Officers’ Department in order to preserve the independence of the judiciary and the prosecutorial system; there was not at first provision for committees to supervise the Scottish and Welsh Offices, because the previous government’s plans for devolution were still being picked apart and the outcome uncertain; and there was not to be a Northern Ireland Affairs Committee for another 15 years, on the grounds that the government (somewhat optimistically, as it would turn out) hoped for the resumption of some kind of devolved administration in the near future.

Nevertheless (I realise this has been a lengthy explanation, but I think it might be useful for the rest of this essay), the essential architecture of select committees created permanently—the proposals, if agreed to, were to be inserted into the Commons Standing Orders—and maintaining continuous scrutiny of government policy was established when the motion was agreed to in the early hours of the next morning. The membership of the committees was not agreed until November, but the ball had been set rolling; and the principle of the committee structure is now so well entrenched that it is beyond political debate.

(Not everyone thought it was a beneficial innovation beyond peradventure: I had a colleague, now retired and who will remain nameless, who had joined the House of Commons as a clerk before 1979 and took the view that committee work should not be a significant part of the House’s business. He tried very hard, mainly successfully, to avoid working on select committees for the rest of his career.)

Now we return (and I hear the sighs of relief) to the events of last week, and the creation of the Departments for Energy Security and Net Zero, Science, Innovation and Technology, and Business and Trade (as well as the reconfiguration and renaming of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport). There will need to be corresponding select committees to reflect this new landscape, while we currently have committees on Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, International Trade and Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. This seems prima facie a simple enough business, although, as it requires the creation of a new committee, there will need to be discussions as to which party is given the chair of which committee (and who is sent to staff all the new establishments).

The complication comes in the fact that the House of Commons also has a non-departmental, cross-cutting select committee on science and technology, currently chaired by former cabinet minister Dr Greg Clark. (His doctorate, incidentally, is in economics, Carlyle’s dismal science, with an overtone of sociology, rather than any hard science.)

The committee has a long, convoluted and slightly fraught lineage. The first science and technology committee was set up in December 1966, with a broad remit to inquire into science and technology across government. Its first chairman was Arthur Palmer, a Labour MP who sat for four separate seats in his parliamentary career; he was an electrical engineer who had worked at Battersea power station during the Second World War and had maintained power supply to London throughout the bombings of the Blitz and the V1 and V2 attacks. As a cross-cutting committee, it proved to choose subjects to investigate which were foresighted and significant, including computer technology (1971), the appointment of a minister for science and technology (1975) and alternative energy sources (1977).

When the departmental committees were created in 1979, science and technology was not included; there was no ministry of science, and it was not a subject which featured among the cross-cutting committees named in the government scheme. Palmer was distraught, saying of Thatcher: “How on earth could a girl who boasts that she was a pupil of Dorothy Hodgkin ever do that?” The administration took the view that science could be scrutinised within the range of departmental responsibilities and it was unnecessary to have a stand-alone select committee to add to the number of oversight bodies. There was a Department of Education and Science (Thatcher’s old bailiwick in the Heath government, of course) which even had the word in its title, and it was shadowed by a select committee. However, the chief scientific adviser (at that point the biologist Professor John Ashworth) was based in the Cabinet Office, which was not really covered by the departmental select committees, so there was an argument that some aspects of science policy would slip through the net. In part as a response, the House of Lords established its own Science and Technology Committee in 1980, with the same broad remit as the defunct Commons body.

After the 1992 general election, John Major removed science policy from the DES and created the Office for Science and Technology (OST), headed by the chief scientific adviser and based in the Cabinet Office. In order to provide better scrutiny, a new Science and Technology Committee was established, but the new body was not a cross-cutting committee with a government-wide remit; instead its task was to oversee the OST in the way that other committees scrutinised their “home” departments. This attracted some criticism, but it did bring back into the ambit of normal parliamentary scrutiny government funding of the research councils, amounting to more than £1 billion, and in its second life the committee produced reports on issues which would only assume greater importance as time went on, like carbon storage and capture, cancers, stem cells and light pollution. It seemed that the ability of parliamentary scrutiny to get one step ahead of the policy agenda had been restored.

The first chairman of the new committee was Sir Giles Shaw, a popular Conservative Member who had a varied if low-level ministerial CV and was bruited as a potential speaker when the House met in 1992. (It was not to be; the government wanted to install Peter Brooke, former Northern Ireland secretary, but the House rebelled and chose the first woman to hold the post, Betty Boothroyd.) He was not a scientist by training—his background was in marketing—but he was well regarded and an effective parliamentarian. He was succeeded by Dr Michael Clark, a chemist with a specialism in plastics (1997-2001), and Dr Ian Gibson, an eminent cancer specialist (2001-05) who was detested by his Labour whips and ousted after a single parliament. In 2005, Liberal Democrat Phil Willis was selected as chair, a former headmaster with the heavy-handed manner and pomposity which often accompanies that profession.

In 2007, Gordon Brown, newly appointed prime minister, carried out a series of machinery of government changes, one of which was to create the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. This bore some resemblance to the new Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, though it also included ministerial responsibility for higher and further education. John Denham, who had resigned from his Home Office position in 2003 over the Iraq War, was recalled to be the new secretary of state. The Science and Technology Committee was rebranded to shadow the new department, Willis continuing as chairman. However, the department was short-lived. In June 2009, when Lord Mandelson returned to domestic politics to take control of a new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, he absorbed DIUS.

There were calls from the opposition to transform the Innovation, Universities and Skills Committee into a revived Science and Technology Committee. The House congratulated itself for its far-sightedness when the government agreed to this move; although the new Science and Technology Committee officially scrutinised the Government Office for Science, based in Mandelson’s new empire, the deputy leader of the House, Barbara Keeley, agreed from the despatch box that it should adopt “a wide-ranging approach… examining the full scope of science policy and related matters across the Government”. Willis again became chairman, and in effect the status quo ante 1979 was restored.

So the committee has existed until now. It was chaired from 2010 to 2015 by Labour MP Andrew Miller, an economist who had worked as a laboratory technician in a university geology department. He was dedicated and respected, though his manner was ponderous and he was unlikely to inspire excitement in many. When he left the Commons, he was replaced for only a year by the young Conservative Member for Oxford West and Abingdon, Nicola Blackwood, a talented musician but without any significant scientific or technological background. When she was appointed to ministerial office in 2016, fellow Conservative Stephen Metcalfe was elected as her replacement. He was a businessman by background by had developed a strong interest in science policy.

After the 2017 general election, the committee chairmanship was allocated to the Liberal Democrats and Norman Lamb, a former health minister in the coalition, was elected to the post. He was a likeable man, unusually lacking in partisan side for a Liberal Democrat, but again had little scientific grounding. He stepped down from the Commons in 2019, having suffered a stroke the previous year. When Parliament assembled after the general election of December 2019, Greg Clark, the current incumbent was elected. He had been business, energy and industrial strategy secretary under Theresa May, and was recalled to cabinet briefly by Boris Johnson as levelling-up secretary in 2022, but was not reappointed by Rishi Sunak last October and returned (unopposed) to the chair of the committee, which had not been filled in his absence.

The current Science and Technology Committee has 11 active inquiries, ranging from artificial intelligence to the antimicrobial potential of bacteriophages. Of the existing members, only the SNP’s Carol Monaghan and Labour veteran Graham Stringer have any significant expertise: the former was a physics teacher and the latter was an analytical chemist in the plastics industry. Former chair Stephen Metcalfe remains a member.

With science and research now concentrated in the new Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, headed by Michelle Donelan (who has no real background in any of those areas), the question for the government, in consultation with the Commons authorities, is whether a departmental committee to scrutinise DSIT’s work is adequate provision to supervise the general area of science and technology. There is a strange tension inherent in this: Whitehall seeks to concentrate responsibility and eradicate potential silos, while Westminster often prefers to range widely across departmental boundaries and work on a cross-cutting basis. Is the current Science and Technology Committee simply rebranded as Science, Innovation and Technology, or will something be lost with the demise of S&T is its old form?

At first blush, maintaining a separate committee would seem unnecessary. DSIT was created with one of its key purposes being to give science a powerful and unified voice in government. According to its website, it is supposed to “bring responsibility for the 5 technologies of tomorrow under one roof for the first time” (what do mean, you didn’t get them? For goodness’s sake: quantum, AI, engineering biology, semiconductors, future telecoms), along with life sciences and green technology. This should obviate the need for a cross-cutting committee, as DSIT will be the home, the responsible owner, of all government science policy. Repurposing the current committee would save creating and peopling a new one, which is not an insurmountable obstacle but does make a slight difference. Applying logic and common sense, one would see the demise of the old Science and Technology Committee and its broad unofficial remit.

And yet… science in its broadest form remains a “high status” issue in Parliament. While the House of Lords overflows with eminent scientists like Lord Winston, Lord Rees of Ludlow, Baroness Brown of Cambridge and Baroness Greenfield, it is a frequent complaint that STEMM subjects are underrepresented in the House of Commons. Only 17 per cent of MPs with degrees in the 2015 Parliament held STEMM qualifications, compared to 46 per cent of new graduates, and the numbers are not growing significantly. But science is (not unreasonably) seen as a key driver of economic growth and an inherent part of success in the future, so those who do have a professional background are often regarded with something bordering on awe by the majority of MPs who do not have a STEMM qualification. It is a relatively easy win to secure resources and backing for something like the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST), and scientific opinions on policy are much more likely to go unchallenged because the knowledge gap between experts and non-experts is much greater, whereas almost any Member will feel able to weigh into debates on foreign policy, healthcare or housing.

There will, almost certainly, be a lobby to retain a separate Science and Technology Committee because of the poor “optics” which will be attributed to its transformation or, in appearance, abolition. The argument will go, I suspect, that one cannot have too much attention focused on science, so even if the House moves forward with two very similar committees then it is not inherently a bad thing.

If that option is canvassed, I hope that some Members are wise and self-aware enough to recognise how prone to turf wars and ego clashes they and their colleagues can be. If we were to have a departmental Science, Innovation and Skills Committee and a more general committee considering science and technology, the former would in one sense be at a disadvantage because the scope of departmental committees is relatively tightly drawn, to avoid intruding on the work of other committees, while a cross-cutting committee exists to cross those boundaries. Arguments about the scope of select committee inquiries are rarely edifying and never useful.

I think the former argument, transforming Science and Technology into a departmental committee scrutinising DSIT, will probably prevail. But it should leave us with something to consider: how, in general terms, do we draw departmental boundaries to minimise (because we can never eliminate) silos and match executive action to scrutiny? Has Rishi Sunak got the balance right with the new departmental structures? Will we see significantly better policy-making, and if so, how quickly? It might be useful to use the scrutiny of the relevant select committees as a lens through which we can assess the success or failure of these latest machinery of government changes.