Accountability has a way to go

Select committee elections should be only the start, says Michael Meacher – parliamentary inquiries, top appointments and more scrutiny functions should all now be democratised.

At the nadir of its reputation following the expenses scandal, Parliament decided – with the agreement of all the parties – that the only way to regain credibility in the eyes of the electorate was to strengthen its key role in holding government to account.

As a result, the House voted to elect the chairs and members of all select committees instead of leaving it to the whips, and also set up for the first time a backbench business committee, with its own elected chair and members, to regain some control over the agenda on the floor of the House. But since the aim is to take back accountability, this can only be the beginning.

Take standing bill committees to scrutinise government legislation. If the chairs and members of select committees are now elected, shouldn’t the chair and members of the committee of selection, now dominated by the whips, also be elected by the House?

And since bill committees often conclude with virtually no amendments at all because the government side has a controlling majority, wouldn’t it be more sensible to have an extended pre-legislative stage at which a range of acknowledged experts are invited to give evidence, followed by a shorter bill-scrutiny stage to consider the main issues raised, more in the style and format of select committees?

Then there is the key question of how committees of inquiry are set up. At present it is the prerogative of the prime minister alone whether such an inquiry is set up, who serves on it and what its terms of reference are.

That seems difficult to justify when the whole purpose of the inquiry is often to investigate the record of the government and the PM on a particular issue. Shouldn’t Parliament (or the relevant select committee) have to give its approval, or otherwise, to the membership and terms of reference before they can be ratified?

Or, as our Victorian predecessors did, shouldn’t Parliament itself set up its own committees of inquiry where it believes they are appropriate and necessary? And in the special case of the intelligence services committee, shouldn’t its appointment too have to be ratified by Parliament and the committee’s reports made to the House, not just the prime minister?

On a similar basis, there is a strong case for requiring that top appointments across the public sector, currently made subject to the approval of Number 10, should in future require ratification by the appropriate select committee, whether pre-appointment or (as in the US) by confirmation hearings. It would symbolise the important fact that the holders of such offices owed a dual accountability to Parliament as well as to the prime minister, and could be subject to recall by either.

There is still a culture of regarding Parliament as a talking shop and a rubber stamp for decisions already made within government. One recent example was the fateful decision to impose a no-fly zone on Libya where Parliament had no opportunity to debate the issue before it was a fait accompli.

Another reflection of Parliament’s perceived passivity is the way that select committee reports, however forceful their analysis or their impact in potentially breaking the mould, are simply left to gather dust and are not debated on the floor of the House on the basis of a motion with a vote at the end. The most important ones at least should be debated and voted on. Control of expenditure is the essential lever for accountability.

At present the handling of the estimates is largely a formality, with Members mainly using it as an opportunity to raise topical or constituency issues. Either the House needs a permanent estimates committee to scrutinise major expenditure proposals before they are actually implemented, leaving the public accounts committee to examine consequences after the event, or perhaps select committees need a permanent sub-committee for systematic scrutiny of expenditure in their departmental area. Either way, further reform and innovation are now needed.

Michael Meacher is theLabour MP for Oldham West and Royton, and a former cabinet minister.

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