Review of Investigative and Scrutiny Committees (Liaison Committee Report)

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Thursday 3rd October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I think I should start by declaring an interest, inasmuch as I submitted both written and oral evidence to the committee as this review was taking place. I very much welcome the report and pay tribute to the excellent work of the Liaison Committee, led by the noble Lord, Lord McFall, in conducting this really important review. We are all very much in his debt. I am speaking today as a Back-Bencher, but know that my noble friends Lord Newby and Lord Stoneham also support this report and its recommendations. There are three key points that I want to make, and in doing so I will pick up on some of the very important points already made by the noble Lords, Lord Howell and Lord Whitty.

I am a very strong supporter of broad, thematic, cross-cutting committees that can take a long-term perspective. It is very important that these committees are comprehensive and cover the broad sweep of government policy—without duplicating the department-based committee structure of the House of Commons—to ensure that effective and in-depth scrutiny takes place in your Lordships’ House. Done well, House of Lords Select Committees can do much to enhance the reputation and public standing of this House—an important issue in its own right.

As the report recognises, the current structure contains significant gaps, particularly in areas of considerable concern to me such as education, health, poverty and inequality and broader social policy. I am therefore very pleased to see the recommendation for a new sessional committee on public services, which should be able to fill a lot of that gap. Indeed, to some extent it mirrors quite closely the suggestion I made for a committee covering general home and social affairs, able to develop a deep understanding of demographic trends and changing social attitudes and to undertake horizon scanning to identify new and emerging social issues so as to be ahead of the curve, as it were, on issues of direct relevance to people’s everyday lives. If we are looking at those issues, the general public will think that we are doing something relevant and that we understand their lives.

My second point is about follow-up. I feel very strongly about this, because I have been a very strong supporter of what used to be called the ad-hoc Select Committees and are now called special inquiries. I have had the huge privilege of serving on five of them, including chairing the Financial Exclusion Select Committee, and indeed was the original proposer of two of them. To my mind, they provide a really helpful means of addressing topical issues and allow Members to contribute their wide-ranging expertise in a raft of important policy areas. That said, the big downside is that it has led to a somewhat fragmented committee structure, with little overall coherence in the range of subjects selected. Crucially—this is my absolutely key point—it has resulted in a real loss of corporate knowledge as these ad-hoc committees are simply disbanded. The risk, of course—has already been alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty—is that these very elegantly drafted reports, which a lot of work has gone into, simply gather dust on shelves.

In terms of follow-up, in the past much has depended on the individual efforts of former chairs. As a former chair of the Financial Exclusion Select Committee, I did as much as I could for the 18 months afterwards to ensure that the Government took our recommendations seriously. I was genuinely quite pleased when, somewhat belatedly, this started to happen. I feel now that the effort that went into the production of the report by all concerned—the members, the staff and those who gave evidence—was worthwhile, because the Government’s and the Financial Conduct Authority’s dial on the subject has noticeably changed. However, I felt keenly that I was doing it with no status or backing from the House. That is why I very strongly support the recommendations in paragraph 68 of the report for more structured follow-up, involving the Liaison Committee and the chair of the former committee, with support from committee staff.

My third point is that I am pleased that special inquiries will continue—I think there is a really important place for them—but I still feel there is more thinking to do about the relationship between special inquiries and the main standing committees and their sub-committees. We must make best use of the body of knowledge acquired through the undertaking of these inquiries, so that we are not starting from scratch each time a new special inquiry sets up. We need to keep this point under very strong review.

I will conclude with a personal view that I know is rather controversial. While I understand the balanced reasoning set out in relation to the election of committee chairs in paragraph 179, I continue to believe that it would offer greater legitimacy and clout and help to ensure strong cross-party support if chairs of committees were elected. I have never believed, and I do not sign up to the argument, that the fact that we have not done it before is a good reason for not trying to do something different. I hope it might be possible to at least test such an approach at some point. At a time when the House sometimes feels ever more polarised on the big issues of the day, measures to incentivise cross-party working have very much to commend them. I also feel that it might help with the critical point of gender balance, which sometimes has not been good on these committees, either on the membership or the chairing.