Select Committees (Membership)

Lord Beith Excerpts

Wednesday 30th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

It is a pity that we have to have this motion, because it departs so markedly from the Wright Committee recommendation that, in the interests of working effectively and not making too many claims on the pool of available Members, Committees should have nine or, at most, 11 members. The elected Chairs of Committees have a strong view that we should not be departing from the Wright recommendations. Of course, when we saw the motion to increase Committee membership to 16, we thought it hard to imagine a more dramatic departure from what Wright recommended.

There has been a continuous process of modification which later led to the proposal that a series of Committees should have two extra members. That was then further modified to a motion in which only one Committee had two extra members and a number had one extra member. That was further modified on Monday night when I asked the Leader of the House to include the provision that it would apply only for this Parliament, which has been claimed as a success by my hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House. I genuinely welcome the willingness of the Leader of the House, his deputy and the Patronage Secretary to try to resolve this matter. However, the view of Committee Chairs is that this matter could have been resolved within existing allocations had parties been prepared to make adjustments to meet the needs of minority parties.

In fact, the Conservative party has done that, because the penultimate stage of the discussions involved an additional Conservative Member to match the fact that there was an additional Opposition Member represented by the addition of a minority party Member. Committee Chairs are generally in favour of minority party Members being on Select Committees, and I look forward to having the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) on my Committee, as I understand he intends to be. He will be a very good Member to have on the Justice Committee. However, had the Labour party been prepared to give up one or two places on Committees, we might not be where we are now. None the less, I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member the Deputy Leader of the House has reasserted the importance of the Wright recommendation, and I hope that we will eventually return to the principle that we keep Committees reasonably small, with members fully involved in their work.