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Administration Committee

I had not intended to make a speech today, just to make the odd intervention, but I want to follow on from what the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) has just said about the evolution of the Liaison Committee. When I first joined it, the Liaison Committee was essentially a management committee for the Select Committees, dealing with budgetary and other in-house matters. We managed to evolve a new system for dealing with the administrative side, and that gave the Committee Chairman time to deal with issues relating to Parliament more generally. The Liaison Committee’s evolution over the past four years has affected its collective thinking about the workings of the House, as well as allowing it to deal directly with the Prime Minister. As far as the Prime Minister’s visits are concerned, I do not pretend that they are the perfect way to conduct interviews with him. However, what we have is vastly better than anything that we ever had before, because no other Prime Minister has ever submitted himself to regular scrutiny by a Select Committee. We have had to adapt to ensure that we get best value from the meetings. Fortuitously, the involvement of so many Committee Chairmen in the Liaison Committee means that, collectively, we are able to bring informed opinion to bear on all aspects of Government policy. For the time being, the Committee is the best vehicle that we have for that, but I have no objection to trying to find more effective ways to carry out our work. Even so, I expect that we will carry on as we are in the near term. We are trying to arrange a meeting of the Liaison Committee for Thursday morning, so that it can be established formally. We hope to get a meeting with the Prime Minister as early as possible in the autumn, and informal contacts to that end are already in hand. After the autumn, we will revert to the normal timetable of holding meetings in January-February and June-July. That will mean that we will not have lost a hearing with the Prime Minister, and that we will have held our full quota of meetings over the life of this Parliament. I want to touch on a couple of points in passing. First, I agree with those colleagues who think that a single-tier system of payment is to be preferred. Any other system would be too complicated and would lead to inequity. Another question has to do with the size of Select Committees. The Liaison Committee was unanimous in its opinion the last time that question arose. Indeed, the then Leader of the House has admitted that he was astonished by the strength of feeling that he encountered when the Liaison Committee insisted that a membership of 11 seemed to be the optimum. The Committee made it clear that it believed that a larger membership caused repetitiveness and lacked cohesion. If the House agrees to the proposition before it today, the Liaison Committee will probably conduct a review of its members as to whether larger Committees work, and report to the House accordingly. Finally, the Osmotherly rules have been referred to. We live in a time of political disenchantment and disconnection, when people have rumbled that they are not very involved in the democratic process. People who live to be 80 have perhaps 18 opportunities to vote in general elections, but that is their total democratic input. As I have said before—and I apologise for repeating it—democracy exists meaningfully only if the Government are held to account every day in the House of Commons. We are talking today about establishing Select Committees, but that means setting up the process and machinery of interrogation. We must remember that that is the prime objective of the Select Committees. It is a matter not of sharing the spoils between us, but of getting our Committees to work as effectively as possible. I am worried that the role of scrutiny will slip from Parliament unless the Select Committees are able to assert themselves positively. In the previous Parliament, a gulf emerged between the Hutton and Butler inquiries and the Select Committees. The quality and quantity of information and witnesses available to Hutton and Butler were much greater than any to which the Select Committees had ever had access. A challenge now faces the House, and the Government. What part do the Government want to play, and where do they want to go with Select Committees? Unless there is greater co-operation with the Committees in the provision of information, the demands for inquiries to be conducted outside the House will grow louder, and that will happen because such inquiries cannot be conducted efficiently inside it. That is why the Liaison Committee told the previous Leader of the House that we needed greater access to witnesses and better provision of information. An undertaking was given that, in future, there would be a presumption that information and witnesses would be provided when the Committees asked for them. It is now up to the Government to fulfil that undertaking. If they do not do so, they will suffer too: the Select Committees will lose credibility as the centre for Government accountability, and the Government will find that ad hoc, non-representative committees are increasingly doing Parliament’s job. Although hon. Members have been laughing and joking in the debate, the truth is that we have a very short time in which to ensure that our system of accountability works effectively. If we do not achieve that, the role of holding the Government to account will slip away from Parliament.