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Administration Committee

I must say that the literary reference that the hon. Lady has invoked is probably better than mine. I had a recollection of the Kafka novels, but the hon. Lady is right that this is an absurd way in which to operate. The truth is that we can have many nuances on a theme, but in the end the real argument is about whether we opt for appointment or for election. I accept that there the scourge of Whip domination is objectionable. In the nicest possible spirit, however, I say to the House—and to my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton), who spoke about this earlier—that I do not think that the other proposals for reform are satisfactory either. The House will recall that the Liaison Committee report ““Shifting the Balance”” of March 2000 said that the system was wrong and needed to be changed so that it was independent of the Executive. It proposed that a trinity of very senior and distinguished hon. Members should make up a panel to which aspirant members of Select Committees could appeal. That might be marginally better than allowing the Whips to dictate membership, but it is still a poor and unsatisfactory way to proceed. That would amount to a system of patronage in itself, and hon. Members desperately keen to get on a Committee would feel that they had to ingratiate themselves with the panel. Subsequently, in February 2002, the Modernisation Committee recommended that a committee of nine hon. Members should act as a filter for applications for Select Committee membership. I do not approve of that either. The systems that I have described are alternative and only marginally less objectionable forms of patronage. Sherlock Holmes said that, when all other possibilities have been eliminated, the remaining possibility, however improbable, must be the truth. In this case, the remaining possibility is that the House will decide to take the composition of Select Committees into its own hands—that is, it will determine that composition by election. We can go about that in various ways. One possibility, which I do not necessarily advocate, is that the process should be a complete free for all, in which all hon. Members have the right to vote for all the members of all Select Committees, with no reserved rights for Opposition or other minority parties. I accept that there would be a danger that hon. Members would vote in a very partisan way and that Select Committee membership would be skewed as a result. The hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) has proposed that the conduct of these matters should be vested in the hands of Mr. Speaker, but I believe that it would quickly become evident that that was not entirely satisfactory or fair. Speedy amendments and revisions of that process would probably be made, but that option is what might be called the pure democratic model. A second, alternative method would be to protect the respective strengths of the parties in the House, in terms of the numbers of Select Committee members—or Chairmen, or both—that are allocated to the parties. However, all hon. Members would still be allowed to vote for all members of the Select Committees, subject to the understanding that, depending on the strength of the parties’ representation in the House, the Government party will have, say, seven members of a Committee, the main Opposition three and a minority party one. If we are committed to the principle of democratic engagement, the seam is pretty rich. A third possibility is that we say that members of the Conservative party will vote only for Conservative members of a Select Committee, that Labour Members will vote only for Labour members, and so on. I confess that I prefer the second of those options. I believe that all hon. Members should elect Select Committee members, subject to some protections for the minority parties. The system is not perfect, and it could be amended subsequently. Yes, there is a danger—possibly even a likelihood—that the first set of elections would not achieve the necessary balance between geography, gender, youth and experience, and so on. Nevertheless, under that system, the House would decide who should be on the Select Committees that scrutinise the Executive. It baffles me constantly that in an age in which the pervasive principle of democratic legitimacy applies we seem always to find an excuse for not applying it in the context of composing the Committees that we so value.