Adam Lent argues that Select Committees are increasingly characterised by an extremely aggressive style of questioning, becoming ‘public courts’ where individuals are tried on the strength of their performance rather than on the evidence. This has gone hand-in-hand with a broader mission creep, with their transformed role having thus far avoided meaningful public debate.
I have attended a few Select Committees in my time. In most cases, they have been friendly if rather sedate affairs. However, I’ve also experienced their harsher side. At a Treasury Select Committee hearing, I sat on a witness panel with the head of a trade association who had made the error of issuing a press release that morning about the evidence he was planning to give. This, it turned out, is just not the done thing. After being firmly rapped on the knuckles by the Committee Chair (fair enough), the MPs then took it in turns to rubbish, with mounting aggression, the views of the sorry individual in front of a packed committee room and internet broadcast cameras. This continued for an excruciating forty minutes. The poor soul did his best to defend himself but there is only so much you can do when confronted by eleven counsels for the prosecution.
On another occasion, I was in the audience for the notorious questioning of leading figures from the private equity world again by the Treasury Select Committee but with a mostly different set of MPs. This was in the midst of the very heated and high profile battle that was occurring between the trade union movement and private equity in 2007. Again the interrogation was fierce and it was widely judged to be a PR disaster for the private equity side. So much so, in fact, that the CEO of the British Venture Capital Association, who had been the target of much of the MP’s questioning, resigned the next day. It caused much joy amongst the trade unions but I have to say I felt sad at the fact that a man who had struck me as a pretty decent human being had lost his job in such circumstances.
I was reminded of these events listening to the Public Accounts Committee grilling the CEOs of the big accountancy firms last week. There was the same hectoring tone and aggressive interrogation I had witnessed. A similar approach was taken by the Culture Select Committee to the previous Director General of the BBC during the Savile crisis – his poor showing there was one factor contributing to his ultimate resignation. A few weeks before that there was Nick Buckles, the CEO of G4S getting a grilling from the Home Affairs Select Committee over the Olympics security fiasco. The list stretches back to the rough ride dished out to the Government scientist, David Kelly, by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in 2003.
Some may see this as just part of the cut and thrust of public life but I have come to take a much more dim view for two reasons.
Firstly, Select Committees have effectively become public courts where individuals are tried not on the veracity of their case but on how well they manage to perform in the Committee Room bear-pit. And the sentence, should one’s performance not be up to scratch, can be a severely damaged reputation or even loss of employment. In truth, some now appear before Select Committees not as witnesses but as the accused but without any of the protections usually offered to those appearing in the dock.
Of course, the same is true of anyone putting themselves up for a hostile questioning on the Today programme, for example, as George Entwistle himself discovered. But Select Committees are not news programmes. They are legally established bodies of the Commons which have the power to compel witnesses to attend, demand written evidence and even charge witnesses with contempt. Witnesses also have no right to silence. At the very least, institutions of such standing and power should be constantly asking themselves whether they are delivering natural justice for those who appear before them.
Secondly, there has been a worrying mission creep in the role of Select Committees. The Committees were established and expanded during the 1970s and 1980s to ensure that the House of Commons could better scrutinise the Government and hold it to account – an unquestionably admirable objective which most of the time, most Committees perform without fanfare.
However, in recent years, some Committees seem to have come to see their job as holding the wider world to account as well hence the hostile grilling of people who hold no governmental role. This, it seems to me, is a fundamentally different activity to scrutiny of the executive and represents a significant extension of state power which has not been legislated for nor subject to public debate.
Of course, few will shed tears for the CEO of a big accountancy firm getting a telling off from Margaret Hodge but that is not really the point. There is an important principle here. MPs are entirely free to criticise whom they want in the Commons chamber or in the media but subjecting people, however powerful, to a courtroom style cross-examination without proper procedure or protections borders on the unjust and possibly a departure from due process.
We must also be very careful about where such practices may lead over time if not challenged. MPs often look across the Atlantic with envy at the huge powers and influence wielded by Congressional Committees. But the Americans learned a very important lesson in the early 1950s about how parliamentary committees can lose perspective and deeply damage the lives of ordinary citizens when seized by a mission wider than executive scrutiny and not subject to proper controls. Select Committees are, of course, nowhere near that sort of systematic abuse of power but ten or twenty years in the future, who knows? Better to deal with the drift now than find out where this might lead.
This was originally posted on the RSA blog.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting.
Adam Lent is Director of Programme at the RSA. He tweets from @AdamJLent.
Interesting debate but I disagree on 3 counts.
1. “Remit creep” is not expansion of state power but of democratic accountability. Select Committees are Parliament, not the State. It is not true that this strengthening has not been debated – it has been a subject of Reports and deliberate policy changes, most notably the de-whipping of Select Committee appointments, meaning members are now accountable to fellow MPs rather than Party managers (providing a healthy alternative career path for MPs than climbing the greasy Party pole).
2. Strength of select committees over private institutions (and the individuals who run them) re-balances (a small amount) the rolling-back of democratic influence on public life due to globalisation, privatisation and deregulation.
3. All Select Committees can do is ask and write reports and recommendations. Has a contempt charge ever been brought? So they do not have hard powers (like a court would). But their soft power is more effective in today’s webstreaming and twitter age. This brings democracy closer to citizens
While I’m not aware of contempt charges being brought, the PAC took the extraordinary step of putting HMRC’s senior legal officer, Anthony Inglese, under oath, as if he couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth if he wasn’t. I thought that was a spiteful abuse of the quasi-judicial power they had; I don’t believe it had any purpose other than to humiliate him.
While I agree totally with Ben (who is a colleague) about the difference between the Commons and the Lords, there is also a difference between the Commons committees, often down to the chairing of them in my view. On tax, the Treasury Select Committee is certainly a lot better informed and analytical than the PAC. Andrew Tyrie at least has a financial background; Margaret Hodge does not, and I am not aware that she has taken up any of the several offers (to my knowledge) that have been made to provide more background and briefing for her committee on how tax law works, to save them from making the basic errors that can be seen in the lines of questioning they follow.
As for the Finance Bill Committee, I’m afraid it’s mostly a waste of time these days. The opposition puts down amendments asking for a report to be prepared on something, simply so they can make general points about tax policy. Most of the work of actually revising the legislation is left to the professional bodies making representations, which (contrary to the PAC’s view) are generally attempts to make the legislation achieve what it is meant to achieve.
I have seen a few of the select committees that have been televised and they have been reasonably well conducted with well thought out questions and information answers. The banking ones were more aggressive rightly so but some of the questions Ms Hodge came out with were amatuerish in the extreme and yet was has ben lauded for her work. Sometimes it would work better if MP’s had their experts who knew how to frame questions better. On committee for gay marriage it was a particularly aggressive one against the Cof E and the Roman Catholic leaders especially by Bryant and Bradshaw to seem to take the replies personally, my observation is that if they were too close to their own vested interests for the sake keeping the discussion on a level headed basis perhaps they shouldn’t have had a place on the committee. The former even critised the chair of the committee. The committee from the Labour side seemed to try and ‘catch out’ those being interviewed. One lady Labour asked the an Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church what his view on a husband changing his sex were they as a couple still marriage. This was an insult by a not very clever person, he easily rebuffed the question saying that ‘you can’t change gender it’s what your born with’. This sort of interegation only shows up MP’s in a bad and often discredited light so how these committees develop in our democracy needs careful monitoring.Many MP’s come across with geniune concerned questions but as you can see those of the Hodge, Bryant and Bradshaw ilk are either ‘grandstanding’ or unable to conduct themselves in a respectful manner.
Dear Adam
Alternatively, you could have written about the refreshing face of Parliament – reminding us that there are some parliamentarians who do look out for us, and are no afraid to challenge the otherwise unaccountable.
Are you preparing a similar critique of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, and John Humphries in particular. His technique could (perhaps) be compared to Andrew Marr’s on the BBC1 AM Show?
Excellent article.
Hodge and Vaz are especially to blame – it seems to be all about raising their personal profile, showing how “tough” they are; though nothing actually changes as a result of their self-regarding monologues.
Mark, That is a very fair point. Maybe the MPs can learn something from the Other Place on this. I do think that even most SCs in the Commons do a fair job and stick to their remit. But that can’t allow us to overlook those that overstep the mark and might indicate a potential drift in an important legal process.
Adam,
Whilst I agree with the points you make, your headline implies that this is a problem across Parliament, and not simply in the Commons, as opposed to the Lords. Indeed, all of your examples relate to the Commons.
Perhaps some differentiation is needed here, as the work of Select Committees in the Lords is rather more sedate and courteous.
I completely agree with the distinction between the Lords and the Commons.
I’ve taken an interest in the work of a couple of committees, namely the Public Accounts Committee chaired by Margaret Hodge and the House of Lords Finance Bill Sub-Committee.
They have covered the same subject at length, tax avoidance, but there is a completely different approach to the two. Both do have different remits, but you would not expect the tone to be so remarkably different.
Very interesting. In what way do they differ exactly?
PAC – Big 4 accountancy firms: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmpubacc/uc870-i/uc87001.htm
PAC – Starbucks, Amazon, Google: http://bensaunderscta.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/house-of-commons-uncorrected-evidence-hc-716-ii.pdf
Finance Bill Sub-Committee: http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/lords-select/economic-affairs-finance-bill-sub-committee/publications/
If you look at the nature of the PAC sessions linked in the uncorrected transcripts above, you can see that the witnesses are treated more like defendants. Whilst many consider that the representatives here have something to answer for, I don’t think that’s appropriate.
As a chartered tax adviser, I’m going to be biased. But I have tried to garner facts from the PAC sessions and found it to be lacking in information and abundant in opinion.
I looked at the position of Starbucks at length and have referred to the answers given by Troy Alstead in this session. There are lots of points where information is forthcoming but he is interrupted in order to make a point for what appears to be theatrical effect.
For example, at Q217 it appears he is about to answer a question and is cut off with a reiteration of what he has said in response to a previous question. I don’t know whether he provides the information he was going to provide in that answer because he never approaches the question in the same way again.
Because he cannot finish an answer we do not know if he ever provides all the relevant information he has. That’s frustrating, but not as frustrating as the fact that the PAC Chair feels that some sort of judgement is required from her.
This exchange is ultimately moved on with Hodge concluding “I think it is about tax avoidance”. Ultimately that verdict only matters in the court of public opinion.
It is the sort of statement that fuels public emotions and only serves to validate opinions already set.
Personally, I think that the witnesses in the two PAC sessions above are treated as defendants in the court of public opinion.
Contrast that with the House of Lords transcripts. Admittedly, these aren’t culprits of tax “avoidance” but neither have the Lords anything to gain from pandering to public opinion.
There are few statements of opinion and open questions which allow the witnesses to explore their answers at length. This is not to say that the Lords do not ask questions in the public interest or express concerns over particular things.
Overall, my opinion is that the two committees are extremely different, from the choice of witnesses to how they are interviewed and what appears to be the ultimate goal of each committee.