Stephen Holden Bates (University of Birmingham), Mark Goodwin (Coventry University), Steve McKay (University of Lincoln) and Wang Leung Ting (LSE), consider the extent to which Commons select committees are based on consensus, in part 2 of their trilogy of blogs drawing on sessional return data.
At the recent conference to celebrate 40 years of departmental select committees[i], participants were told with regularity that one of the reasons select committees are one of, if not the, best part of Parliament is that they are non-partisan, based around consensus and, as Stephen Twigg put it, “the very antithesis of populism, polarisation and ignoring the evidence”. Whether consensus-seeking is at the heart of good politics, particularly at the present conjuncture, is a moot point and must, alas, be the focus of a possibly heretical later blogpost on the effectiveness and worth of the UK select committee system. For the time being, let us take this claim about select committees at face value and see whether and to what extent they are based on consensus. One way – but not the only way – of measuring the degree of consensus of departmental select committees is to count the number of divisions (votes) which occur during committee meetings and to analyse trends over time and within and between committees.
To do this, we used sessional returns from 1985-86, which is when this information started to become available, until 2016-17 to count the number of meetings, the number of full reports published and the number of divisions that took place. For the 2015-16 and 2016-17 parliamentary sessions, we collected the data on reports and divisions from each select committee’s website, formal annual minutes and the minutes for each full report published because this information is no longer collated centrally within the Sessional Returns[ii]. Divisions are potentially significant because they suggest a more conflictual or partisan pattern of behaviour, rather than the more consensual approach which is usually, as per Stephen Twigg’s comments, taken to be the hallmark of select committees. Select committees are cross-party groups of backbenchers within which a culture of non-partisan co-operation is generally valued. There is a strong presumption in select committee work against the use of divisions to manage disagreements among committee members. Committees often select topics for inquiry with an eye to avoiding matters that are divisive or party political and members work hard to ensure that the reports they produce reflect their unanimous view. Resorting to divisions to settle disagreements may suggest that part of the normal process of select committee working has broken down, at least temporarily, precisely because members have been unable to reach a negotiated compromise.
Divisions in the departmental select committee system
There were 2,447 divisions during departmental select committee meetings between 1985-86 and 2016-17. This equates to 0.14 divisions for each of the 18,049 meetings or, to put it another way, 0.68 divisions for each of the 3,600 full reports[iii] published. As can be seen from Figures 1 and 2, which show the number of divisions per meeting and per full report by parliamentary session, there has been a decline in both these measures over time[iv]. The high point in both figures during the 1993-94 session is down almost entirely to the Scottish Affairs Select Committee which had 44 divisions on the consideration of the Chair’s draft report on drug abuse in Scotland – the highest number of divisions of any committee during one meeting – and 45 divisions in total.
Divisions within departmental select committees
Table 1 sets out the average divisions per meeting and per full report for each of the departmental select committees (and their forerunners). Figures 3 and 4 show the divisions per meeting and per report by parliamentary session for each of the departmental select committees. As can be seen from the table, when focusing on committees which have been in existence for longer than one or two parliamentary sessions, only four – the Foreign Affairs, Work & Pensions, Scottish Affairs (again, caused mainly by that 1993-94 session), and Treasury Select Committees – have more than one division per report. At the other end of the scale, there are three committees – the International Development, Defence and Justice Select Committees – which have one division or fewer for every 20 full reports published.
The figures for the divisions per meeting and per report show that it is only really the Culture, Media & Sport Select Committee, and perhaps the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and Transport Select Committees, which have upwards trends in terms of these measures; all other committees have downward trend lines, or ones that are flat at best. Also of note here are the Northern Ireland Affairs, Justice, Defence and International Development Select Committees which all have very low numbers of divisions in total.
Seeking consensuality: Can you have too much of a good thing?
If you are looking for consensuality in your select committee system, then boy-oh-boy have you found it! It may be the case that disagreement in select committees is now thrashed out behind closed doors and beforehand so that, once meetings begin, consensus and unanimity can easily be reached[v]. However, on the basis of what we present here and taken at face value, select committees are now much more characterised by consensus than they were previously: the number of divisions per meeting and per report are on downward trajectories, and divisions are now very much the exception across most, if not all, committees. Overall, it appears as though a (socialisation) process has occurred over time wherein consensus has been institutionalised (to an ever greater extent) within the select committee system.
One committee which stands out a little in this context, although not like a sore thumb, is the Culture, Media & Sport Select Committee, which is characterised by upward trends in the division measures we employ. If House of Commons nerds, like what we are all here, were asked to explain these upwards trends, the answer would probably be along the lines of it being caused by the high-profile and controversial topics it has been investigating, such as those surrounding the phone-hacking scandal.
This makes intuitive sense and was our first reaction, but it is not as though other committees do not cover high-profile and controversial policy areas. The Defence and International Development Select Committees are two such committees – just think of the debates surrounding the 2% and 0.7% spending targets – and yet these committees are both characterised by very low numbers of divisions over their whole existence. The Treasury Select Committee has not had a division since 2007-08 and it is not as though the economy and government spending have been depoliticised during this period.
It is possible that the different patterns reflect very different working styles across committees. For example, the Culture Media & Sport Select Committee is often regarded as an ‘outward-looking’ committee that both responds to, and seeks to shape, media agendas and often takes on inquiries that are only loosely connected to the work of government. On the other hand, the Defence Select Committee tends to understand its role much more as a departmental watchdog or ‘critical friend’ whose primary relationship is with the government and is, therefore, more ‘inward-looking’.
It is also possible that different patterns both across and within committees and over time is a reflection of the changing membership compositions of both committees and the House of Commons. The 1997 general election seems to be an important point in time for the trends we identify here. This was, of course, an election that saw both a large influx of female MPs and a large turnover of MPs. It is sometimes claimed that women are more cooperative than men. If this is the case, then there may be a cohort effect as more female members and Chairs in the committee system seek consensus to a greater extent than their male colleagues did previously. However, it is interesting to note that the Health and Education Select Committees, which are toward the top of Table 1, are among the most disproportionately female committees over time and the Defence Select Committee, which is towards the bottom, is one of the most disproportionately male[vi]. This points towards the importance of the newness of MPs in 1997, rather than their gender, in explaining changes in the propensity to divide in committees. It will be interesting to see in our future work whether a new cohort of MPs did indeed (help to) bring in a new style of parliamentary politics within the select committee system.
It may be the case that select committees are now better at what they do than before precisely because they are more consensual (although this claim needs to be argued with evidence rather than simply asserted). Given the history of Northern Ireland, it is also probably better that the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee appears to proceed through consensus to a greater degree than most of the other departmental select committees. We are not, therefore, saying that consensus-seeking as a style of politics is always and everywhere a bad thing. What we are saying is that it does appear somewhat strange that, in an era of the (aftermath of the) financial crisis, austerity and Brexit, as well as a level of ideological disagreement in Westminster arguably not seen since the 1980s, select committees tend now to have fewer divisions than ever before.
One possibility is that the select committee system has, due to a combination of factors, remained somewhat immune to the greater polarisation in British politics and continues to exhibit and entrench the behaviour that would be expected in a period of ideological convergence and valence politics. As discussed above, it is perhaps no coincidence that the decline in divisions really begins in the late 1990s at the peak of New Labour’s ascendancy and the politics of centrist triangulation that this entailed. Reforms to the select committee system in 2010 may have further contributed to this trend. Since 2010, committee chairs have been elected by the whole House and so must win support for their candidacy from across the political spectrum, a development that ought to encourage greater consensus in cross-party working, as candidates reach out to the political centre ground within Parliament. As we have suggested in previous work, it may be that select committees have been captured more recently by what were described as ‘awkward centrists’ by a participant in the recent 40th anniversary conference, especially as those MPs may be in (self-imposed) exile from the front benches. So, there is agreement among members of committees from whichever party about disagreeing with the frontbenches of both the main political parties. In this respect, select committees are perhaps a refuge for those rendered ‘politically homeless’ by greater ideological divergence and the more polarised political style of the Brexit era. It may be no surprise to find that ten out of the eleven members who broke with their parties to form Change UK (or whatever it’s called on the day you are reading this), were serving select committee members at the time of their defection[vii]. It is arguable the case that departmental select committees have always been a welcoming home for ‘frustrated’ backbenchers; it may well simply be the case that the type of MP left frustrated has changed.
Whatever the case about the reasons for the decline in the number of divisions in select committee meetings, the picture presented here leads us to ask, at least tentatively, whether we need more disagreements and divisions in our select committee system and that, at present, there is a an excess of consensuality within both individual committees and the system as a whole. Two obvious potential dangers regarding this situation are of groupthink and the greater likelihood of the operationalisation of Professor Schattschnieder’s mobilisation of bias causing important issues worthy of debate to be ignored or suppressed. Both would have the consequence of select committees working at a suboptimal level when undertaking their scrutiny and other functions.
Given the general tenor of comments at the 40th anniversary conference, select committee members and staff would probably be pleased to see that these institutions are apparently preserving their consensual character in the teeth of greater political polarisation. Yet, if one of the reasons for the decline in divisions is that members are too wary of engaging political controversy, they risk select committees being pushed to the margins in a period of British politics where the number of uncontroversial issues seems to be ever smaller.
Stephen Holden Bates is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Birmingham, UK. Follow him on Twitter: @Stephen_R_Bates
Mark Goodwin is a Lecturer in Politics at Coventry University. Follow him on Twitter: @MarkRGoodwin
Steve McKay is Distinguished Professor in Social Research at University of Lincoln. Follow him on Twitter: @SocialPolicy
Wang Leung Ting is a Fellow in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Follow him on Twitter: @kiwiting
Our project, the Select Committee Data Archive (1979-Present), from which this blog emanates, was part funded by the British Academy (SQ140007).
Read Part One of Stephen Holden Bates, Mark Goodwin, Steve McKay and Wang Leung Ting’s analysis of select committee sessional return data: Debating the Effectiveness of House of Commons Departmental Select Committees in Informing the House
Footnotes
[i] You can read one absolutely marvellous paper not presented at the conference here.
[ii] This is a Very Bad Development in our opinion.
[iii] The more eagle-eyed among you will realise that this figure is 5 reports lower than the number of full reports mentioned in our blog on debates. We used different datasets for these blogs and some human error must have occurred in recording the data which we are trying hard to resolve. We thank you for your patience while we investigate this small discrepancy and hope this has not spoilt your enjoyment of these blogs.
[iv] When undertaking some checking of the data, we did find some underreporting of divisions in the Sessional Returns pre-2015-16. For example, there are no divisions recorded for the Education Select Committee in the 2010-12 Sessional Return but, as recorded in the report minutes, the Committee divided once in its consideration of its 5th Report. Similarly, there are no divisions recorded for the Business, Innovation & Skills Select Committee in the 2010-12 Sessional Return but, as recorded in the report minutes, the Committee divided three times in its consideration of its 13th Report. However, as we are as certain as we can be about the 2015-16 and 2016-17 figures, because we checked both the formal minutes and the report minutes for each committee, and these figures are in keeping with the parliamentary sessions immediately prior, we do not believe that the under-reporting in the Sessional Returns is of a magnitude to have distorted significantly our results and the trends we identify. Moreover, as discussed in the main body of the blog, the period after the 1997 general election appears to be important with regard to the downward trend in divisions. There is no mention in any of the Sessional Returns around this period of a change in the way the information and statistics is recorded with all of them including an explanatory note along the following lines: “This Return follows the pattern of its predecessors since the creation of the current Select Committee system by the House in 1979”. As such, we are cautiously confident that the trends we identify here are because of what is happening in committees, rather than changes in, or mistakes about, how committee activity is recorded; further checking of committee minutes pre-2015 would be needed for us to be more fully confident.
[v] There is some evidence that this occurs. For example, in some report minutes, it is recorded that voting on some paragraphs of reports is ‘postponed’, or that the committee ‘deliberated’ before formal consideration of the report.
[vi] These findings about the femaleness and maleness of committees are from on-going work by Goodwin, Holden Bates and McKay. Please contact them for a working paper if you are interested.
[vii] This includes select committee ‘super-chair’ Sarah Wollaston (who chairs both the Health & Social Care Select Committee and the Liaison Committee, which brings together the chairs of all other select committees).