An Unhealthy Scrutiny?

Stephen Holden Bates, University of Birmingham discusses potential difficulties effecting scrutiny of the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The piece considers problems that may arise due to Jeremy Hunt’s role on the Health and Social Care Select Committee.

Jeremy Hunt, in his role as the newly-elected chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee, has featured prominently in the news since the outbreak of Covid-19. This is perhaps to be expected both because the core tasks of select committees include the scrutiny of government policy and departmental strategy and because the work of select committees has tended to become more prominent in the media over time.

Of course, the Jeremy Hunt who is the chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee is the same Jeremy Hunt who was Health Secretary between September 2012 and July 2018. During this record-breaking ministerial stint, Public Health England published its Pandemic Influenza Response Plan[1] in 2014 and the UK Government ran a national pandemic flu exercise, Exercise Cygnus, in 2016. This exercise has latterly also been in the news. As Harry Lambert reports in The New Statesman, despite the fact that the exercise revealed that the UK’s health system could not cope with the excess bodies – partly because there were inadequate numbers of ventilators – the government’s planning for a pandemic was not re-written, at least officially.

It is highly likely that, in the aftermath of the worst excesses of the pandemic, there will be a public inquiry into the government’s preparations for, and response to, Covid-19. In the interim, there are select committee inquiries. Indeed, these are already happening. In addition to the inquiries about aspects of the pandemic already announced by the Home Affairs and the Women and Equalities Select Committees, the Health and Social Care Select Committee has established an inquiry that will “consider the preparedness of the UK to deal with a potential coronavirus epidemic”.

This latter inquiry throws up a quandary. How can Chair Jeremy Hunt scrutinise effectively the policies and strategies of the Health and Social Care Department which were, almost certainly in part, developed under Secretary of Health Jeremy Hunt? This is already a question that has been posed by others, even before the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic became fully apparent. As Denis Campbell says in The Guardian, the former health secretary will “in effect be marking his own homework”. It is not unheard of for former ministers – even former prime ministers – to appear before select committees but, however pertinent, it seems unlikely that that will be the case in the on-going Health and Social Care Committee inquiry.

The 2010 Wright Reforms were designed to strengthen the legislature in relation to the executive by, in part, making select committees a more attractive career option for MPs, including ex-ministers. This appears to have happened. The possible unintended consequence of this development, however, is that there are now potential conflicts of interest in the process of scrutinising government which may have the effect of weakening Parliament. It is difficult to see how a committee can effectively hold government to account when there is a prima facie case that the committee chair was, at least in part, responsible – and potentially culpable – for the policies and strategies being scrutinised.

So far, most – but not all – MPs have not really commented on this issue, let alone questioned the current situation. If MPs want to maintain the widespread view that select committees are often Parliament at its best, perhaps it is time for more of them – including those who sit on the Liaison Committee – to do so.

[1] This document, along with the NHS document Health and Social Care Influenza Pandemic Preparedness and Response published in April 2012 and the Department of Health’s UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy published in 2011, formed the backbone of the UK Government’s blueprint for responding to a viral pandemic.