By Marc Geddes.
Parliamentary and legislative committees perform a range of roles, such as the scrutiny of legislation or accountability of government. Increasingly, committees are holding public hearings, which can be really important for MPs to gather relevant knowledge and evidence to support their work and fulfil committee tasks. In recent research, I spent time in the UK House of Commons and German Bundestag and interviewed MPs and staff to get a better understanding of whether committee hearings are important information-gathering tools. Given that these are often official and formal routes for parliaments to listen to stakeholders, these are prestigious and important and can be seen as ‘evidence on stage’.
In the House of Commons, the parliament has two committee systems. For scrutinising legislation, temporary bill committees are made up of 30 or so members, appointed by parliamentary parties, to go through proposed laws via public meetings with an optional evidence-gathering stage. For scrutinising policy and holding government to account, permanent select committees exist to shadow government departments. Made up of small groups of MPs – usually around 11 members – and elected by the party colleagues, they are often independent-minded spaces. Select committees conduct policy scrutiny through inquiries that include open calls for written evidence and public hearings with a variety of witnesses (e.g. scientists, business or trade union leaders, interest groups, etc.). Committee members deliberate in private to identify key conclusions and recommendations, to which government must respond (but is not forced to accept). Analysis has shown that around 40 percent of recommendations are accepted.
In the German parliament, permanent committees mirror government departments (plus some cross-cutting ones, such as a Petitions Committee). Committees are tasked with both examining legislation and with scrutinising policy. Committee size varies depending on the topic, but they are in general much larger than UK committees. For example, the Committee on Work and Social Affairs has 49 members. Members are appointed by parliamentary parties and take on the role of rapporteur, i.e. they are allocated specific portfolios within the committee’s wider remit. For example, in the Committee on Work and Social Affairs, one MP from each party will have responsibility for migration issues, another for pensions, etc. In general, Bundestag committee meetings are private but, especially since the 1980s, they have increasingly made use of public hearings. These can be used to invite experts to give evidence as part of scrutiny of legislative or policy proposals.
At first glance, both parliaments seem reasonably similar. But this masks considerable differences. In the UK, committees are supported by a secretariat of procedural and policy specialists, who write briefing papers for all members, suggest witnesses and analyse written evidence. Witnesses are usually identified on the basis of suggestions from members and especially the committee’s chair, in consultation with the advice from parliamentary officials (including the secretariat but also the House of Commons Library and the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology). Bundestag committees, meanwhile, are also served by a secretariat, but their role is to offer procedural advice only. Witnesses are instead nominated by parliamentary parties, often via group leaders and rapporteurs, who’s own staff will undertake research and identify experts. The number of witnesses depends on the size of the parliamentary party. Witness lists are published, inclusive of the party that nominated them, so it is fully transparent who invited whom.
The two approaches by the House of Commons and the Bundestag push evidence-gathering in different directions. In the former case, hearings are usually organised in a non-partisan way, especially for select committees. In the latter, given the inbuilt party political considerations, the process sharpens political divisions. These differences are reinforced through other practices. Briefing packs in the House of Commons are produced by the parliamentary administration and shared with all members; these often serve as agendas and give suggestions for issues to probe. Witnesses are often given oral briefing by the inquiry manager so that the witness can adequately prepare. In the Bundestag, briefings are handled by the rapporteur within each parliamentary party, often in close collaboration with the party leadership teams. Witnesses are usually briefed by the relevant party, too, in terms of the kinds of points and questions the party wants to get across.
These dynamics mean that committee hearings in both parliaments operate differently. Questioning in the House of Commons can be very political, but it is rarely directly partisan. Indeed, many hearings – especially with experts – tend to be thematic and open-ended, which may be directed a the panel in general or at specific witnesses, and without time limits (though the chair may play an active role in directing questioning). Committee hearings in this context can allow for robust questioning of political and policy positions, and allow MPs to gather information and expert opinion on a range of issues. In the Bundestag, meanwhile, questioning dynamics are very different. MPs usually focus their questions only on witnesses that they have invited, and usually have a set amount of time to both pose a question and receive an answer (in committees I’ve observed, this was often three to five minutes). Consequently, hearings do not develop thematically or where responses can build on one another; there is no dialogue. The end result is that hearings are often used by MPs to confirm existing knowledge, legitimise pre-existing political positions, or criticise the government.
Given the often assumed centrality of committees, and the growing prevalence of hearings, understanding how these function and work on a daily basis is critically important. What does this mean for committee hearings as evidence on stage? In both settings, it is clear that expertise is used, but used differently. Borrowing from the work of Christina Boswell, it seems that committee hearings in the UK case are used more ‘instrumentally’, i.e., for their problem-solving functions, while in the German case to ‘substantiate’ and ‘legitimise’ policy positions.
What I have found so far is notably different to what we might expect. Given the UK’s wider adversarial political culture, replicated in many dynamics in the House of Commons (not least prime minister’s questions), and Germany’s consensus-seeking political system characterised by coalition governments and bargaining, we would have perhaps expected committee work to echo such cultural differences. And yet, they operate in opposing ways. We can explain this at least in part due to their parliamentary structures, whereby the German Bundestag is organised with reference to its parliamentary party groups and the UK House of Commons gives primacy to the individually elected representative.
However, there are deeper underlying issues at play. First, with respect to the parliamentary administration, for example, MPs in the UK are a lot more positive about the service provided by officials who are seen as trusted and impartial. In my interviews, German MPs were a lot more sceptical of the idea of neutrality, with many questioning whether anybody can ever be neutral. Second, MPs view their roles in the institutions differently. In the House of Commons, MPs are either part of the frontbench or backbench; and if the latter, they see themselves as independent-minded and with the freedom to focus on anything they want. In the Bundestag, MPs are allocated policy portfolios on behalf of their parliamentary parties, and so see themselves as becoming specialists and advocate for their party in respective debates and committees. This suggests a more general point of difference between the two parliaments, which have developed within different parliamentary traditions and therefore have developed different structures and organisational methods to achieve those results.
About the author
Dr Marc Geddes is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, and Visiting Fellow, Institute for Parliamentary Research (IParl). His past area of research expertise focuses on parliamentary committees in the UK House of Commons. Since 2024, he has begun a new research project to compare how parliaments across Europe gather, analyse and make use of different types of knowledge to fulfil their democratic functions.