The new cohort of select committee chairs will be scrutinising the work of a weakened government, write Mark Goodwin, Stephen Bates and our PSA Parliaments Co-Convener, Marc Geddes in a blog originally posted on Democratic Audit. Nine of the 28 are women, reflecting the advantage female MPs enjoy when they stand for committee elections. The current line-up also includes some well-known figures who have clashed with their party leaderships, creating an intriguing new dynamic.
Tag: select committees
Following the early General Election, all House of Commons select committees have had to be reconstituted. Marc Geddes, Co-Convenor of the PSA Parliaments Group, looks ahead to this week’s elections for Committee Chairs.
Being the first without a majority in the Commons or the Lords for 40 years, how will Theresa May’s minority government implement any part of their legislative agenda? How will committees function? Will the smaller parties in the Commons work together? In a blog originally posted on LSE British Politics and Policy, PSA Parliament exec members Marc Geddes, Alexandra Meakin, and Louise Thompson offer a preview of how the 2017 Parliament may function.
PSA Parliaments member, and second-year PhD student, Alex Prior, discusses his PSA placement with the House of Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee.
Should the 2015-17 Parliament be remembered for anything more than Brexit? Alexandra Meakin looks at Select Committee work over the last two years.
The only two female members of the Intelligence and Security Committee are leaving the Commons at the general election, and the whole Committee will have to be re-formed after June. In a blog originally posted on the Democratic Audit blog, Andrew Defty says one of its reports has been rushed out before the election with the government’s redactions unchallenged, and a long-delayed inquiry into the UK intelligence services’ involvement in extraordinary rendition will now be pushed further back. Dominic Grieve is a promising chairman, but the ISC needs to get into shape quickly after the election.
By Mark Goodwin, Stephen Bates and Steve McKay
In the past two months, two of Britain’s richest men have been forced by Parliament to admit to, and apologise for, serious failings in their business practices that could end up costing them millions in compensation. Sports Direct owner Mike Ashley admitted to the Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee that, despite being Britain’s 22nd richest person with an estimated fortune of £3.5bn, he had not been paying staff in the company’s main warehouse the minimum wage. A few weeks later, the same committee witnessed what many saw as a bizarre performance from another British billionaire, Sir Philip Green, as his failings in the sale of British Home Stores were exposed in between complaints about excessive staring from the committee members. These are just the latest in a string of high profile inquiries by parliamentary select committees over the past six years that have also seen Rupert Murdoch attacked with a custard pie, Michael Gove alleging a ‘Trot conspiracy’ in English schools and a vice president of Google being informed that “you do evil”.
By Marc Geddes
Please note that this blog piece has also been published on the Crick Centre blog, and is available here.
Congratulations to Mary Creagh, who has won a by-election for the chair of the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC). In addition to getting to grips with her new committee’s portfolio, Mary Creagh also faces a choice on the type of chair she wishes to be – with committee-orientated catalysts at one of the spectrum of chairs, and the leadership-orientated chieftains at the other. The choice that the newly elected chair will make will have an impact on scrutiny in the House of Commons in a range of ways. In this piece, I want to explore what it means to be a catalyst and a chieftain by drawing on interviews and observations for my doctoral research, and how this might affect Mary Creagh’s leadership of the EAC.
Please note that this piece was originally published on the PSA Insights Blog, available here.
By Leanne-Marie McCarthy-Cotter
Following from yesterday’s launch of the report ‘Building Public Engagement: Options for Developing Select Committee Outreach’, Dr Leanne-Marie McCarthy-Cotter (The Crick Centre, University of Sheffield), discusses the findings from her, Prof. Matthew Flinders and Prof. Ian Marsh’s research. The research was commissioned, and published, by the Liaison Committee. You can access the report in full here.
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Interpreting Parliament, but how?
By Marc Geddes
What interests me in the study of Parliament is the way in which everyday life is so unpredictable, chaotic, reactive and consistently beset by challenges. Yet simultaneously, to the outside world at least, Parliament looks stable and ordered, static and unchanging.