Dramas at Westminster

Select committees and the quest for accountability

Marc Geddes

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526136824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

Based on unprecedented access to the UK Parliament, this book challenges how we understand and think about accountability between government and Parliament. The book focuses on the everyday practices of MPs and officials to reveal how parliamentarians perform their scrutiny roles. Many adopt different styles of scrutiny, which chairs of committees attempt to reconcile and officials try to support. MPs and officials create a drama or spectacle of accountability and use their performance on the parliamentary stage to hold government to account. This book offers the most up-to-date and detailed research on committee practices in the House of Commons, following a range of reforms since 2010. The findings add new dimensions to how we study and understand accountability through the book's path-breaking empirical focus and theoretical lens. It is an ideal book for anyone interested in how Parliament works.

1

The quest for accountability

Situated along the river Thames in London, the Palace of Westminster evokes the grandeur and privilege of the time in which it was built: the seat of a global empire in the nineteenth century. Grand staircases and hallways are lined with statues of former prime ministers. Paintings depict famous battles fought by victorious British armies. Carved doors lead to imposing committee rooms. Intricate furnishings designed by Augustus Pugin showcase the wealth that the Empire brought to the UK. The palace symbolises power. This design is intended to impress and humble its visitors. At the same time, however, the palace’s masonry is crumbling, leaks are damaging ceilings and artwork, and the building regularly catches fire. The disintegrating edifice of the UK’s legislature, and the scaffolding that is swallowing many of the building’s spires, symbolises a different aspect of politics in the UK: a crumbling democracy. Trust in politicians and political institutions is in long-term decline; volatile voting patterns by the public have returned surprising results at the ballot box; and established political parties are rocked by ongoing crises about their future. In that sense, the Palace of Westminster has come to epitomise nostalgia of a mythical (and misplaced) golden past, instability in established institutions and conventions, and a democracy in need of restoration and renewal.

The malaise, conflict and discontent that has gripped the UK is far from unique. Across the globe, turnout in elections has fallen to an average of 66% in the period 2011–15 (International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 2016). Citizens are voting less often, have become more volatile in casting their vote, identify less with political parties, and are less likely to become party members (Mair, 2013). Trust in politicians and institutions has eroded. Meanwhile, anti-establishment parties and movements have proliferated. While their success has not been unambiguous, many movements have made considerable inroads into national political cultures, whether it is Podemos in Spain or the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany. It goes without saying that Donald Trump’s election victory in the USA as president can be considered one of the most significant in that respect. Regardless of their success, such movements are opposed to established institutions and the existing political class, which they characterise as untrustworthy and out-of-touch in some way or another. In the UK, this has contributed to the surprise referendum result to leave the European Union in 2016. Alongside these events, trust in politicians – including their motivations, truthfulness and integrity – has markedly declined over the past 50 years (Allen, 2018; Clarke et al., 2018). Parliaments, which exist to represent their respective publics and hold political elites to account, are seen as failing in their core tasks. This raises a multitude of questions about the role of politicians in their political systems. It has led some to argue that the health and legitimacy of western democracy is at stake (Foa and Mounk, 2016; cf. Inglehart, 2016).

How have politicians – and especially parliaments – responded? Many have sought to make it easier for the public to engage with them (Leston-Bandeira, 2013) and undertaken parliamentary reforms to bolster their abilities to hold government to account. Parliaments have sought to continuously reinvent themselves because they still lie at the heart of political systems. Across the world, from longstanding and established democracies to authoritarian regimes and dictatorships, legislatures are uniquely placed to represent and symbolise their political communities. In parliamentary (as opposed to presidential) systems, political authority and legitimacy is drawn directly from the legislature. It is only by maintaining the confidence of their parliament that governments survive. However, while one function of parliaments is to sustain the executive and bring the nation together, legislatures also exist to hold governments to account and to scrutinise decision-making. And despite reforms that have taken place in many legislatures to increase their policy-making capacities, publics do not believe parliaments are effective in carrying out such functions.

The UK’s Parliament has not been immune from these trends. In 2013, Jeremy Paxman, former presenter of Newsnight, described the House of Commons as a ‘remote and self-important echo chamber’ (Plunkett, 2013), while a comment piece in 2016 from a former government adviser called investigative committee hearings ‘grandstanding from powerless MPs’ (McTernan, 2016). This was reinforced by the publication of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians, critiquing Parliament and politicians as dysfunctional (Hardman, 2018). The image of Parliament as distant from everyday concerns of citizens and powerless to affect government decision-making is not novel; in fact, the sentiments are widely shared by the public. The Hansard Society (2017) recently found that only 30% of respondents were satisfied with how Parliament works overall. It also found that no more than four in ten believe that Parliament has done a good job in carrying out any of its responsibilities in recent years (Hansard Society, 2017, pp. 28–9). The annual Eurobarometer has found that trust in the UK Parliament sits at 35%, which, although in line with the EU average, is also part of a declining trend (it was around 50% in the mid-1990s) and far from inspiring (European Commission, 2018, p. 43). Meanwhile, politicians languish in the polls as one of the least trusted groups of professionals, with only 19% of the public believing that they are trustworthy (Ipsos MORI, 2018). While such trends are arguably more complex than these headline figures may suggest, it does feed into a broader narrative about politicians, political institutions and democracy more generally in crisis (Ercan and Gagnon, 2014).

It is not just journalists and the public that have a negative view of the foundational institution of the UK’s political system. Academics share this view, too. Anthony King and Ivor Crewe (2013, pp. 361–2), for example, refer to the House of Commons as ‘peripheral’, ‘totally irrelevant’ and ‘passive’. Another author described Parliament as ‘puerile, pathetic and utterly useless’ (Ward, 2004, p. 42). These views are deeply ingrained across academic disciplines and begin early in undergraduate teaching. One textbook on British politics suggests that ‘the House of Commons is misunderstood if viewed as a legislator’ (Moran, 2017, p. 111). Another argues that ‘legislation today is substantially an executive function’, and that Parliament ‘legitimates rather than legislates’ (Griffiths and Leach, 2018, p. 103). Research findings from the parliamentary studies community contrasts sharply with these assessments, suggesting that Parliament is now at its most powerful since at least the mid-nineteenth century (Russell and Gover, 2017; Thompson, 2015a).

The contrast between perception and reality has led Lord Norton of Louth (2017, p. 191) to conclude that ‘these are the best of times, these are the worst of times’ for Parliament. This has no doubt been exacerbated in recent years. Between 2010 and 2015, the UK had its first peace-time coalition in more than 70 years and, since 2017, a minority government. This has not only had repercussions for the organisation and strategies of political parties, but it also heightens the role for Parliament in adjudicating different interests while also throwing up challenges for established rules and conventions. No more is this the case than with the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. We have already seen this with, for example, the government being found in contempt of Parliament in December 2018 and losing – by a historic margin – a key vote on EU withdrawal in January 2019 (Kidd, 2019; Wright, 2018). With wider so-called ‘plots’ to ‘seize control’ over the parliamentary agenda (Shipman, 2019a), Parliament has come under the spotlight in recent times, demonstrating the accountability and law-making challenges that Parliament faces.

Although the UK Parliament faces unique challenges, these opening pages have shown that there are truly global questions about the role of legislatures in political systems, including their ability to represent the interests of citizens and respond to their concerns. It also points to widespread dissatisfaction with parliaments and the tools available to them to carry out their multifaceted roles. That said, our scholarly understanding of how parliaments employ their capacities to, among other things, hold the executive to account is still not widely understood either, nor do we necessarily know much about the everyday lives and pressures that MPs face in enacting their roles. It is in this context that this book is written. It focuses attention on how parliaments exercise their accountability mechanisms in order to tell a broader story about politicians and their place in democratic politics. It takes the UK Parliament¹ as its starting point and case study, specifically looking at what are often described as the power engines of parliaments: committees. The book sheds new light on how the House of Commons’ select committees undertake scrutiny, what this tells us about parliamentary practices and behaviour, and the role of Parliament in an ever-changing landscape of British politics that is characterised by dissatisfaction of political institutions. In order to explain this book’s subject matter, this chapter will summarise the importance of committee scrutiny in the House of Commons, followed by a wider outline of the book.

Committee scrutiny in the House of Commons

Accountability is central to the relationship between government and Parliament. Broadly conceived, it refers to a formal relationship in which the government has to explain itself and to account for its decisions to the legislature. Beyond this general definition, however, the term is shrouded in ambiguity because of the wide range of issues that it includes, such as good governance, transparency, equity, democracy, efficiency, responsiveness, responsibility and integrity (Bovens, 2010; Olsen, 2013). We can distinguish between two interrelated and often used terms: ‘accountability’ and ‘scrutiny’. Strictly speaking, ‘accountability’ is a formal relationship, while the term ‘scrutiny’ is used to describe the process (White, 2015a, p. 3). As will become clear in subsequent chapters, this book focuses closely on the latter term in order to tell a bigger story about accountability relationships in the House of Commons.

In the UK Parliament, accountability manifests itself in many forms. Most well-known is the weekly duel between government and opposition at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) (Bates et al., 2014; Hazarika and Hamilton, 2018). Here, the prime minister has to answer questions from randomly selected MPs without forewarning of the topic, as well as six questions from the leader of the opposition. It is a highly partisan debate that takes place in a confrontational atmosphere involving shouting, heckling and yelling f...