Is Plaid about to get shafted over Select Committee places?
Bubble — By Adam Higgitt on June 16, 2010 3:30 pm
Are the minor parties facing the black ball?
AMID last week’s election fever in Westminster, in which Parliament conducted the first ever secret ballot of Members for the chairs of the Commons Select Committees, the facts about how the rest of the places are to be filled has almost gone unnoticed. Since they were established, the allocation of places on these important bodies has been opaque, and has fallen to the party whips. That has now changed, with the Reform of the House of Commons Committee (the “Wright Committee”) recommending that:
members of departmental and similar select committees should be elected by secret ballot within party groups, by transparent and democratic processes, with the outcome reported to and endorsed by the House
So far, so good. Transparent and democratic is better than opaque and executive-controlled. Except that the dynamics of the new Parliament also have a role to play. Party representation on the committees is determined by overall party balance in the Commons, which has been apportioned at 5 Conservative, 5 Labour and 1 Lib Dem position on each of the new, slimmed down 11-person committees. In this, as in the past, there is no formal allocation for representation by the minor parties such as Plaid, the SNP and the Northern Ireland parties. In previous Parliaments, this has always been overcome by the Lib Dems agreeing to surrender a couple of places out of goodwill. The SNP’s Mike Weir served on the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, and Adam Price was a highly influential member of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, for example. Now, with a combined coalition majority of just one on each of the committees, it is unlikely the Lib Dems will accede to the giving up of places to make way for the minor parties. That leaves Labour in the position of potentially giving up slots – except that with its own internal ballot in the process of being organised for the allocation of members, it may prove difficult to persuade those elected to surrender their place – even if the Parliamentary Party were so inclined.
None of this may affect the Welsh Affairs committee, where special arrangements will probably be made to reflect Plaid’s representation. But on the departmental committees, many of which do important and influential scrutiny of decisions that affects Wales in all sorts of ways, it is possible Plaid and the other smaller parties may find themselves frozen out.
Tags: 2010 General Election, constitutional reform, Westminster
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3 Comments
OK, so how does “elected by secret ballot within party groups, by transparent and democratic processes, with the outcome reported to and endorsed by the House” morph into “shafted” and “frozen out”?
Adam notes that “there is no formal allocation [to select committees] representation by the minor parties such as Plaid”. So why exactly SHOULD any of the major parties give up places for Plaid? Some regular contributors to this site may speciously argue that a significant strand of Welsh opinion won’t be heard on select committees – to which the obvious riposte is: tell that to the Welsh voters who decided not to elect more Plaid MPs.
Why should elected Labour, LibDem and Tory MPs, who want to serve on and contribute to select committees’ work, sacrifice their (and their constituents’/party’s) interests to, as Adam accurately describes them, “minor parties”?
The problem Gez is that we don’t actually elect parties we elect individual MP’s and we elect them all as equals. By saying that some parties are not allowed to elect members to committees means that those MPs are less than equal. We pay our MPs to do a job of work, part of that work is to hold the government to account through scrutinising government measures on select committees, by excluding Plaid MPs from committee work we are saying that they can have an easier workload for the same pay, why should Plaid MPs have an easier ride than those who happen to be in “major” parties?
Telling the people of Wales to elect more Plaid MPs if they want Plaid people on committees wouldn’t work either – Plaid would have been excluded under the current rules even if 40 Plaid people had been elected. Northern Ireland didn’t elect anybody from the “major” parties so all of the provinces MPs are excluded from the committees, under this oversight.
Incidentally, from what I understand, it was an oversight rather than a shafting, and it is likely to be remedied shortly.
To be honest I find it bizarre that all parties would not have some representation on important Commons committees. Perhaps Plaid needs to reevaluate their Westminster election tragedy, like campaign to win as many seats as thy can. They owe that to their supporters.