Good afternoon, and welcome to this session of the Procedure Committee. This afternoon we are talking about our inquiry into elections within the House of Commons, focusing specifically on Select Committee Chair elections. Our look at the operation of Select Committee Chair elections will include the voting systems, the competitiveness of the elections and canvassing by candidates. To help with our inquiry, we are joined by three academic experts: Professor Meg Russell, Dr Stephen Holden Bates and Dr Marc Geddes. Good afternoon to you all. May I ask you to introduce yourselves formally for the record?

I am Professor Meg Russell. I am the director of the Constitution Unit at University College London. It might be worth throwing in that I was the specialist adviser to the Wright Committee which devised the proposals for elected Chairs.

I am Dr Marc Geddes. I am a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Edinburgh.

I am Stephen Holden Bates. I am a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Birmingham.

Welcome to all three of you. As is traditional, the first question comes from the Chair. Meg, the Constitution Unit wrote to us with evidence to suggest that the voting system for Select Committee Chairs is set up to find candidates who can command the support of the majority of Members of the House of Commons. Can you set out how the mechanics of the voting system and the underlying logic achieve that outcome?

I should point out that the written evidence came from three colleagues: I was the first author, but it was also written with Alan Renwick, who is a deep electoral systems expert, and Tom Fleming. As to how the election system works, I believe that you have been talking about the Deputy Speaker elections up until this point, and those are a bit more complicated because you are electing several people at once. For a Select Committee Chair, you are electing just one person at once, so you can use a relatively simple electoral system, which is the alternative vote system. The principle is that each person chosen should have majority support. As you all know, but for the record, nominations are opened and, if more than one person is nominated for a Committee Chair, a vote is held. Voters will rank candidates in their order of preference. If after the first preferences are counted, no candidate has more than 50%, the least popular candidate is eliminated and the second preferences are allocated. Basically, you have two choices in such an election—although Alan would probably tell me there are lots more complicated, obscure ones—which are: first past the post and AV. The difficulty with first past the post is that if you have three, four or five candidates, it becomes a bit random who gets through. You might get someone elected on 25% of the vote or something. Given that this is not an election between parties—it is an election between people from the same party—you are not going to give a partisan advantage to a smaller party by swinging in behind a particular candidate. In each election, the things to choose from between the candidates will be specific to that Committee and that set of candidates, so having that kind of system does not give disproportionate influence to any particular group, but it does ensure that each person has the support of a majority of voters when forced to choose. The written evidence from Iain McLean—who is an even bigger electoral systems expert than Alan Renwick, if that is possible—points out some of the shortcomings. He points out that in a first-past-the-post system ballot, you can have a situation where candidate A is more popular than candidate B and candidate B would beat candidate C, but candidate C would actually beat candidate A if you used second preferences. You can ensure that the last person has at least some majority support, even if using second preferences. Sorry, that was probably a long and complicated answer.

No, it was an excellent explanation. Drawing on your experience with the Wright Committee, how important is it that Committee Chairs are elected, in your view?

It is a long time ago, and not many Members of the House now were around in those days. It is worthwhile remembering what the system used to be, because when we do so, it looks quite peculiar. In the old days, basically, the Whips put forward names to be on each Committee, and they would make it clear to those they were nominating whom they expected the Chair to be from among those Members. If you went on the Committee, the expectation was that you would vote for that person. The system was very controlled by the Whips and therefore by the party leaders. The system fell apart after the 2001 election, when the Whips kept off the previous Chairs of two Committees, Gwyneth Dunwoody and Donald Anderson. When, for information, the names went before the parliamentary Labour party that were about to be put on the Order Paper, all hell broke loose. I was there, because I was working for Robin Cook as Leader of the House at the time, and Gwyneth Dunwoody stood up and said, “Why is my name not on this list?” The lists ended up being rejected by the House because those Chairs had been kept off, and the system became very controversial for a number of years after that. There were a series of proposals from the Liaison and Modernisation Committees, but the controversy was still rumbling on in 2009 when the Wright Committee met. The principle that the Wright Committee was seeking to honour—I have the report here—was: “It should be for the House and not for the Executive to choose which of its Members should scrutinise the Executive: the House should also have a strong if not decisive influence on the identity of the Chair.” It does have a decisive influence. “The credibility of select committees could be enhanced by a greater and more visible element of democracy in the election of members and Chairs.” I think most people agree—my colleagues probably want to comment on this as well—that the image of the Committees and their strength and influence has been very much enhanced by those reforms, because they are seen as much more independent of the Executive, even though I think they did a good job before, to be honest. But the Chairs in particular are seen as speaking for the House. There is a risk that Chairs who were independent in the past might have been accused of being some sort of lackey of the Whips or something. You cannot deny that people have been chosen by the House, and that gives them status and independence and enhances the reputation of Parliament as a whole.

You are raising an interesting point, but do you not think that Opposition parties are at a potential disadvantage in the system? I certainly know that it would be the inclination of a Government Chief Whip to do everything they can to get the weakest horse in as a Select Committee Chair and encourage their voters and their party—because you always or usually have a majority as the Government—to make sure that you have the weakest possible Chair from the Opposition Benches, as against the strongest Chair. Whereas if you are an Opposition Chief Whip, you put in the person who is most likely to cause the maximum amount of pain to the Government.

I get your point, but I think there are—

That is what happens.

There are some dangers of that kind, but is it then for the Opposition Chief Whip to try and keep the weaker candidates off the ballot paper so that the governing party does not elect them? There are lots of political dynamics going on here.

Are you saying it is a guided democracy?

Well, I also think it is a bit too cynical to think that all Government Back Benchers want weak Select Committee Chairs and weak scrutiny of the Government.

They usually want weak scrutiny of the Government from the Opposition Chairs.

They can choose a weak Opposition Chair only if weak Opposition Members put themselves forward to be Chair. I would have thought that quite a lot of Government Back Benchers would not want a weak Chair of any Committee. Maybe I am too naive, or maybe you are too cynical—probably the truth is somewhere in the middle.

It is not always the preferred candidate who wins in a Select Committee Chair election. We probably all have examples of that.

Do you think the voting system that you described so well, Professor Russell, is clear to the general public and to MPs participating in the election?

I am hogging all the time.

Whoever feels best able to answer.

We may all have an answer on this. I think it is probably as clear as it could be. The public are never going to have a high awareness of how people are chosen, but I think they know that they are elected, which is an important thing. I doubt that many of them delve into the fine details of the electoral system. This is an obvious point that somebody is going to make at some point: even if members of the public do not use AV to choose MPs, it is commonly used in other places, particularly inside the political parties, to choose leaders. It is not a completely unfamiliar system, but I doubt that the majority of the public want to get into the weeds of exactly how people are chosen. I think they are probably interested in the fact that they have been chosen by the House.

I echo Professor Russell’s point that it is not necessarily how MPs are chosen or elected, but the fact that they are chosen through an electoral process that I think matters to the public. It would be asking quite a lot of the public to understand the minutiae of parliamentary procedure. The broad principles are something that should be echoed. In our written evidence we put forward five reasons why Chair elections are beneficial. One of them, to return to the points that Meg made, is around the legitimacy of the role of MPs as Chairs and giving them a House role. Another one is around strengthening the independence and impact of Committees in the eyes of the public. That is really important. There are three other factors that we talked about that draw on Stephen’s research.

One of the other ones is that the introduction of elections has been good for female candidates. Prior to elections, female MPs were under-represented at Chair level, and the introduction of elections has made a difference to that. The issue has disappeared in the 15 years since, so there is quite a lot of evidence that that made a difference. Secondly, since there have been elections, the newsworthiness of Select Committees has increased. Select Committee Chairs and members are communicating more with the public. A couple of the core tasks are about communicating with the public and informing the public, and that increased newsworthiness has arguably allowed Select Committees to do those core tasks better. Thirdly—I am saying this a bit carefully because it is unpublished research that has not been peer reviewed—I have been doing some work with colleagues looking at the impact of the elections on the levels of specialisation that MPs had in the House, and there is some evidence to suggest that the introduction of elections increased the specialisation levels of MPs, albeit perhaps temporarily. There is a suggestion that in the 2010 and 2015 elections especially, there was an increased level of specialisation, which cannot be put down to things like turnover; rather, it is things like the elections of Chairs and members.

May I expand on a point that Gavin made? As you may know, I was a Member of the Scottish Parliament for 10 years, and in the Scottish Parliament, Committee Chairs are appointed by the party Whips. As Chief Whip for the Scottish Conservatives, one of my jobs was to appoint Committee Chairs. You are probably aware of the speculation and rumour that there was around this place after the last election. A number of long-serving shadow Ministers who had served for Labour in opposition were passed over for Government positions, but the deal was that they were promised that the Government’s whipping machine would ensure that they became Committee Chairs. Do you have any insights on that? This is perhaps particularly to you, Professor Russell. Is it genuinely a free decision of MPs, or do you think there is a whipping operation of the kind that I described—something to give people as part of the payroll?

I am flattered that you think that I have something to tell you about that. You are the people who participate in these elections, so perhaps you are better qualified to say what kind of pressure you might or might not come under from the Whips. There are things—we might come on to this when we are talking about competitiveness—that are quite particular about this Parliament. The very high turnover at this election may have led to a lot of people coming in who were relatively less familiar with the system and relatively less confident in challenging the instructions given to them by the Whips. When turnover is lower and there are more old timers, it is perhaps easier for people to ignore those kinds of suggestions. At the end of the day, I don’t want to give the wrong impression. I was once accused in front of a Procedure Committee inquiry some 10 years ago of wanting to turn Parliament into an academic seminar—I was appearing with Tony Wright, and we were both accused equally—which I thought was rather unfair. I don’t think this is a technocratic place where everything runs along strictly neutral and impartial lines. You can’t take the politics out of politics. Whatever the system is, the parties, the Whips, Back-Bench factions and so on will try to use the system to their advantage. I don’t think you can stop that kind of thing, but if Members do not want people who have just come off the Front Benches being elected to chair Select Committees, they don’t have to vote for them.

There is perhaps a difference, in that previously there was formal control by party Whips over who became Chair, and there may have been a shift towards informal control in some ways. Anecdotally, I heard that for one particular Committee there was a preferred candidate, who did not win. So it obviously did not work in that instance. In the last Parliament, there were a lot of Opposition Select Committee Chairs who then went on to the Front Bench, so the party leaders obviously did not think that the weakest link was chairing and I am not entirely sure about the Opposition weakest link point.

I was not making the point about the weakest link. I was making the point that Committee Chair becomes one of the appointments that the Whips control and that can be offered to colleagues as—

I am sure that might happen. I think there is also an issue with membership—whether Whips control access to membership of Committees, rather than the chairships—where the process is very opaque and there is not much information out there about what goes on. At least with the Chair elections you know who the nominees are and there is canvassing. There may be too much canvassing, but there is canvassing, and there is a public vote that is reported. That does not happen with membership elections, and from my perspective, it is probably there that attention needs to be placed, rather than at chairship level.

I agree with that. I don’t know whether we have time to discuss it later. The concerns about membership were in our written evidence. Basically, our evidence was that we feel that the Chair elections work pretty well. We might talk about canvassing and other things, but the use of the system and so on works pretty well. The member elections are somewhat more problematic and deserve a bit more scrutiny.

This question is for Marc and Stephen. Could you explain how the competitiveness of Select Committee Chair elections may seem to have risen recently? Do you think that other drivers are at play than the fact that some incumbents chose to step down in 2024?

As we say and as Meg says in her evidence, it depends on how you define competitiveness. In terms of the number of contested elections, 2024 was the most competitive, but if you look at the total number of MPs who stood and then the narrowness of the winning margin, 2024 was not the most competitive. But in terms of the number of contested and uncontested elections, 2024 was the most competitive. I think that was mainly down to the fact that, first, not many incumbents were standing again. There were only three for the particular Committees that they were chairing. Other MPs, who had previously been Chairs of Committees, were standing for a different Committee—like the Chair of this Committee. There were not many incumbents, and there was a lot of switching from Conservative and SNP chairing of particular Committees to Labour and the Liberal Democrats, so those are the issues that perhaps led to 2024 being more competitive in terms of contested or uncontested seats.

Stephen has covered what I was going to say. I suppose the other point I would make is that it perhaps also reflects the growing prestige of Committees. These are sought-after posts, and that might also explain why increasingly people want to go for these positions.

The other, slightly more cynical thing that I perhaps should have said is that I felt that some MPs from the most recent intake were standing not in order to win, but in order to raise their profile in the House. The fact that none of them—apart from the ones where it had to be a new MP—won perhaps bears that out a little bit.

Another way of looking at competitiveness, which is reflected in our evidence, is to look at how many people are standing per Committee, and that has not changed very much. If you look back over the five elections, the number of Committees has slightly fluctuated, but 51 people stood in 2024 and 52 in 2019 and 2017. There were 61 in 2015—there may be reasons for that—and 57 in 2010. So the number of people standing in these elections has been fairly stable. Sometimes you have had more uncontested elections, particularly in 2017, which was an election where not a great deal changed in the composition of the House. It had obviously just been a short Parliament beforehand, so that makes some sense. At times, there have been ones that have had six people standing, but generally the number of people standing per position is about two, if you average it out in every one of these elections.

I was part of the 2019 intake, and the elections must have passed me by; I had never seen anything like it in 2024. It could have been that there was just a small intake of Labour MPs, and it was covid, so that canvassing period really did not happen. But 2024—crikey! I think there were some of us older ones thinking, “The confidence of these newbies going for Select Committee Chairs!”, but I agree that it could have been to raise their profiles.

The other thing to say about competitiveness is that we both feel there is an issue with competitiveness of third party-chaired Committees. Since 2010, I think there has been only one SNP Committee where the chairship has been contested, and for the Liberal Democrats there has not been any. I was slightly surprised at the Liberal Democrat press release when they announced their Front Bench, as it included reference to the Chairs of their Select Committees, which seemed to be slightly conflating party activity with parliamentary activity.

Not really, no. Basically, I think the elections have always run pretty well, and they continue to do so. They vary according to whether it is a large turnover election and so on—there are contextual factors that make them run differently. One of the ones that Dr Geddes and Dr Holden Bates emphasised in their evidence—I do not want to steal their point—was about the length of the campaign period this time, which may have been a contributor, alongside other things, to the increased campaign materials.

To follow up on the point you made about the SNP and the Lib Dems, is that not them just circumventing the rules of the House? My understanding is that they have their own internal contest and pick the person they want. They are not getting the judgment of the rest of the Members of Parliament as to who we want as Chair of that Committee.

I do not whether that is circumventing the rules or not.

It is not in the spirit of the rules, and that is basically what they are doing.

There may be reasons why. Because of their relatively small number of MPs, it may be that a third party does not have the same possibility of competitiveness within that cohort.

Just to be clear, my understanding is that there is a contest happening, certainly with the SNP, but they do it behind closed doors among their MPs, as opposed to all MPs getting to choose.

That does not seem—it is a parliamentary Committee, isn’t it? It should be elected by the whole House.

I think that is something we can seek further evidence on. I am conscious that we do not have any third party MPs here to defend themselves.

The question would be whether there are any sanctions against people who do not respect that election. Of course, according to the rules of the House, somebody who had not been elected inside the party has the right to put themselves forward, but the party might well be able to make their life very difficult if they did so.

My understanding of what happened with the SNP in the last Parliament, certainly with a couple of candidates who would have gone forward to a full election of the House, is that there was sufficient pressure and the internal contest happened to ensure that only one candidate was put forward for ratification, which is obviously not within the spirit of the rules, as Gavin says.

An interesting question for the Procedure Committee is what the rules could do to prevent that kind of behaviour.

One of the challenges we have is that there are House rules for elections, but political parties elect the members, although not the Chairs, of Committees. Those processes are sometimes less transparent, shall we say, than the elections for Chairs.

We touched on the canvassing and electioneering in the Chair elections, which I think was a delight for all of us. We all know how it feels to live in a parliamentary by-election in terms of leaflets. This question is mainly to Stephen and Mark. Following the election last year, we had a uniquely long campaign period between the announcement of the party Chair allocations and the elections taking place. What impact do you think that had? I have a supplementary question, because I suspect you may touch on it. Your written evidence suggests a 10-working-day fixed gap between the announcement and the elections. What is the rationale for that and how does it tie in?

The reasoning behind the 10 working days is that it reflects what has tended to happen in practice in previous elections. This time around, in 2024, was the outlier. If you give MPs an entire summer to run an election campaign and nothing else to do, maybe that is what they will spend their energies on. That might explain why there was more intense canvassing over that period. If it is a quiet summer, it does not give them much else. For that reason, we think the time period should be reduced in line with standard practice. We have put it as 10 working days, or 14 calendar days. That was the practice in 2010, 2015 and, I think, 2017. We recommend doing that in the future for consistency reasons and because it makes the process more transparent and helps to minimise the canvassing that some MPs have complained about.

Do you think there would be any risks with a fixed term? It sounds like not, but I will give you the chance to say whether there are any risks associated with a determined period.

I would not say so. I looked through the written evidence from some of the MPs who are concerned that it might reduce opportunities for canvassing and therefore that some MPs might not be aware of who is running for these elections, but I think that is a minimal risk.

I have a basic question to start off with. Meg talked about the good old days. I remember when I first arrived in this place in 1983 that the then Member for Gosport spent an inordinate amount of time canvassing my support for him to be the Chairman of the Defence Committee. I could not get a word in edgeways, but at the end of his case, I said to him, “I didn’t think that people who weren’t on the Committee had a vote on who should chair it.” He said to me, “You are Edward Leigh, aren’t you?” I assured him that I was not, and then he left—I have never seen anybody depart so quickly. He had a relatively small number of people from whom to choose. The previous system may not have been perfect, but it ensured that the members of a Committee could choose their Chair. Taking into account that one of the big frustrations at the beginning of any Parliament is that it takes a long time to set up the Select Committees, would it not be better to revert to a system whereby we have elections within the parties for the membership of the Committees, with the Government announcing prior to that which Committees would have a Labour Chairman, and so on? Then, within the parties, people would compete among themselves to be the party representatives on those Committees. At the first meeting of that Committee, the members would choose the Chair, taking into account that the Chair may have been allocated to a particular political party. In that way, not only would we get the best and keenest people going on to the Committees, but we would ensure that we maintained the principle that it is important that the members of the Committee should have confidence in the Chair, rather than having that Chair imposed on them. I pray in aid of this proposition what happened on the Intelligence and Security Committee. When the members had been appointed by the Government and Opposition Patronage Secretaries, the members themselves decided that, in this particular example, Julian Lewis would be a much better Chair than somebody who had been identified in advance as the Government’s chosen person. That was an example of where the Committee itself chose its Chair. The consequence for Julian Lewis was that his knighthood was delayed—stopped and then subsequently reinstated much later—but it meant that the Committee had a Chair of its own choice and liking. Why are we thinking about the current system without thinking about the virtues of having a Chair that is chosen by a Committee’s membership? That would remove us from a situation, as in the past, where a Patronage Secretary would say, “You are going to go on this Committee.” We can now have elections to the Committees, and the Committees, once elected, would elect their Chairs.

I could say that I can remember the Wright Committee because I was there—I was there, but I would not have remembered unless I had reread bits of the report before coming here. The Wright Committee did consider all of these options. You can see, set out in the report, that there are various ways of doing it. One way would be to elect the members and then have the Committees elect the Chairs, or to elect the Chairs and then elect the members afterwards. There were various combinations considered. The Intelligence and Security Committee remains under something more like the old system, and that is the kind of problem that you had with the old system. The system you are suggesting is not the old system—you are suggesting the election of members, which is an interesting proposition. I think that it would take us back to: how are the members elected? The Wright Committee wanted members to be elected by a transparent democratic system; it actually wanted those elections to be kitemarked by the Speaker. The kitemarking by the Speaker was never implemented, but the motion that the House agreed said that “the party should elect members by secret ballot using a transparent and democratic method”. I do not think the method is at all transparent. We do not know what goes on in terms of the election of members, and the system is not operating in line with the motion that the House agreed, implementing the Wright Committee’s recommendation in 2010—I have managed to get that point in.

Is that failure something for this Committee to look at in this inquiry?

I think it should be. Certainly, I would not endorse a system where Committees are choosing their Chairs until you had sorted out whether the elections of members were genuinely transparent. The Wright Committee did consider this. You used the words “Chair imposed on them”, and it was very explicit that because the Chairs were chosen first, and the outcome of the Chair elections was announced before member elections opened, people did not have somebody imposed on them; they had to decide whether they wanted to serve on a Committee chaired by that person. I know that sometimes you would want to be on a Committee, but you would not like the Chair, so that would present you with a dilemma. However, they are not really imposed on them—members know in advance.

The example I was taking was the Intelligence and Security Committee, where it was quite clear that there was pressure on the Government members of that Committee, who were appointed, to choose another Government-supporting member, other than Julian Lewis.

That seems to me to be an argument against the old system, pre-Wright Committee, rather than an argument against the revised system.

Exactly. It is an argument against that system; it is not necessarily an argument against the revised system that I have been describing. You talk about this issue of canvassing. I think this is the point that is emerging already. At the last general election, I did not know many of my new colleagues—there were only 25 of them—and I certainly did not know any of the new hordes who were then sitting on the Government Benches. Yet the system required us to make intelligent choices as to who we wanted to have as the Chairs of these Committees. I thought it was good that the potential candidates set out their stalls and made themselves available for questions and so on. So, wasn’t the length of time that all that took a consequence of the fact that people did not know each other and candidates were modest enough to recognise that people did not know them? Should it be a subject of criticism that canvassing took place and/or that it took so long?

I do not think that it is necessarily a criticism, and certainly that is a benefit of having a longer electoral period. However, you could organise hustings in different ways. For example, you could have hustings specific for each Committee, where everybody is able to set out their stalls, which would then prevent everyone from receiving several phone calls or several leaflets through their door, or having door-to-door canvassing, if you had those meetings for those Committees that you are interested in. That would perhaps be more time-efficient.

I slightly disagree with Mark there. One of the MPs—I think it was Toby Perkins in his written evidence—said that nobody will attend the hustings, and I think I agree with that. If there are, say, 25 elections, what MP has the time to go to all 25 of those? Either you take two days out of your working week to go to every husting, or you just go to the one that you are interested in, where there will be 10 other people there. I do not think that is a good use of anyone’s time. There is probably an issue with what the rules should be about how much canvassing, and so on, should be done. There are rules in every workplace about that kind of thing. At our university, when there are elections for senate, you make a 250-word statement and then people vote on the basis of that. I did not go around putting leaflets under people’s doors or anything like that. So, there are ways of doing it. I think it is about allowing fairness in the system and also recognising that MPs are very busy people.

There is a candidates booklet for the Select Committee Chair elections and as part of our work on this inquiry we have seen it. I think there was an understanding that not many Members were aware of it. I wondered whether any of you three were aware of the candidates booklet from the outside looking in, because from the inside it was certainly not well known about.

Yes, we read it.

We are not typical members of the public. Again, it is very nice that you are asking us these questions, but you are the ones in the best position to judge whether there was too much or too little canvassing, or whether there ought to be limits put on it. I was very struck by some of the written evidence you received from people who took part in the elections and who used words like “excessive”, “deluged” and “intolerable”. However, they were not unanimous in their view. There are clearly different views, and I do not know whether you will ask Members as a whole how deluged they felt. This is really a question that I think only you can answer in here. Those of us sitting on the outside will look at the answers with interest, but we are not really qualified to adjudicate.

Absolutely fair point. Sir Gavin, you had some questions.

Meg, your written evidence suggests that competitiveness is unlikely to be the driver of increased campaigning. Do you think that is because the roles of Select Committee Chairs have become more established and people have become more comfortable with what they are, or that they see it as a better career route?

Do you mean in terms of what happened the last time?

Yes.

I think it is the product of a fairly unusual constellation of circumstances, which does not mean that it will not happen again. The timing that was referred to before was caused by a July general election, and we have not had one of those for—I have not mugged up; I think we have had one once before, but not for a very long time. So the recess arrived before the elections could take place, and that clearly influenced things. On top of that, you had an unprecedentedly high number of new MPs, who did not know the candidates, and a number of new candidates. I am not sure that that would be repeated. But it might be complacent to say that you will revert to what happened in 2019, say, at the next election. Once there has been an election, with a lot of leafleting, campaigning and emails being sent out, there is a risk that that sets a precedent, and that it is ratcheted up, even if those conditions do not apply next time. That might be a reason for looking at limits.

Marc and Stephen, do you think that the elections have created, like, super-parliamentarians? Obviously that is how we refer to our Chair. Have they given them a prominence that they did not previously have? We were talking about Gwyneth Dunwoody and various others who were quite prominent parliamentarians who used the Select Committee system. Do you think the elections have elevated people, or does how much elevation they get come down to the individual, not whether they have been elected?

The elections have increased the prominence of Select Committees more generally and Chairs in particular; whether that means that Chairs are super-parliamentarians is a different matter. I did a little bit of work looking at the career paths of Chairs. Over the last two or three Parliaments, you have had the emergence of people using Select Committee chairships as a stepping stone. You have seen quite a few relatively new MPs chairing quite prominent Committees and then being promoted to the Front Bench relatively quickly. You have also seen MPs use chairships to—this is not quite the right term—tread water. They have been Ministers or shadow Ministers, and then, for one reason or another—to do with Brexit, Corbyn becoming leader or whatever—their normal career path has not—

There has been disruption.

There has been disruption, yes, in both parties. Then you have had people who you would normally expect to be on the Front Bench being the Chairs of Committees, and then subsequently going back on to the Front Bench. That is a bit different from the super-parliamentarian: if you do not want to be on the Front Bench, you can have another career path where the end point is becoming a Chair of a Committee, or if you were on the Front Bench, then now, as part of your swansong, you are going to Chair a Committee. That is traditionally what chairing a Committee was like. There seems to be the emergence, as I said, of these two other career pathways.

To echo an earlier point, a lot of Chairs perceive their role to be a House-wide one, and I think that that changes their sense of purpose and the kinds of activities that they do. From that point of view, the role of a Chair has far greater prestige than it perhaps did in the past.

Do you have any views on whether all the Chair posts should be part of the process of being elected at the start of a Parliament? For example, should the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee be elected to serve for the whole Parliament, or continue to be elected on a sessional basis?

That is an interesting one. We may have struggled slightly to interpret your question about whether all Chairs should be elected, because it could be interpreted as, “Should there be fewer or should there be more?” I do not think any of us believe that there should be fewer Committees with elected Chairs, but there are some around the edges that do not currently have elected Chairs, and maybe it could be extended to them. I thought it was interesting, in the evidence from Members who had contested the elections, that someone raised the question of the Liaison Committee. It elected its own Chair this time, in line with what Sir Christopher was saying, but did not the previous time, when Bernard Jenkin, who did a very good job as Chair, was maybe aware of the need to prove himself as an independent voice, having effectively been parachuted in by the Prime Minister to chair the Liaison Committee. There are some questions about other Chairs. The Backbench Business Committee is an interesting one. I confess that I am quite closely interested in the Backbench Business Committee, and was there at its creation. I do not how that ended up being sessionally elected rather than elected for the Parliament. I do find that quite peculiar. I do not have a particularly strong view as to whether it should change. There is a problem with the Backbench Business Committee, again, in terms of election of members, as the recommendation of the Wright Committee was that those members should exceptionally be elected across the House, unlike the members of other Committees that are elected in their parties. That was initially the case, but again, a surprise motion from the Government that nobody was expecting changed that pretty much overnight, and they gained approval for that. I have separately written evidence for the Backbench Business Committee’s inquiry into its own operation after 15 years. One of the things we have said is that it is a long time since that change happened, but it would be better to revert to the principle of being elected across the House. It is a different Committee from others. I do not have a strong view about the Chair.

The Constitutional Unit’s written evidence alludes to the potential merits of periodic reviews of Select Committee Chair elections. Are there any particular elements of that that you think should be monitored or reviewed each time?

It would be interesting to hear from the others who have done such careful research about these elections on how easy it is to get information about the elections, because I found it quite difficult. I do not believe there is a publication that says how many people stood for how many Committees, how many votes were cast, and so on, which would make it easy to track issues like competitiveness. I mainly made that point because I was concerned about the lack of transparency over election of members. The election of members is not specified, but there is a very high level of specification of the election of Chairs in Standing Orders. Those are followed by the House authorities—it would be a breach of Standing Orders not to—but there is not even a mention in Standing Orders that members of Select Committees are elected. There is not a list of which members will be elected, and there is no indication of what electoral systems were used or how many candidates stood. With respect to Select Committee Chairs, it is transparent and closely laid down, and there is publicity about it, but I still think it is somewhat scattered. Stephen and Marc might want to comment on that. With respect to members, there is nothing. My suggestion was that if this is not going to be governed by Standing Orders, then perhaps this Committee could take it upon itself to report on the election of members by parties. You might think somebody else should be doing that, but I think somebody should do it. Currently, it is in breach of what the House agreed in 2010, and it is definitely in breach of what the Wright Committee recommended.

On the point about election of members, I tried to do research on that point in the past, but I got nowhere, because there was no information at all. When I once inquired into it, I was told, “These are internal party matters,” and was not given any further information.

Ditto. That is the experience I have had. In terms of collecting data for Chair elections, I found it relatively easy, because I now know where to look, but if you were coming to it cold, there is not a central repository. The other thing that perhaps could be done refers to members. In terms of gender and ethnicity, Committees are doing pretty well overall, but in the last election, there were issues about, I think, the geographical representation on certain Committees. The old system may have been better at doing that, because you think, “Well, we need to have someone from different regions.” From memory, the Treasury Committee is very London-heavy. I don’t think there are any Scottish MPs on the Defence Committee—from memory, I think that is right. So there are issues. Monitoring who the members are is not saying you must do something about it, but it gives information to the electors, the MPs who are electing, to say, “Okay, I need to consider who I am voting for in terms of geographical representation as well as other reasons why I may or may not vote for someone”—if those elections do actually take place.

If that information was available, how much of that do you think is a reflection of the particular Parliament? With this Parliament, there were a lot of vacancies, a lot of new Members elected for the first time and there was a big change in Government. That obviously would have flavoured what happened. You have already detailed some of that. Every Parliament will be very different. If you did have that information, how much of it would be flavoured by the peculiarities of that particular Parliament?

The only thing I would say on that is that I do not think there is necessarily—Parliament is pretty good at publishing sessional returns, which include a lot of information that is very useful to people. It used to be better, but it is still pretty good at that. I would not have thought it would be too difficult to include, for example, details of Select Committee Chair elections in that information, or to at least include links. That seems to be the way it has gone—for further details, such as attendance, go to the individual Committees. Some Committees are better than others at reporting that. There are already ways of doing it that could be utilised to make information readily available to anyone who was interested in it.

Of course, this is about trust in the process. Again, this is not about us being able to get easy information so that we can write nice research publications; this is about the transparency of Parliament for the public, and them having trust that rules are being followed and that transparent and democratic processes are taking place. I think you can see that if you look carefully for the Select Committee elections, but as Stephen says, we know where to go and get the information. If a member of the public wanted to see, “How did those elections go?”, it would not be so straightforward to find that. I think that is a shame, because it is all done perfectly properly and the information is there, but it is just not pulled together. For Select Committee members, even we do not really have confidence that the system is working properly and there is no reason for members of the public to have confidence that it is working properly.

Can it not be argued that, because the results of the individual parties choosing the members for each Select Committee are then reported to the House by the Committee of Selection and there is a motion on the Order Paper, which normally goes through unamended and on the nod, there is a power of the House to force a different outcome, irrespective of what decisions come from the individual parties, in the same way as the House can amend a recommendation for membership of a Joint Committee, for example? The usual channels will have put that list together but, as I know from experience, if you cause trouble and you put down some amendments, quite often you can get a change of view. Particularly to Meg, because she has opined on it: do you think the power of the House to oversee this process to a greater extent and to insist on more transparency is already there but it is just not being used?

I think that is a slightly different question. I think the House is very powerful when it wants to use its powers. I suspect that it cannot now throw out who the Select Committee Chairs are, because that is all specified, but when it comes to the members, you may well be correct that it could still do that. That is effectively what happened with Donald Anderson and Gwyneth Dunwoody, when the lists were thrown out. But on 4 March 2010, the House passed a motion that it “takes note” of the recommendations of the Wright Committee and “endorses the principle that parties should elect members of select committees in a secret ballot by whichever transparent and democratic method they choose.” What you are saying may or may not be true, but that motion— This is not a transparent process. It may be a democratic process; we don’t really know, because it is not transparent. It is certainly not a transparent process. That is the point that I am making.

Thank you for your evidence on Select Committee Chairs. Our inquiry is slightly broader, as we are covering the elections for Deputy Speakers. Do any of you have any comments you would like to make on those elections? I thought I would give you the opportunity to add before I draw our proceedings to a close. Witnesses indicated dissent.

If there is anything you want to add to the evidence that you have given this afternoon, we are very happy to receive anything in writing. I draw this session to a close.