Liaison Sub-Committee

Oral evidence: The effectiveness and influence of the Select Committee system, HC 1860

Wednesday 8 May 2019

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 8 May 2019.

Watch the meeting

Members present: Dr Sarah Wollaston (Chair); Hilary Benn; Lilian Greenwood; Sir Bernard Jenkin; Mrs Maria Miller; Stephen Twigg.

Questions 45-81

Witnesses

I: Ruth Chambers, Senior Parliamentary Affairs Associate, Green Alliance, Kayley Hignell, Head of Policy (Families, Welfare and Work), Citizens Advice, Mark Lloyd, Chief Executive, Local Government Association, and Ed Cox, Director of Public Services and Communities, RSA.

II: Professor Adam Cygan, Leicester Law School, University of Leicester, Dr Catherine Haddon, Senior Fellow, Institute for Government, Dr Holger Hestermeyer, Shell Reader in International Dispute Resolution, King’s College London, and Dr Jack Simson Caird, Senior Research Fellow in Parliaments and the Rule of Law, Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law.

Written evidence from witnesses:

– [Add names of witnesses and hyperlink to submissions]

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Ruth Chambers, Kayley Hignell, Mark Lloyd and Ed Cox.

Q45            Chair: Good afternoon. Welcome to the Liaison Committee. I am grateful to you for coming and sharing your thoughts and expertise for our effectiveness and influence of the Select Committee system inquiry, to mark the 40th anniversary of the Select Committee system. Before we start questions, could I ask you to introduce yourselves and who you are representing today?

Ruth Chambers: Thank you very much for the opportunity. I am Ruth Chambers, representing Greener UK, which is a coalition of 14 environmental NGOs. I have also worked for a number of other charity sector organisations over the last few years.

Kayley Hignell: I am Kayley Hignell, head of policy for the families, wealth and work topic areas at Citizens Advice.

Mark Lloyd: I am Mark Lloyd, chief executive of the Local Government Association, the representative body for 355 councils across England and Wales.

Ed Cox: Hi, I’m Ed Cox. I am a director for public services and communities in the RSA. I am also the incoming chair of INVOLVE, which is the public participation charity. Perhaps I will draw on some of that experience as well this afternoon.

Chair: Great. I am going to hand over to Stephen Twigg to ask some questions.

Q46            Stephen Twigg: Good afternoon. I have two questions for each of you that relate to the impact and effectiveness of Select Committees. First, can you briefly tell us how you as an organisation respond when you hear there is a relevant Select Committee inquiry? Secondly, can you give an example of some work of a Select Committee that has had an impact on either your organisation or the policy area that you focus on? Shall we just go across the table, starting with Ruth?

Ruth Chambers: How we react really depends on the length of time that a Committee gives us to respond. Sometimes Committees present slightly challenging timescales for stakeholders. We have two modes of response: one is orderly and one is scramble. We hope to not use the scramble mode very often.

As a coalition, the first thing that we would do is convene our members and decide whether this is an inquiry that we want to engage in collectively. If we do, we decide which questions we might want to address, draft some kind of high-level response, agree that between us, test any assumptions, commission further evidence, and get a response in as quickly as possible. We are conscious that the earlier that we as stakeholders send our thoughts into the Committee, the greater the chance there is that we might be invited to give oral evidence, which is where we feel we can have a more productive discussion and dialogue, and obviously the greater the chance we have influence the Committee’s thinking as it moves forward.

If the timetable is very constrained, we might send in something quite high level at the outset and then send in supplementary submissions, either on the back of oral evidence or as stand-alone documents, if we feel that is required.

An example of where Select Committees have been very effective from a stakeholder engagement point of view is that when EU exit secondary legislation was first announced—that huge tranche that has just been through various stages of Parliament—there were no plans from DEFRA to do any stakeholder engagement on that because of the time constraints. That worried stakeholders very much. A commitment was made to one Select Committee—the EFRA Committee—that there would be some kind of engagement. We worked with three Committees who happened to have DEFRA Ministers before them in the space of about 10 days—I think it was Public Accounts, the Lords EU Energy and Environment Sub-Committee and the Environmental Audit Committee—and briefed them on the importance of stakeholder involvement in that process. As a result, DEFRA put in place improved engagement mechanisms on EU exit legislation for stakeholders, a digital reading room and a sounding board for stakeholders to share their views. It was not perfect and it was late in the day, but it was better than nothing. We do not feel that that would have happened without the input from that Select Committee to Ministers.

Q47            Stephen Twigg: On your first answer, how much notice do you need for it to be an orderly response rather than a scramble?

Ruth Chambers: Ideally, four weeks is sensible and six weeks is better. Three weeks is very tight.

Kayley Hignell: I fear we are going to repeat quite a lot here, but I guess that is a good outcome in terms of consensus. On your first question about how we respond at Citizens Advice, we are a bit like the Select Committees. We cover pretty much all areas and all topics; all the data and the evidence that we have cuts across the different topic areas. First, we look at whether it is a priority area for us and whether our data is telling us to respond. Then we look at what valuable evidence we have: is it robust enough and is it useful to answer the questions? Then we move to the resources question, about how much resource we can put into the response. I echo Ruth about the timeline: six weeks is ideal, four weeks is doable, but three weeks is very, very tight.

When we work to produce our written evidence, we determine which questions are relevant to us. Sometimes that is one out of 10; sometimes it is all 10. In the past, perhaps we tried to spread thinly across the 10 questions, but we have now become much narrower and say, “Actually, we have the strongest answer to these questions.” That can be a difficult process.

We also monitor things like the oral evidence sessions, so that we are not just feeding in but looking at what is going on. That gives us really good indications of where Government Departments are on different areas and topics, and it allows us to find out quite a lot of information that we might not otherwise be able to get.

If we are invited to give oral evidence, we develop a briefing around that and around possible questions. Oral evidence and briefing can be very difficult to prep for because it can be so broad. Lots of great work goes in by the Clerks to help make sure we have details of where the questions could be narrower.

On your second question, about impact, the Work and Pensions Committee and the Public Accounts Committee recently have had a real impact on the roll-out of universal credit. They have drawn a lot of scrutiny and attention to the issues. Universal credit is a major issue for us as an organisation, so it was very valuable to have extra attention drawn to that subject, and certainly to get more clarity on the Government’s position on it. The Treasury Committee’s inquiry last year on household debt was also good in the sense that it pulled together something that is quite cross-cutting and is one of those long-term issues without necessarily having a firing pistol for it. It was great to see that one, too.

Mark Lloyd: As the representative body for 18,500 local councillors, we are very keen that they have a chance to share their concerns about the wellbeing of communities with parliamentarians who are similarly minded, so we take responding to Select Committees through the Local Government Association very seriously. We are always keen to bring you views when two things exist: first, when we can form a cross-party view—we can on almost all issues, to be frank—and secondly, when we have evidence that we think you will find compelling.

I will give you a short list—without expanding, I promise—of recent work that has had a massive impact. The work of the Treasury Committee on councils’ role in house building and the scrapping of the housing revenue account was very important and built on a 15-year campaign by the LGA. The joint work of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee highlighting the crisis in social care was also critical. The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee’s focus on children’s services and the underfunding of critical support for young people mattered a lot. The Public Accounts Committee’s seminal piece of work on the funding gap facing local public services was critical. We think the work of Select Committees matters, and we are very keen to be active contributors.

Ed Cox: I will not repeat things that people have already said about the selection of topics that are congruent with the work that a particular think-tank is doing. My experience, with both IPPR and the RSA, is that we will choose topics if we feel we have something substantive to contribute.

Perhaps to focus on things that have not been said already, one of the judgments we make is whether we think a Select Committee is any good: whether people turn up, whether the questioning is useful and meaningful, whether we think there is a genuine attempt to be cross-party, whether we think a long-term strategic approach is being taken, and whether we think the Select Committee is actually going to have any impact, either in relation to Government or in relation to creating a wider narrative—a wider impact in society—that people are going to listen to. We look quite carefully at different Select Committees and form judgments about whether they are any good or not.

Another factor is the extent to which we feel Government needs to be held to account on topics. Many, many inquiries take place. Again, we are selective and choose those we think are really going to have some purchase on Government.

The last thing to say is really quite a technical thing. It is quite hard to keep tabs on new inquiries. On the front of the website, there is a shortlist of four or five, which are the most recent ones, but after that, when you dig down, there are literally a hundred or so there at any point in time, and it is quite difficult to work through them. At both think-tanks, we have had to develop our own internal processes for trying to keep tabs on precisely which inquiries are being announced, what their timelines are and so on.

On the second part of the question, in terms of those we think have been effective, certainly the BEIS Committee’s inquiry into the Taylor review of working practices—obviously, Matthew Taylor, our chief executive, was responsible for that—was particularly effective. It was both cross-party and long term, and we think it had a wider impact on the Government’s response to the Taylor review. The other one I would mention is the work on the funding of adult social care, which Sarah Wollaston was involved with. We think it was particularly creative to use a citizens assembly to gather evidence around that. Perhaps we will touch on that some more later in our conversation.

Q48            Stephen Twigg: Ed, thank you. That takes me neatly to the next set of questions, which are more about effectiveness. Can I invite each of you to say briefly whether there are things—types of activity or types of scrutiny—you think Select Committees should be doing more of, and whether there are areas you think we focus too much on that we should be doing a little less of? To put that in a broader frame, do you think we are clear enough as Select Committees about priorities and strategy?

Ruth Chambers: I think you could be clearer. This applies across the board to all Select Committees. For example, it is often difficult for stakeholders to know what the forward work programme of a Committee is, how long it is going to run for and how much space there is to pick up emerging or urgent issues. It genuinely is hard unless you engage with the secretariat on a one-to-one basis. People are often very happy to have that kind of discussion, but it is not apparent from the information on the website how “full” you are. In terms of some of the things that could be done about that, one-off hearings are not as effective as more in-depth scrutiny sessions, but they do allow Committees to be a little more fleet of foot in picking up issues that are a little more urgent.

Sometimes, two Committees can be competing in the same space for airtime. A good example of that is the draft Environment Bill, which our coalition has been involved with. The EFRA Committee and the Environmental Audit Committee have undertaken separate pre-legislative scrutiny inquiries, which have been incredibly helpful. They were based around a single set of questions, which on one level made it easier for stakeholders to submit a single set of evidence, but they were separate inquiries and they produced separate reports. It is not altogether clear why the two Committees did that and why there was not a conjoined inquiry, for example. That might be something to think about.

There is also the matter of getting out of Westminster. I know that is always challenging for parliamentarians—your business is so packed—but taking inquiries away from Parliament to hear the views of stakeholders on the ground is something that we would very much like Committees to do more of. A good example of a Committee that did that was the Transport Committee, where you went to Liverpool and Leicester and somewhere else as part of your health of the bus market inquiry. You did not just hear from stakeholders on the ground in those areas; you also held open Q and A sessions for the public.

There are lots of pockets of good practice such as that, but it is not consistent across the board. Those are some things that Committees could do more of that would improve the stakeholder experience and probably lead to better quality evidence as well.

Kayley Hignell: I agree with the need for more clarity on priorities and the forward look. Even if it was a sense of a pipeline of inquiries—not necessarily completely tied down, just topics of interest, perhaps—it would allow us to prep earlier, or at least look at our priorities and where we are putting our resources.

On that point, there is potentially the need for a formal route for making suggestions for inquiries. We can effectively do that by talking to different Members, the secretariat and the like, but it is not a formal process, as far as we are aware. I hesitate to say that sometimes, though, because the reactive process—the building of a debate and then Select Committees coming in and having a look at it—can really add value. Drilling down, getting that clarity on positions and showing the Back-Bench interest in the area can be useful as well.

I echo the point about getting different perspectives and getting out of Westminster. The Treasury Committee recently visited a local citizens advice to hear about people’s experiences of debt and talked to our frontline workers. You will get different things from different people, so people on the frontline will give you quite a lot of insight into how they interact with Departments on their frontline. Nationally, we will be able to give you an idea of the trends, themes that come up, reactions to changes of policy and so on, but I would stress that it would be useful to get those different perspectives.

I am not sure if that kind of stuff is involved in the induction processes of Select Committee members. Are there organisations, visits, tours that should be done as part of inductions to help people to get across those areas?

Mark Lloyd: Local government has a very well-developed discipline around a forward plan, so we set out up to a year in advance the kinds of topics that we will be considering through our executive and non-executive processes. While there are, to some degree, forward plans for Committees, it would be helpful if they were developed a bit further. That is not for one moment to deny the wriggle room that you will need to tackle urgent and important issues that emerge on an ongoing basis, but it would enable us all to target our scarce resources appropriately at the work of the Committees over the year, and as has been suggested, highlight any gaps that we spot in the programme of work.

On the whole, we think the Committees are exploring the right issues that chime with what is worrying local councillors across England and Wales right now. As colleagues have said, however, the more notice we can have to deliver to you frontline councillors from across the country to give you real-life evidence, the better. Of course, they have their priorities too. If you had wanted me to deliver councillors to you in April, when they were all out campaigning ahead of the local elections, it would have been more difficult; ditto in January, when they are building their council budgets. Being mindful of the pressures on other organisations is important.

Getting out and seeing real-life experiences is invaluable. One of the Committees recently, when exploring issues in the private rented sector, spent time in the London Borough of Newham with the team that deals with the private rented sector and makes sure that accommodation is of the right quality for residents. The more of that we can do, the better.

Ed Cox: I broadly agree that Select Committees are addressing the right kind of issues. In one sense, you could say that it would be hard not to, given the plethora of inquiries that there are—they cover nearly all issues. That leads to the critical point: actually it is quite hard to see what is of particular significance as opposed to what is a tokenistic, “I think we should be asking some questions about this.” There should be a little bit more thinking about what are the really important issues that Select Committees should be focusing on, as opposed to a scattergun approach, which is sometimes how it feels.

Part of the fundamental problem, which is probably not a topic for today, is that Parliament tries to do too much. We need to devolve far more from this place and allow a lot more decision making to take place elsewhere within our democratic system. Then you would not need Parliament to scrutinise quite so many topics. Those would be general comments.

As they are, the inquiries are very well framed, the questions are thought through, and the way reports are written is excellent as well. There is some rigorous thinking that goes into them, even though there may be too many of them. If you wanted some advice about which ones might have the most impact, our feeling is that those where there is a genuine sense of cross-party working and those where there is cross-departmental working are particularly effective, as well as those where you are looking at the longer term strategic issues that might be quite difficult for a Government to focus on, because they have a different perspective on what needs to be done over a short period of time.

Much more thinking could go into the impact that an inquiry might have. Ostensibly, doing a ministerial grilling, publishing a report and getting on the “Today” programme seems to be the limit of impact that many Select Committees aim for, but there is a huge opportunity to develop a wider communications strategy, to look at how, for example, you engage with civil servants perhaps more broadly than currently, and how you play into that wider public debate. The most successful Select Committees are those that have had ongoing engagement about a topic over a longer period of time. They become part of a much bigger public debate.

Finally, public engagement is absolutely critical. I assume we will have further questions about that, so I will hold back more detailed comments, but public engagement could be really important.

Q49            Lilian Greenwood: Those are really interesting responses. Building on what you said, and thinking about possible reforms of Select Committees given the rapid change happening in Government, in the economy, in technology and in wider society, are there reforms, new powers or different ways of working that could bring us more up to date or enable us? That might be about how we engage with people. One point that came up last week about the need to provide written evidence and whether we should be taking evidence by video or other formats. Or is it about responding to people’s expectations about how and where they can engage? I would be interested in your views.

Kayley Hignell: When things are changing so rapidly, it is very difficult to keep up and make changes structurally or to processes. Developments that are already under way are helping—particularly the cross-cutting Joint Committees. That is very helpful, and it is a helpful change in the development of policy in Government, to be frank, where that is happening more and more, so it is natural for the Select Committees to take that approach. Continuing to build on that is integral.

On getting different perspectives, the way you gather evidence will make a difference to the types of perspectives you get into your inquiries. You mentioned videos; giving video evidence would be quite useful in regards to oral evidence sessions, as well as gathering it as part of an inquiry.

We work across a couple of major projects at Citizens Advice—smart meters and universal credit, for example—which affect our clients quite significantly. One of the things we have noticed is how Government works and scrutinises those major projects, particularly when they are taking an “agile” or test-and-learn approach to how they are rolling out measures. That makes the job of accountability, scrutiny and checking progress quite difficult. There is something about the role Select Committees play—the PAC, for example—within that environment, because it feels like that is going to become more and more the case. There is certainly value in a test-and-learn approach in terms of not continuing much further down the line with something that is not going to work and needs changes, so it feels sensible to look in that area.

Mark Lloyd: The relatively recent use of video to explain the work of Committees and present their findings has been very powerful. We have used those videos to amplify the conclusions that Committees have reached, thereby extending the reach of the work of the Committees. We should do more of that.

There should perhaps be some consideration given to the submission of written evidence, moving away from the fairly rigid format. There are lots of councils across the country that are doing some super things for their communities and with their communities. We would be very keen to present case studies of those, rather than responding to a whole set of evidence.

The issue of Committees joining up to explore issues is really powerful. I have already referenced the work of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee exploring social care, which was super. I have an example where that did not work so well, namely the Environmental Audit Committee. It tested issues around car washes, which actually became a modern slavery issue, so probably belonged more with Home Affairs. If they had collaborated more on that investigation, we could have given a much more helpful contribution to the debate.

Ed Cox: In so far as Parliament’s processes and decision making is relevant to the public and communities, Select Committees have responded and adapted pretty well in parts. Through the use of video, the internet and so on, Select Committees have been quite good within Government at engaging.

The broader question is the role of Select Committees within the parliamentary system, and more broadly within decision making and democratic governance in the country as a whole. That is not really the topic of today’s conversation, so I will limit my comments to that.

I think there is a lot more that could be done on public engagement. Rather than just doing it in patches with particular enquiries, there could be a more systematic approach. That is not to say that public engagement is good for every inquiry, but I think that there could be more instances where that approach is taken.

INVOLVE has already put together a paper on innovations for Select Committee engagement, which I would advocate that you consider in relation to this inquiry. Think about some of the good practices that you could pursue, and some of the examples of good practice that are there. If you want, I can drill down and give you some more details of what some of those good practices might be.

Q50            Lilian Greenwood: I think we will come on to public engagement, which will be really interesting. Ruth, is there anything that you want to add to what has already been said?

Ruth Chambers: I have a few things to add. From our perspective, many environmental and social justice issues are cross-cutting, so they need cross-cutting solutions and approaches. A good example of where Select Committees joined up was on the conjoined inquiry on air quality. That was a really helpful forum to think about transport, health, environmental and other implications.

There is a very practical benefit that Select Committees could introduce, subject to wider parliamentary business constraints. One of the most disrupting elements of a Select Committee oral evidence session is votes being called. We recently experienced that at the EFRA Committee session, where two votes were called in the space of 40 minutes. It is terribly demoralising for a witness, who may have psyched themselves up to come to give evidence in a stressful environment, and then have to do it again and for a third time. It is also of course interrupting for members of the Committee. It is an obvious point, but other Parliaments—the Scottish Parliament and the European Parliament—do separate out Committee business from plenary business. I know that it is more challenging here, but if it is possible to do more of it, it would benefit everybody.

Finally, thinking about the Committee’s role in scrutinising legislation, Select Committees do pre-legislative scrutiny really well, but when Bills are formally introduced to Parliament, the Bill Committee is not the Select Committee. That puzzles us as civil society organisations. Bill Committees are then put together on a bespoke basis with people who may not be as familiar as the Select Committee with the importance of that legislation and the issues that it might raise. Is there any practice or convention that suggests that a Select Committee could not be the Bill Committee, especially where it has already done that PLS? That is another suggestion we would like to make.

Chair: We will now come on to evidence in more detail.

Q51            Mrs Miller: The reports that we write are only as good as the evidence we receive, because they are evidence-based reports. Are we getting the right evidence? Also, is there room for Select Committees to help develop new evidence bodies, particularly in areas where there may not be a lot of work being done? I am interested because, in the Women and Equalities Committee, we often don’t have, frankly, two sides to an argument; we only ever have one side of an argument put. How do we encourage more evidence to come forward? Can we have a role in that as well? Who would like to start? Kayley?

Kayley Hignell: I can give it a go. In terms of the quality of evidence, there is lots in here about what is useful, particularly around qualitative and case study evidence versus things that are much more about trends over time. There are limits on what can be provided from different organisations, particularly within timeframes. Sometimes, when there is a Select Committee inquiry, we at Citizens Advice will ask our network directly. If we have enough time, we can go to them, get a focus group full of experienced welfare rights advisers, in the instance of work and pensions, and ask them the detailed questions. At other times, because it’s a tighter cycle, we can’t do that, so we have to rely just on what we have within our quantitative data. We see millions of people, so there is a lot of evidence in there, but you won’t get the depth of understanding or insight, so timing can make a difference on quality of evidence.

On new evidence, I guess it’s slightly different, but there is something about getting information from Departments that can be quite useful. I am talking about stuff that is not necessarily in the public domain but would be really useful to your inquiries, with civil society organisations being able to add to that evidence base, or complement it, triangulate it—however you want to look at it. I have seen examples of Select Committees writing for further data and information that is then used by numerous organisations, including, I am sure, all of ours, to progress the understanding of an issue. So while it is not an evidence base in and of itself, it is unearthing evidence that would be very useful.

Mrs Miller: Interesting. Ruth?

Ruth Chambers: Just two additional thoughts from me. The first is that the quality of evidence, in my view, is inextricably linked to witness diversity and experience, in that if you get a broad range of witnesses who are comfortable and able to give evidence in the right setting, you will get a better quality of evidence. I don’t know whether there will be an opportunity later to talk about how to improve the witness experience.

Mrs Miller: Yes.

Ruth Chambers: Okay, great. The second question that you asked is whether there are opportunities to collaborate with other bodies to improve how evidence comes forward. I have two thoughts on that, one of which is in relation to something that happens at the moment. The Environmental Audit Committee subcontracts, for want of a better word, the National Audit Office to provide it with some sort of scrutiny of evidence, so there you have an expert audit body supporting Parliament via a formal arrangement. That is befitting of the Environmental Audit Committee’s role as a cross-cutting audit Committee across all the Government’s work. That is one example of where you can bring in extra resource.

Another example, which we have been thinking about quite a lot, is in relation to the work of non-departmental public bodies, or sponsored bodies from Departments. Often, at the delivery end of things, they are the ones that are responsible for delivering or implementing Government policy. Looking more closely at the work of those agencies, not just on an ad hoc basis but on a more sustained basis, would be one way to amplify the evidence that Committees could be getting on certain issues.

Q52            Mrs Miller: Obviously, the LGA could be a very rich vein of evidence for many Select Committee inquiries. Mark, how do you feel we are doing on gathering evidence from your organisation?

Mark Lloyd: I think well. The LGA, according to the Commons’ own data, is the No. 1 giver of evidence to the Committees of Parliament, with 179 submissions since 2013. That trumps even Government Departments, so we are very keen to work with you. Perhaps what we could do more effectively is to collaborate on the scope of the inquiry and the plan for the inquiry, and then we could work more closely with local councils and local communities to produce evidence that chimes even more with the Committee’s line of inquiry. I think we do a good job, but we could probably work together and collaborate more to ensure that the voices of local politicians, local experiences and local communities come even more into the debates of the Committees.

Q53            Mrs Miller: You are talking about working together on terms of reference and things like that?

Mark Lloyd: Exactly that.

Ed Cox: In terms of both the evidence received and the reports, and the way that evidence is written up, Select Committees by and large do a good job of gathering secondary evidence, pulling all that together and debating it. In terms of oral evidence, Select Committees work hard to get a relative diversity of people in front of them. However, all that—secondary evidence and those who give oral evidence—is drawn from quite a narrow pool of people who are already engaged in policy making and thinking in that sense. This is where public engagement and thinking more creatively about the way in which you might gather primary evidence could be a huge opportunity.

Q54            Mrs Miller: Do you have any specific ideas on that, just to bring that last point to life?

Ed Cox: Yes. I think there is a whole range of different techniques that could be used to create more primary material. For example, the Lords Select Committee on Charities came to visit a charity that I chair in Manchester, spent a whole morning with us and understood a lot more about what we were about, and they apparently found that a very illuminating experience. The Citizens Assembly on Social Care, about the long-term funding of adult social care, was another useful and interesting technique that I understand has then been quite powerful in influencing the ways that Government are beginning to think about these issues.

There are other techniques, such as the use of film; I know the Welsh Assembly has been using film in some of its work on fisheries, because it is very difficult to get fishermen to come in and talk about their experiences. There are all kinds of techniques that you can use to get out there, if there is a will and desire to do that—not necessarily for every inquiry, but certainly for those where that seems more relevant.

Q55            Mrs Miller: Moving on to giving oral evidence, what could we do to make that more effective? Are there changes we could make to make it something that more people want to do, or make it a more pleasant experience? Hopefully you do find it a pleasant experience when you give evidence. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Mark Lloyd: Shall I start? Even for leaders of councils, appearing before one of these Committees is a daunting experience. It matters; it is a big deal, and we want to do a good job on behalf of local government in influencing the conclusions you reach. The more we can do in advance to help people understand the setting and to be clear about the lines of inquiry that will be presented to them, the better they can prepare and the higher the quality of contribution you will get.

In the main, the teams supporting the Committees do a first-rate job, but we can always go a little further in helping witnesses before they step into a room like this, rather than having to give evidence straightaway live on television. We could explore more informal settings, getting away from the Palace of Westminster, as people may feel more comfortable giving evidence in a setting that is perhaps more familiar to them—those are all the kinds of things we could explore.

Q56            Mrs Miller: Without wanting to delve into any details, my Committee has asked the LGA to give oral evidence on two occasions and you have declined. I don’t know if you want to say anything about that; we have been rather unhappy about it.

Mark Lloyd: I am happy to. The Local Government Association is the representative body for local government. We want to give evidence on issues that matter to our councils, on issues that they have identified as their priorities and where there is an agreed cross-party position. There are some issues that our member councils are saying to us are not at the top of their priority list, and on which they have not invested the time and energy on agreeing a position across the political groups that make up the LGA.

Q57            Mrs Miller: On the Equality Act? I am surprised. Well, this is probably not the right forum to go into any further detail, but the public sector equality duty means that your members would have a very important point to give, and we are very disappointed that you did not want to take part.

Mark Lloyd: Okay, I will follow that up separately.

Ruth Chambers: I have three practical suggestions. I agree that even people who have done it on countless occasions want to do a good job. If you are representing an organisation or a coalition, you really feel that kind of weight behind you. My first suggestion is the meet and greet, which is really important for witnesses. A good recent example of where that was done impeccably, in my experience, was the Lords EU Energy and Environment Sub-Committee. One member of the secretariat was outside the room to meet and greet witnesses. They had a little iPad that showed the seating plan and told people where to go in the room—a small thing but it makes a difference—and they talked through how the Committee session would be run. Then the Chairman came out and introduced himself, saying how much the Committee was looking forward to hearing from the witnesses and how much he thought they had to contribute, and he encouraged everyone to contribute. It was really no more than setting the mood music, but for people who think, “Gosh, I may have nothing to say”, or, “I am a little bit nervous about this”, it really made a difference. So a practical meet and greet.

Secondly, if we actually curve the tables around a bit, we would be sitting around a table. It would only take a little bit of extra wood to do that, but it would probably make a difference to the way it feels. This does not in any way feel like an adversarial grilling, but again, for people who are not used to speaking in a parliamentary Committee, if it is done in a roundtable session, which that Lords session was, it makes a difference. You feel part of a conversation and discussion, and you contribute rather differently as a result.

The final practical suggestion relates to the convention in the Commons to provide questions in advance to witnesses on some occasions, but it is not a rule and not all Committees do it. It is always done with the usual caveat that they may change, and that is absolutely fine. Again, for people who are not used to operating in that context, if you give them the exam questions in advance, it will not lead to an overly managed discussion, but it does help people to prepare who might not otherwise be well equipped to prepare.

Q58            Mrs Miller: Having chaired a Joint Committee for which we gave questions in advance, I have to say that you do end up with speeches. There is a balance to be found.

Ruth Chambers: Maybe there is a balance and some middle ground, but at least giving the broad areas that one wants to cover would help to settle nerves and lead to better quality evidence while allowing time and scope for supplementaries and follow-ups.

Ed Cox: I concur with that point. If you can create a slightly less formal and adversarial environment, there may be a reduced need to actually provide questions in advance, and then you take the pressure off, so to speak. Look at us here, sitting with all our notes in front of us. We have done lots of preparation for this. To that extent, if you wanted a less formal environment, you could find ways of creating that.

My view is that oral evidence is oral evidence; it is what it is—this is the process. To that extent, I think it works well. The question is what you supplement it with. Do you just rely on oral evidence? Or do you have written evidence then oral evidence? Or are there other ways of bringing information into the work that Select Committees need to do? You are probably not going to be able to change this kind of session dramatically, but there are lots of other things that you could do to add other types of evidence.

One little thing is notice periods. We talked about notice periods for inquiries generally, but notice periods for oral evidence, in my experience, are generally a week—sometimes 10 days. It is normally really quite short. For somebody like me, who does not live in London, it means rearranging a whole day of your time to get down to London and get back. Expenses are provided, which is helpful, but to rearrange an entire day with one week’s notice can be quite tricky.

Kayley Hignell: I pretty much echo everything that has been said. I totally agree on notices. As somebody who comes in from Leeds for sessions like this, it can be a challenge. It also restricts the people who we can put forward, particularly our local officers. If you want somebody with frontline advising experience, we are asking them to take a day out of advising, and we need to get cover in and all those things. It depends which kind of witness you would like.

While I understand the challenge on giving pre-set questions, there is definitely something on topic areas. Effectively, when we are prepping—you are right to point out all the notes on the table here—we are prepping on quite broad areas, because anything could come up. Even if you could omit areas of interest, it would allow us to give you deeper and more meaningful evidence on the topic areas. I perhaps speak for all of us here in saying that we don’t necessarily see it as you saying it is not important to talk on those topic areas or to discuss them further. It is genuinely understood that you want to delve into something, so it is not a negative thing to do that. It sometimes feels like the oral evidence session can be a repeat of the written evidence, which might not be necessary, depending on the strength of the written evidence you receive.

Q59            Chair: Can I return to the issue of public engagement, starting with you, Ed? Certainly it was extraordinarily valuable to have the citizens’ assembly input into the joint inquiry into social care by the HCLG Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee, but obviously that was a very expensive process for Parliament. What is your experience, as an organisation, as to whether a citizens’ jury is something that is equally good or equally valuable? Or should we try to do fewer but stick with citizens’ assemblies, which is of course the larger format—we had nearly 50 participants in that assembly.

Ed Cox: The first principle is to decide what kind of inquiry requires public engagement. The second question is then, if we do think there is some value in public engagement, what type of public engagement might be the right kind? Then you end up with whether a citizens’ assembly is the right kind of approach as one of a multitude of techniques that you could consider.

Most of the academic evidence around citizens’ assemblies or, to use the slightly more jargon term, mini-publics—there are different types, and you can have deliberative polling or citizens’ juries, but they all involve the idea of getting a representative sample of the public to contribute to a discussion, which as you say is a relatively expensive thing to do—shows that they are best for long-term complex challenges. In this place, most people think that all your challenges are quite difficult and political, but there are some, such as the funding of adult social care, climate change and, dare I say it, Brexit, that require a much more sophisticated, complex process. Those are the kinds of circumstances when you would find a citizens’ assembly or some kind of mini-public to be of most benefit.

I would not want to necessarily say, however, that that should preclude other forms of participation and engagement. There are lots of other things that could be done. Even, simply, getting out of here and going to visit places could be quite valuable. I do not think we should necessarily make the cost, if you like, preclude doing a whole range of different types of public engagement.

Q60            Chair: So it depends on the type of inquiry. There are various other ways that Committees engage. Certainly, we have used Nursing Times in our nursing workforce inquiry to get out—so using people who have the contacts to be able to host. Could you give us some more ideas of where you have seen very good examples of public engagement that you would like to see more use of by Committees?

Ruth Chambers: I have already mentioned the question and answer sessions of the Transport Committee. They are good ways for the public to come along, learn more about Select Committees, learn more about Parliament and contribute on an issue that they care about. When those issues relate to passenger or consumer issues, you will get a good audience that way.

Recently, the EFRA Committee had all the DEFRA Ministers before it to talk about departmental business—very important, but quite a dry and dusty subject for the public. How do you get the public interested in that? What they did was to use Twitter and a new hashtag called #askDEFRAministers. It got a very large response and a very large number of questions—probably too many; more than they were expecting—but it allowed them to act as a bridge between the public and Ministers in a way that perhaps Committees are not that used to doing.

Also, a few months ago, I took part in the first parliamentary podcast. It was run by the new Select Committee, the European Statutory Instruments Committee. Again, it probably had a fairly limited audience because it was about statutory instruments, so we did our best to explain what they are and why they matter to the public. As an engagement tool, podcasts are an example of how Parliament can take what are, in many ways, quite technical or complex issues to the public via a forum that they may be more minded to engage with.

Finally, on the public engagement point, we know that there is a huge appetite from the public at the moment to engage and have their say about things like climate change. If it is a question of resourcing, certainly we would want to encourage this Committee, when it thinks about the resourcing of Select Committees, to build in some funds for them to do this kind of thing—as and where it is relevant, as colleagues have pointed out.

Mark Lloyd: I referenced earlier the work of the HCLG Committee and their visit to the London Borough of Newham. They joined an enforcement team visiting private rented housing. Councils across the country—all 355 across England and Wales—would be more than happy to host Committees, so that they can go and see in real life what is happening in communities. The resource implications of that would be minimal, frankly. That is point one.

Point two is that Committees like you have a very well-developed overview and scrutiny process. We have an organisation called the Centre for Public Scrutiny, which has helped us to develop those approaches. With your consent, I will take on as an action liaising with the Centre for Public Scrutiny to highlight the best examples in local government of how scrutiny is working and share that with your Committee team.

Q61            Chair: Thank you very much. Kayley did you want to add anything?

Kayley Hignell: I just want to add to and share views on the idea of looking at the different formats to get different audiences. I think sometimes there is a one-size-fits-all approach, whereas those audiences are so different in their availability. Even if you just look at the formats on written evidence, for example, Citizens Advice has word limits. For the general public that might be appropriate, but for a large organisation you might need more space. Looking at those formats to ensure you think about which audiences can use those different formats would be useful.

On conveying conclusions and getting messages out, any notice you can provide to organisations such as ours—as well as organisations across the table, I am sure—allows us to amplify it and put it into our press grid and social media grids, to get what we are doing into our newsletters, to our advisers, to frontline staff and sometimes to the general public. At the moment, sometimes there is very limited notice on when something will be published, which is understandable. Any notice on that would help us to amplify it.

Q62            Chair: So it is a wasted opportunity for Committees to get the results of their work out if we don’t give you enough notice?

Kayley Hignell: Absolutely; we can definitely do more on that with notice.

Q63            Chair: At the start, you gave us an idea of six weeks being good, four weeks being workable and three weeks being not enough for preparation in advance. What is the ideal notice period for you as organisations on conveying messages?

Kayley Hignell: We probably need at least three to seven days on that. My press team at the office will kill me for saying that I am absolutely certain, but that would allow us to at least put something in place. I don’t know what others might say.

Mark Lloyd: We run a weekly grid, so seven days would be perfect for chiming with our forward programme.

Ed Cox: Can I just mention time and timing? I think that this is quite critical. If we take as an example the inquiry into the Welsh Government’s cancer delivery, which was run by the National Assembly for Wales, the public engagement programme was deliberately built in between written evidence and oral evidence. They were able to prepare a briefing pack from the written evidence, which was then used with groups of people working with cancer sufferers or with cancer sufferers themselves. That was fed through and enabled the questions. Giving enough time is critical.

It has already been mentioned—I feel that it ought to be mentioned again—that there needs to be resource to do this. Again, I think that Parliament needs to look very carefully at how much it cares about this. Does it really want to invest in this process or not? If it does, we need significant resources to make public engagement much more effective.

Lastly, if you are going to engage the public, it is really important that there is really good feedback afterwards. In the couple of experiences that I have had where Parliament has tried to do public engagement, the engagement has been quite good, but then you hear nothing afterwards.

Chair: That is a really important point.

Q64            Sir Bernard Jenkin: This is a very interesting commentary on our work; thank you very much indeed. On that engagement point, I think that your suggestion, Ed Cox, about what the Welsh do is very interesting. We have a much bigger research budget now. How do you think we should spend that money? Should we spend it on commissioned research, more polling or funding citizens’ assemblies?

Ed Cox: There are many things that could be done and I would certainly suggest that public engagement is key. I would like to just point out the difference between polling, which is where you ascertain public opinion, and a citizens’ assembly or a deliberative process, where there is time spent in order to gather what I would call public judgment. There is a really significant difference between the two.

When you allow people to spend time talking to each other and kicking around views—which costs money, hence the response to your question—you actually find that people’s ideas change and move and adapt, and you get much more quality information. If you go out polling, you simply get people’s opinion, very much filtered by the kind of messages they have received—on that day, even—without that deliberation. I simply distinguish between those two things.

On commissioning research—sure, provided that you are clear what the evidence gaps are. I feel that far too much research is commissioned where we already know a huge amount, if only we were to go and look for it properly. I have some hesitation about that.

Ruth Chambers: I agree with that very much. If you have that extra resource, that is fantastic, but how could that best be deployed? Where are the gaps? Certainly from a stakeholder engagement perspective, we see the gaps as engaging a broader audience—different parts of the public in different parts of the country—as Ed outlined.

There is also clearly a gap for some Committees in the secretariat’s capacity. We know that the greatest limiting factor on Committees being able to do more is not the lack of expertise in the secretariat—they are, in my experience, first class—but the numbers that they have. There are literally only so many hours in the day. If resource could be spent in those sort of areas, I think that would greatly benefit the reach of the Committees and the impact that they have.

Q65            Sir Bernard Jenkin: That leads on to another point I want to raise with you: what is your experience of interacting with Select Committee staff? We are addressing perhaps a deficit in long-term expertise, because even a Committee specialist tends to be a generalist who is brought in for a couple of years to do that role and then moves on to something completely different. What is your experience of dealing with Committee Clerks and Committee specialists, and how do you think that could be improved, in order that, for example, we are more aware of evidence gaps, rather than just being receivers of evidence?

Mark Lloyd: My response is a positive one; I am not sure if that is what you are looking for. However, I find that even the generalist who becomes a specialist works very hard at developing detailed knowledge very quickly. They are very quick to span boundaries between Parliament and relevant organisations to foster their learning and to develop the relationships that allow them to access information that we and others all hold. In the main, I think they do a super job, recognising that all public services are resource-constrained. In that context, I think they deserve some applause.

Ed Cox: I echo that. It was really good that it was actually civil servants who commissioned the work that INVOLVE has done in order to come up with innovation. There is an appetite among civil servants themselves to build on that. I would only question again the fact that the whole Westminster system seems to come from a relatively narrow group of the general population.

Kayley Hignell: I absolutely add my applause to all the staff who work on Select Committees. They are often working all hours; we get inquiries at very different times of the day, with very short notice and the like. They are very good at being open about the need to move quickly or on flexibility on deadlines and timings and those kind of things.

However, echoing the earlier point, there are just not enough of them. For example, on narrowing briefs for oral evidence, I imagine they get tonnes and tonnes of submissions for some inquiries, which they have to narrow down and summarise for you guys on the Select Committee. Given the time and resources available for that, I imagine that is very difficult to marshal. They are doing a great job—we just need more of them.

On the earlier point about the actual evidence collected and whether there are opportunities for collecting primary evidence—we were asked about that a second ago—I think there is something to say about focus groups here. We are frontline advisers. We talked earlier about the idea that you could get out more. That is a way of collecting some formal evidence, using that budget. It is not quite engagement, but you will get a lot of views that you might not get in this formal setting. We use that an awful lot with our frontline workers.

Ruth Chambers: I agree; my experience of certain Select Committee secretariats has been wholly positive. I have two practical suggestions. A lot of the things we have been talking about are not common practice for Select Committees at the moment. Do the Committee secretariats have the right skills or enough experience of new or emerging public engagement techniques? If not, how can they get them? Is it simply a training and development issue? Could secondments from organisations whose work to engage the public is a bit more bread and butter actually help?

Secondly, it is about understanding stakeholders’ perspectives. Depending on where different Clerks or their staff have come from, they can have a better understanding of how stakeholders operate, the demands they face and the challenges they have. Engaging more directly with stakeholders in different ways could help secretariats learn a bit more as well.

Q66            Sir Bernard Jenkin: To what extent do you think there is too much emphasis on the performance of oral evidence sessions, rather than more informal ways of gathering evidence? My experience is that having a private seminar attracts witnesses who would be reluctant to speak in public and, because they are not witnesses in public, they speak much more freely and openly and we gain much more information, though we cannot quote it directly in evidence, as a learning point for the Committee. Have you taken part in private seminars with Select Committees?

Ed Cox: Not with a Select Committee directly, but certainly in other decision-making environments, and what you say is absolutely true: if you break out of what feels like a relatively adversarial environment, you are likely to get more evidence.

Q67            Sir Bernard Jenkin: My last question is about influence. You have rather succinctly characterised what the ambition of a new Select Committee Chairman is—what mine was, originally—which is to hit the headlines and get on the “Today” programme with your report. What I have learned is that even just opening the inquiry starts a process of influence. How do you think we could make new Select Committee Chairs more aware that how they interact with their bodies under scrutiny and bodies giving evidence immediately creates an influence that many Select Committee Chairs are not even aware of? How should we train our Chairs to learn faster?

Ruth Chambers: I would say they need look no further than around the table to see really good examples of Chairs who do exactly that. I wonder whether there is scope—if there is not already something of the kind—for some kind of mentoring or buddying scheme from Chair to Chair. That certainly happens outside Parliament. If you are a new trustee on a charity board, you are often assigned a mentor who is a more experienced trustee to explain the ropes, talk about what being a trustee means, give you advice, answer questions and that kind of thing. What you are asking is almost more a political question rather than, “These are the facts you need to learn,” so I wonder whether you as Chairs could not help with that process of learning.

Sir Bernard Jenkin: That is a very good suggestion.

Mark Lloyd: There is also something for me about shining a light on where the political discourse has changed as a consequence of particular inquiries, and illustrating the way those inquiries were conducted. There are examples; I referenced earlier the crisis in our social care system, where the public discourse has changed entirely, and I think that is due in large part not just—I hope—to the work of my organisation, but to the work of Dr Wollaston’s Committee. We should illustrate those points more effectively to everybody involved in this process.

Chair: Thank you very much. We have one final question.

Q68            Hilary Benn: Mr Lloyd, you have answered the question I was going to ask, so I will put it to the other three. Can you name one Select Committee report that has had an influence or impact that particularly sticks in your mind in the area your organisation covers? Just one.

Kayley Hignell: It’s so hard to choose.

Ed Cox: I would have picked the same one as Mark. I think the Public Accounts Committee is definitely worth looking at. The influence that that Committee has had over several years, for me, makes it distinctive from other Select Committees, and it is worth—

Sir Bernard Jenkin: They have the NAO behind them. They have massive resources.

Ed Cox: There you go; that illustrates the point that it is about money, but the way the Chair has galvanised the Committee has also been very significant.

Kayley Hignell: I would echo the point on the Public Accounts Committee and would cheekily add the Work and Pensions Committee, both on the roll-out of universal credit. There have been several reports on that, but what I would stress is that they have been really timely; that has been the important thing with them. They have been at points where there is still time to change the timetable, even if that has not necessarily happened, and that has made a massive difference. Sometimes, with the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee, it can be a little bit after the fact because they are waiting to see what has happened, but there have been really decisive reports from both, which have been really impactful in that debate.

Ruth Chambers: My example would be from the Environmental Audit Committee, which held an inquiry last summer into environmental principles and governance after EU exit. The report was impactful because it led to a shift in the Government’s position, but it was impactful really because it was hard-hitting, timely and precise in its recommendations, which are all manifestations of a good Select Committee report.

Hilary Benn: Great. Thank you very much.

Chair: Thank you very much for your complimentary comments on the social care inquiry, but I would say that the Government still have not published the Green Paper—we continue to harangue them every week. Thank you very much for sharing your evidence.

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Professor Adam Cygan, Dr Catherine Haddon, Dr Holger Hestermeyer and Dr Jack Simson Caird.

Q69            Chair: Good afternoon. Thank you very much for coming to give evidence this afternoon. For those who are following from outside the room, it would be very helpful if you would all introduce yourselves and say whom you are representing, before we move on to our discussion, which will be much more focused on the article 50 process and Brexit and the contribution of Select Committees to that. Perhaps we can start with you, Dr Simson Caird.

Dr Simson Caird: My name is Jack Simson Caird. I am senior research fellow in the rule of law in Parliaments at the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, which is an independent centre dedicated to the study of the rule of law worldwide. From 2015 to 2018, I worked in the House, for the House of Commons Library, as a constitutional law specialist, and in that capacity I interacted with several Committees on Brexit matters.

Dr Hestermeyer: I am Holger Hestermeyer. I’m the Shell reader in international dispute resolution at King’s College London. I’m also currently a mid-career fellow at the British Academy. And I work as a specialist adviser to the EU Committee of the House of Lords on the roll-over process and treaty scrutiny, but of course I cannot speak for that Committee.

Dr Haddon: I am Catherine Haddon, a senior fellow at the Institute for Government.

Professor Cygan: I am Professor Adam Cygan and I’m professor of EU law at the University of Leicester. For the last two years, I have been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, as part of one of their Brexit priority grants, and I have been working with UK in a Changing Europe.

Q70            Chair: Thank you very much. Let me start by asking each of you to give your reflections on how well Parliament has conducted its oversight of the article 50 process. I will start with you, Catherine, if you wouldn’t mind kicking off on that one.

Dr Haddon: Happily. I think it has improved its scrutiny massively and it has been a huge learning curve for all involved. That has been reflected in the range of ways it has had to scrutinise that process, both through Select Committees and, obviously, in the Chamber. It’s also reflected in the way in which Parliament has evolved during this period, recognising that there is a minority Government and the shifting balance of power there. But also, we have seen twists and turns, depending on the nature of the Brexit process itself and the kinds of things that have called for scrutiny. In the earlier period, a lot of it was to do with the negotiating—understanding what the Government’s position was and getting access to information, to an evidence base, to papers. During the later process, it obviously moved a lot more on to Parliament’s mechanisms for scrutinising the final stages of the deal itself, and how its procedures then coped with the process of the withdrawal agreement being brought to the House again and again.

Professor Cygan: I agree with much of what has been said there, but I would also say that the challenge for Parliament here has also been to try to follow a process that it hasn’t really got much control over—the way in which the negotiations were conducted, which was broadly in secret, and Ministers then coming back to give evidence to Committees where the message being given was not necessarily always clear. The policies that were coming out were not clear. From the work we have done, we saw that much of the time the evidence sessions were Committees looking for answers from Ministers on things that really should have been presented to the public and put in the public domain more readily.

The other thing that I would just point out is that Parliament has sort of been trying to play catch-up, and a number of inquiries have been going on, some of which have overlapped, which I think has not been a good use of resources.

The other point about the work of the Committees is that often they have all focused on what are pinch points in the negotiations and their consequences, rather than necessarily following up what would be specific policy issues that may be arising, not just within the article 50 process but more generally going forward.

Dr Simson Caird: I think the best thing to look back on is the period immediately after the referendum and before article 50 was triggered—around that time—where I think there was a sense that people wanted to wait and see how Brexit could play out, and there was a sort of education process of working out what Brexit would be like. I think that has been difficult, because there was a sense that the existing scrutiny procedures could adapt, but what we have learned is that Brexit is such a complex, multi-level problem—in terms of international law, domestic/constitutional law, delegated legislation, devolution—that it is actually very difficult for existing structures, which are not specifically designed to cope with that sort of problem, to be adapted to.

The main strength is that we have seen the sorts of things that people talked about already in the earlier session: how hard Committees have worked to raise the standard of debate, so that by the time we got to 2018, we had a sense of all the complexities that were there. But then, as was just said, we were playing catch-up and trying to adapt the procedures.

I suppose one of the big lessons for the next stage, when we get to it, is that the window before these negotiations begin is really crucial, in terms of adapting and finding bespoke arrangements, and trying to come to some agreement so we do not spend the whole time debating procedures and things, rather than the actual substance.

Chair: Yes, we are going to come on to that—what happens next.

Dr Hestermeyer: I want to start with some praise. I think that Parliament has done an enormous amount of work, obviously including the Select Committees. They have produced a body of work that is impressive in terms of quality.

When it comes to critiquing, I want to take a step back and think, “What is the function? Why all of this work?” I think that basically there are two functions: one is scrutinising Government, which is why the departmental Select Committee system was set up; and the other is informing the public. I think that both are running, to some extent, into problems.

With informing the public, there was a multiplication of work and at times there was a lack of co-ordination of work, which led to several reports on very similar topics. And the sheer amount of information is too much for the public to digest, so there is some work to be done in that regard, in terms of how the PR work is structured. And in terms of Government oversight, there has been a problem at times with getting the information from the Government.

There are a lot of things that currently are not worth going into. There are, of course, political problems in the process and there is nothing we can do about those. The questions that we can tackle are the structural problems and, for me, from a treaty scrutiny point of view, one of the essential things is that the whole system is not used to Parliament having a vote on a treaty, and accordingly there was no process in place for parliamentary input. There was absolutely no buy-in and that led to where we are at the moment, and that is something that can be worked on institutionally.

Q71            Chair: It’s certainly very frustrating being on the other side of the Committee table, asking the questions and not being able to get the answers that you need to make sense or reach conclusions. How commonplace have you found that in looking at Committee reports hampered by the refusal of Government to give information? For example, our inquiry into the health aspects of Brexit and no-deal planning for medicine supply is getting a response that is kind of, “Nothing to see here. We’ve got it all covered”, whereas what you really want as a Committee is to be able to adequately scrutinise what the no-deal planning is. I wonder what your overall impression is of that being a phenomenon across Committees.

Dr Hestermeyer: I want to distinguish between two different phenomena there. One is, simply, that a lot of questions were asked that had not been asked before. My experience is mostly with the House of Lords. I remember when the House of Lords worked on trade post-Brexit, and there were a lot of associations that were asked questions such as, “What do your members say?” and they simply were not prepared—they simply did not have the information. I think that is rather common. It is an enormous change and there is a lot of information that simply does not exist. That is one of the problems.

The other one is a real problem from a treaty scrutiny point. It is important for the actors to know what is being done, where we stand and where we will stand, rather than saying, “Everything will be fine and everything will be rolled over by the relevant date”, and then finding out on that date that actually that has not happened. That is a true problem. Then we probably get back to the political problems, which I am not sure that we can actually remedy.

Dr Haddon: If you step back and look at it, that is what has been interesting about this. You could say that this has been a treaty negotiation and scrutiny process, in which case, yes, as the Government is negotiating it, there is only so much information that will be given out. You look at how treaties are negotiated everywhere, and that whole question about how informative you can be on the mandate at the beginning of negotiations is a big question.

What we have also been doing, however, is scrutinising the Government’s policy as it has evolved on Brexit, which is a huge amount of work. Parliament has been having this debate within Select Committees and elsewhere on what should happen now for the country. So it is trying to do all those different things at the same time, which is why it has been such a huge amount of work.

Professor Cygan: The Government was, to some extent, influenced by the binary nature of the debate that we had in the referendum, which was that you are either in or you are out. Because of the UK voting to leave, a positive spin has to be put on everything.

In response to your point about no-deal planning in healthcare, realistically the Government could not say much other than, “Everything is under control”, because it either sets off a panic and says, “We don’t know what we’re doing”, or it overplays it and says, “Yes, yes, yes—we’ve got all the drugs in place and there aren’t going to be any problems”. They have had to try to strike a balance between recognising the challenges but at the same time recognising that they have to put the information across in a way that is manageable and that the public can get to grips with.

Dr Simson Caird: When I think about the Government’s approach to Committees, I think about David Davis’s statement that the UK Parliament would get the same level of information as the European Parliament.

Hilary Benn: Harrumph!

Chair: Not in our experience.

Dr Simson Caird: That is a good example of where, perhaps, looking back, we needed a more dramatic change of approach and a rethink before the article 50 process started, in terms of an agreement—I do not know who would have brokered that agreement—between Committees and the Government as to when information would be delivered, by whom and what. Then you could have started to think about co-ordinating a bit more and avoiding some of the duplication. If you had had a clear agreement as to what would be provided and when, you might have got a slightly smoother process.

Sir Bernard Jenkin: That assumes that the Government knew the information that you wanted it to provide.

Q72            Hilary Benn: But that is precisely the point. Since the Cabinet could not agree on what it wanted, what exactly was the Government going to share? I have to say that Humble Addresses have proved to be extremely successful mechanisms for getting stuff out of the Government that they did not want to give.

I want to turn to what happens now, on the assumption that eventually a deal will be done and we will leave—that is in the lap of the gods. Every Select Committee has done something on Brexit, in the Lords and in the Commons, as have all the departmental Committees. How should the structure of scrutiny by Select Committees change, bearing in mind that the future partnership negotiations will cover every single area of national life and will go on for years?

There will also be the scrutiny of EU laws as they are passed during the transition period and then afterwards, because they are going to have an impact on us, if we have a close economic relationship that means that we adhere to those laws. Then there are the treaties that will be negotiated with other countries on trade and the work of the Joint Committee. That is a summary of the main ones.

Based on what you have seen and learned about the first phase of Brexit, how do you think that Parliament could most effectively address that, in terms of the structure of Committees, agreeing who is going to divvy up what, how we would meet together more effectively than we have done—we have done a bit—to have a joint plan, rather than leaving Select Committees basically to focus on the things that they think are most important in their own areas? That is basically today’s evidence session, but I thought I would just put the question in there. I’m interested to hear your answers. I don’t know who is going to go first.

Dr Haddon: I’ll jump in. You will be pleased to know that the Institute of Government has got a report coming out on this in a couple of weeks’ time. That always seems to be our mantra.

Hilary Benn: I look forward to reading it.

Dr Haddon: As you said, there are a number of different things that it has got to be able to do. The first thing to say is that it is great that you are looking at this now, because, as we have just said, Parliament has often had to be slightly behind the curve, playing catch-up. It is great to be ahead of the curve in thinking this through, not least because, when or if this next stage happens, a lot of the structures that will be in place then will set a template for the future of how Parliament deals with the EU and our new position. That is really important.

You identified a few of them. One of them is how it functions during the transition period, and particularly the oversight of the Joint Committee. On that, we know that the European Parliament has already put in place some processes for how it is going to engage. The UK can learn from that and set up similar processes.

In terms of some of the scrutiny of the EU during this period, when we are on the outside, the processes that the UK already has, which you could argue were never sufficient for doing scrutiny of EU law, will need to be completely rethought. We will have to have a good long look at how that will be done, how you will get the right level of access and what the Government’s role will be in facilitating all of that.

I am going to rattle through these because I’m sure everyone else is going to cover the same area. The UK desperately needs to relook completely at how it will do future scrutiny of treaties. The fundamental question there will be the balance between setting up a treaty Standing Committee, which could have a specialist function in looking specifically at the process and the role of treaties, and also how that will work with departmental Select Committees, because treaties today cover such wide-ranging ground, and departmental Committees will want to play a role as well, so you may end up having an combination of both, but you need to look at what is the right balance between the two.

There is also a question about UK-wide interests in all of this, because there will also be devolution questions down the road, about common frameworks and where you need to get the right level of scrutiny over that. There will also be a huge new load of regulatory bodies and areas where the EU has played some kind of oversight role, where we will need to look to see what we can put in place to cover it. There is a range of those.

There is an interesting question about how the Commons works with the Lords on all of this. We are considering that some kind of Joint Committee between the Commons and the Lords might be the best way to bring some kind of guiding influence to all of this. Otherwise I think you will have lots of different activity happening all over the place, without a sense of how it all adds up to something that is thorough.

This is the most important thing that Parliament needs to focus on: how it can use its resources well, ensuring it is delivering as much with the resources that it has got. That kind of guiding role would be useful.

Q73            Hilary Benn: On the subject of a treaty Committee, if the UK were to engage in trade negotiations with the United States of America, are you saying that there should be a United States trade treaty—

Dr Haddon: No, sorry, this would be a treaty scrutiny Committee.

Q74            Hilary Benn: Of treaties in general?

Dr Haddon: Yes. I’m posing the question; I think others here will have views on that. If you look at other models around the world, that is often what they tend to have. It is an important question about where it lies. You cannot have it all sitting with one Committee when you have got departmental Committees that will want to play an important role. There is also a danger that if you delegate it all to a departmental Committee, you will not have the holistic view.

Dr Hestermeyer: I would like to distinguish three aspects of the question: institutions, level of scrutiny, and interaction. It is important that the institutions that are set up can work fluently and flawlessly in whatever scenario. Rather than setting up an institution and then, if there is a no-deal Brexit or something else happens, setting up another institution and having a gap in between, make sure that there is an institution that can last, take all the relevant tasks and survive whatever scenario. I understand that, so long as there is a Department, there will have to be a departmental Committee. Maybe it could be locked on to that.

Treaty scrutiny is a different question. At the moment, we are mostly dealing with what are sometimes called continuity agreements—where agreements that already existed are reproduced as UK agreements. That is arguably an EU thing, but that will change over time; there will be more and more treaties that are not continuity agreements. That will very likely need a different structure. I concur largely that the way to do this seems to be joint work between the House of Lords and the Commons. The way it currently works is that the House of Lords has a structure and the House of Commons does not. That is counter-intuitive, given that CRAG gives the House of Commons more powers than the House of Lords. In a way, that is structured the wrong way around, if anything. However, the better way to do it would be to do the work jointly, as it is the same work. That is institutions.

As to the level of scrutiny, that depends very much on what we are talking about. If we are in a transition period and the UK becomes a rule taker, that is more of an informative scrutiny; there is nothing much that Parliament can do in that regard. However, the Joint Committee’s decisions have enormous power. For example, the development of trade rules between the UK and the EU are actually delegated to the Joint Committee. There you could have scrutiny, with a scrutiny reserve, as is currently the case. This has to be thought through, depending on what exactly is scrutinised.

There is then the problem of interaction. Say that you negotiate a trade agreement with the US. The US will want agricultural rules and standards in there, and there is usually a part on intellectual property. These are wide-ranging agreements. In that case, the Ways and Means Committee in the House of Representatives, which is in charge of trade agreements, sits with chairs and ranking members of other Committees that are interested in that particular trade deal, so that they can scrutinise it and so it is absolutely clear that everyone is on board. That seems a rational process—to co-ordinate these things, rather than split up the deal between different Committees. I am not entirely sure how that would be managed in practice. It could be through the Liaison Committee, for example.

Dr Simson Caird: I have three concrete proposals that I think will work. One is similar to something that Holger just explained. I think there is a case for a sub-committee of the Liaison Committee to do some of this co-ordinating work, working out who does what. I am not sure whether this Committee divvying it up between the different Committees or the Committee itself doing some of the work would be better. I think Holger would be the one to ask.

The second is something like a framework agreement that I think the European Parliament had. It can be informal; it does not have to be in law. It should set out the rules on which the Government and Committees will interact for that period when information will be supplied. You would have to decide who would broker that agreement and how it would be approved, but the key thing would be that that is approved before the formal negotiations begin, so that everybody knows where they are and we do not get caught up in arguments about who should get what when.

From the staff side, when I was here I was always a strong advocate of some kind of co-ordinating unit on the staff side—a Brexit unit that could work not only on co-ordinating—for the use of expertise within the House, because the expertise within the House is not evenly spread. It is on Committees, based on where those Committees were set up, or in the Library or in legal services. There is a strong case for bringing some of that together to avoid duplication.

Then also, thinking about the future relations, one of the difficult things for Parliament, which I think points to some broader things that are quite counter-cultural, is that there will be a lot more investment in external relations. There have been some positive things going on with the devolveds—the inter-parliamentary forum is very positive, but it does not have a formal role—but there might need to be development in external relations with the 27 and the European Parliament. Clearly there is a case for a more beefed-up staff unit to help to facilitate the work of these Committees on big cross-cutting issues such as the future relationship.

Professor Cygan: I think the immediate problem that will hit the House of Commons in particular will be the lack of scrutiny of EU legislative proposals, especially during the transition period. Again, depending on the nature of the subsequent future relationship and how close we are, that will influence how much time and effort we want to invest in that, but there are a couple of things that come out of this. First, during the transition period, if we are going to be rule takers and will have to follow that legislative process, it might not be such a major problem, because of the parliamentary elections and the appointment of a new Commission. Indeed, by the time the Commission gets going, it could be 12 to 18 months before anything significant starts to come forward anyway, so that might not affect the UK as much as might be thought, but there will be issues about access to documentation.

Parliament will no longer have documents sent to it as of right, as it does now under protocol 1 of the treaty. It will no longer, for example, engage in the subsidiarity monitoring process, whereby it co-ordinates with other national Parliaments on how to approach particular legislative proposals. That will be lost. As far as I understand it, English will remain an official language of the EU, so documentation will still be produced in English and will be readily available, but will have to be accessed, I suppose as a starting point, from the Commission’s website.

But I do not think it all has to be negative, in the sense that the UK Parliament will be outside this process. There are things that can be done—strong representation in Brussels, for example, to know what is happening; and speaking to officials in the Commission and Members of the European Parliament and its committees. That, I think, is something that will need to be thought about.

It is also important to think about how Parliament builds relationships outside the European Union with other national, sub-national and regional Parliaments. The Norwegians do this quite effectively with the Scandinavian countries and to some extent also the Dutch Parliament. Also, the Norwegian Parliament have an observer-type status in COSAC, which is the committee that co-ordinates the European affairs committees of the national Parliaments. They always write to the rotating chair of that committee at the start, asking whether they will be welcome and whether they can still attend the meetings when they occur. That is something that Parliament can proactively do. However, we are not going to be at the table and we are not going to be influencing.

Then comes the next question: what do we do at some point in the future relationship when we decide to align ourselves with or diverge from EU rules? At that point, what benchmarks will Parliament have to make that decision? Are they going to be standardised across each sector of policy, or will there be different approaches? Will there be different policies that we would see as prioritising and needing to align ourselves with, or not? These are the sorts of questions that will also have to be thought about by Parliament over the coming months.

Whether there will be a European Scrutiny Committee of the sort that we currently have also needs to be considered. Clearly the European Scrutiny Committee existed to fulfil the requirement that we saw in the treaties for scrutiny and subsidiarity monitoring. That is not necessarily going to be required; then again, it depends what happens with the Department for Exiting the European Union—whether that continues, or whether something replaces it, and how such a Department would be shadowed.

For the short term, while the idea of having a transition process or implementation period during which we would be rule takers might seem quite straightforward, I think there will be challenges in that period to understand what the regulatory consequences will be. All European laws, when they are scrutinised, will have financial, administrative or technical implications for us. That is not going to change as they are now.

Just very quickly on the other points, with respect to the future relationship more generally, this is really difficult. I am concerned that we will come back to the same position that we are in now, where Parliament is constantly chasing the negotiations to find out what is going to happen in the future relationship. We simply do not know what that is going to look like.

On the issue of the treaties, I agree; I think there needs to be some sort of single Committee that is co-ordinating this. The European Parliament, to some extent, does this as well: it will have the constitutional affairs committee, which will often take a lead and bring in the other relevant committees as and when is needed to discuss this.

Hilary Benn: Just one follow-up: Jack, you made the suggestion of a kind of framework agreement about sharing information between the various scrutiny committees, the scrutiny structures of the House of Commons, and the UK Government. I am wondering whether what you have said, Professor Cygan, shouldn’t also include the EU. Since you have very clearly described some of the normal, current methods by which information comes, we are going to have to go and find it, and it would be really useful to work out what both sides are prepared to disclose. Bernard wanted to come in.

Q75            Sir Bernard Jenkin: We have had some very comprehensive evidence, and the written evidence—the summary of which I have read—is really fantastic, particularly the idea of a Joint Committee on treaties, which would be like the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, umbrella-ing the whole process. I think we need to be careful; there is a limitation. Some of these suggestions say that there should be more sub-committees of the Liaison Committee; well, I am going to have to leave in a few minutes. We are all far too busy. I think you have to use the existing Committees, or set up dedicated Committees. It is not a good use of resource to tie up Chairs in being members of Committees.

How much do you think the level of treaty scrutiny now being proposed—I am thinking just of general treaties—exposes how little we have traditionally scrutinised treaties?

Dr Hestermeyer: To start with, the one thing that astonished me is that CRAG is CRAG 2010, and it doesn’t seem that a lot happened since that. The first thing when you think about treaty scrutiny is “What treaties are actually scrutinised?” There are a lot of treaties that are signed as a matter of everyday business, and that, I think, Parliament would not be interested in, because they are too detailed, too small and too insignificant. Currently, CRAG attaches treaty scrutiny to treaties that are subject to ratification, so only those treaties are actually laid before Parliament.

One of the limits of treaty scrutiny comes from the fact that Parliament has very little power at the end of the process. CRAG only allows delaying, and for that, you need dedicated time to actually vote to delay, so this has never happened in practice. The powers of Parliament at the end of scrutiny are limited. Necessarily, Government is not the most reliable in its exercise of being scrutinised; power always tries to evade scrutiny—by the way, this is not a UK observation. In the US, treaties are subject to a two-thirds vote, and need two-thirds agreement by the Senate. The reality of the US treaty process is that this process is hardly ever used, and in reality, they are mostly now Executive agreements, with Parliament just voting and a majority being sufficient.

In a reform of the scrutiny process, the first thing that needs to be done is a precise definition of what is subject to scrutiny. I am in favour of a broader definition, because Government will try to avoid it by using, for example, MOUs and claiming MOUs are not legally binding. By the way, the International Court of Justice would not agree with that generality. Then you would need a sifting process, much as is done with EU law, in which you say, “Well, these treaties are small treaties; we don’t really care,” so that Parliament can focus on the larger ones.

I think it would be important to conceive of this process as a co-operative process. Parliament wants to help Government and to improve the treaties, not just criticise. For that, Parliament would need to stay informed on the negotiations; be informed about the mandate and have input in the mandate; actually get texts in between—it could be done on a clear basis, by the way, as happens in the United States where trade agreements and negotiating texts are shared with the relevant committees, not just the final agreement—and then have an up or down vote.

I have some ideas about how that could be structured, but I do not want to take up too much time, but if you are interested in that—

Q76            Sir Bernard Jenkin: If the Joint Committee did a sifting process, you could have a very broad definition, but the importance would be sifted by it.

Dr Haddon: But there would be a big difference between huge new areas where we are looking to develop treaties and either areas where we are carrying them over or where they are smaller treaties where you would want to have a sifting role. There are separate questions that need to be asked. One is about changing the methods of scrutiny and the other is whether Parliament wants to change its powers vis-à-vis treaties, which at the moment are quite modest, especially when you look internationally.

There are also the different stages of it. Holger has already mentioned input around the mandate, which is a big question about whether you set limits for the Executive about what they can and cannot do. That may constrain them, but on the other hand, it is hugely empowering for Parliament.

There is something during the negotiation period itself. Again, the big question is how much access to information you have. There is also the ratification process and then there is always the ever-important assessment looking back at what more could have happened, whether it achieved what we needed to do, and so forth.

The other thing is that Select Committees play another role, which can be hugely important when you do not have access to that information and when it is a closed shop where you are not getting the information during the negotiations. Select Committees do this kind of analysis in parallel to what is going on in government—raising the issues, exploring them and coming up with the commentary of what is actually important in the negotiation that is going on. Even if they do not have access to what the precise negotiations are, that helps to inform the wider Parliament about what the issues are.

That has been hugely important throughout the whole Brexit process where, as we said in the initial stages, the Government have not always been hugely informative. So Parliament getting this information and raising those issues, exploring them and analysing them is hugely important and it should think about how it can do that as well.

Q77            Sir Bernard Jenkin: I think we should reflect on how many treaties the EU has been signing where we have had absolutely no national parliamentary scrutiny at all. Apparently there was going to be a US-EU trade treaty. It was discussed in exchanges, but where was it ever going to be scrutinised by the UK Parliament?

Dr Hestermeyer: All the EU’s trade agreements so far, except two, were mixed agreements, so the UK always became, in the trade agreements, an independent partner. That would have been the case in TTIP as well.

Sir Bernard Jenkin: They are subject to national veto, yes.

Dr Hestermeyer: So the UK would have been able to veto.

Q78            Sir Bernard Jenkin: But where was the scrutiny? We are talking about a degree of scrutiny that was never envisaged when we were still a member of the European Union.

Professor Cygan: After opinion 2/15 in the courts, those mixed agreements no longer exist, so the European Union has separated them out—

Q79            Sir Bernard Jenkin: I am simply talking about what we do in our own national Parliament.

Professor Cygan: That is exactly the point. That will mean that the agreement is going to deal only with the trade component of it that will be scrutinised only and exclusively at the EU level—national Parliaments are now out of that loop. That is one of the debates that is going on. We have seen it particularly with CETA and the problem with the Belgians, and why they refused to ratify it because they felt they were outside the process. That is a much more efficient way for the EU to do it.

Sir Bernard Jenkin: I am just reflecting on—

Dr Hestermeyer: They were subject to the scrutiny reserve. In the case of CETA, it was overridden, if I remember correctly.

Q80            Sir Bernard Jenkin: But what was the Committee system for scrutinising CETA in this Parliament? Zero. So this is really Parliament taking back control. Supposing Parliament succeeds in stopping us leaving the European Union altogether, what would be the implications of this whole learning process for the way we scrutinise the processes of the European Union? The ESC and the scrutiny reserve is a very feeble system of scrutiny.

Dr Haddon: If, for whatever reason, we do not leave the EU, we needed to look at what our process for scrutiny was anyway. It was insufficient when you compared it with other EU nations. We did not spend enough time looking—to use the phrase—upstream to see where those things developed from. We were very reliant upon a scrutiny sifting process and I think much more needed to be done. There is also the link to departmental Select Committees, which had a very limited look at areas of EU legislation that actually had huge importance.

Q81            Sir Bernard Jenkin: And no resources to do it with.

Dr Haddon: And no resources to do it on. Yes, regardless, we should look at these issues but then, as you know, I always think that we should look again and try to think how we could do things better.

Dr Hestermeyer: I agree entirely. I think the scrutiny override should become a subject of debate. How can it be that other Parliaments can stop and delay, in terms of CETA, and the UK Parliament cannot, merely because of internal governmental decisions? That should not be acceptable.

Sir Bernard Jenkin: Thank you. Chair, I have to go. Can I go?

Chair: We will not be quorate when you leave, Bernard.

Sir Bernard Jenkin: I’m very sorry.

Chair: No, that’s fine. I’m so sorry because I feel we could have carried on for longer. I apologise for the commitments of Chairs. Thank you all very much.