1. The new Chairmen's Panel had a short discussion at their meeting last Wednesday on issues likely to be considered during your Committee's current round of deliberations, following a very helpful briefing by Patrick Cormack and Nick Winterton. Their briefing was, quite properly, in very general terms, since they did not wish to anticipate your Committee's report on the legislative process. It was accordingly not possible for the Panel to reach a collective view on any proposals which might emerge from your Committee; but colleagues did agree that they would meet again, as soon as possible after the publication of your Report, in order to prepare a collective response in time for their views to be taken into account by the House.

  2. Meanwhile, the Panel felt that it might be helpful if I were to write to you, in the light of their short discussion, to set out some very general views and propositions which your Committee may wish to take into account. In drafting this letter, I have of course been able to take account of the outline proposals in your Memorandum to the Modernisation Committee which has very helpfully been made available to all Members; and with the Panel's approval I have consulted the two Deputy Chairmen.

  3. I should start by emphasising that the Government's concern to improve the legislative procedures of the House is of course unanimously endorsed by the Panel, many of whose members have extensive experience of overseeing bills and other business through standing committees and are therefore probably better placed than others to evaluate the strengths as well as the weaknesses of the standing committee system.

  4. The begin with the weaknesses, it is undoubtedly the case that debates in standing committees - and therefore their ability to reach informed decisions - would be improved if more information were made available to Members before the clause by clause consideration of a bill begins. At present the only papers submitted to all members of a standing committee (including the Chairman) are the Notes on Clauses prepared by the relevant Government Department - these vary in quality, but at their best only provide a modicum of additional factual and background information, and at their worst do little more than repeat the provisions of each Clause and the gloss provided in the Explanatory and Financial Memorandum.

  5. As chairmen, we are always conscious of the fact that more material is available at this stage, which is frequently provided by the lobbies either selectively to potentially sympathetic Members, or, in more respectable cases, to committee members in general. Much of the discussion of detail in standing committees on bills is considerably informed by this kind of material, but it is clearly a failure in the system that such written submissions cannot be formally recorded and published. A very limited but useful first step would therefore be to empower all standing committees on bills to receive written submissions, and to order their publication with the Official Report.

  6. It follows that members of the Panel would be unlikely to object in principle to the wider use of the special standing committee as a device for providing more complete and up-to-date information about the views of the lobbies and other interested parties on the final proposals contained in the Government's legislation. This procedure would obviously be no substitute for the earlier and more detailed scrutiny of draft legislation by select committees which you seem to envisage in your Memorandum. But experience to date suggests that where it has been used the special standing committee procedure has stimulated debate which is both better informed and better focused. A larger number of evidence sessions than the three meetings provided for in the current standing orders might be helpful in the case of more complex or contentious bills than those which have been considered under the procedure hitherto.

  7. The evidence-taking sessions of special standing committees have so far normally been chaired by the Chairman of the relevant departmental select committee. This follows decisions by the Chairmen's Panel in 1982 and in 1994, when it was felt that for a member of the Panel to chair the evidence-taking sessions might compromise the impartiality of the Chair at later stages. I have not put this matter to the new Panel, and there may well be conflicting views. However, it is clearly the case that the continuing need to call on the services of the relevant select committee chairmen may either discourage the use of the special standing committee procedure altogether, or significantly impede the work of the select committees concerned.

  8. I therefore hope that it may be possible for the Panel to reconsider their predecessors' decisions on this matter, so that it might prove possible for members of the Panel to preside at the evidence-taking sessions, to ensure a fair balance in the allocation of questions and the time for questioning, but taking no direct part in the questioning of witnesses other than for purposes of elucidation and clarification. So long as the chairman of a special standing committee had no responsibility for the preparation of any substantive report from the committee I suspect that the tradition of impartiality could be maintained if members of the Panel were to participate at this stage. The Panel has had no difficulty in adapting to the procedure in the European Standing Committees, when questions are directed to the responsible Minister, and I can see no reason in principle why that experience could not now be applied to the management of questions to a wider range of interlocutors.

  9. Standing committees in recent years have been the subject of frequent and widespread criticism as a result, in particular, of the peculiarly inadequate arrangements for the conduct of debate in what are now termed standing committees on delegated legislation. It will be of no surprise to your Committee to learn that the inadequacies of the delegated legislation committees are more than apparent to members of the Panel, who have had more experience of such committees than most Members, and who are accordingly more conscious of the frequent waste of time, effort, resources and talent which many such meetings involve. Although I realise that your present focus is on the procedures for dealing with primary legislation, I would hope that you will find time to consider, and in general to embrace, the main thrust of last year's proposals of the Procedure Committee on this subject [Fourth Report, Select Committee on Procedure, Session 1995-96 (HC 152)].

  10. The establishment of a system for sifting statutory instruments, for identifying those most in need of debate, and for grouping instruments for debate, could ensure that the time of delegated legislation committees, and their members, was much better employed; and the introduction of a question period on the lines of the European Standing Committees could well enhance the quality of debate. Perhaps most important, the ability of delegated legislation committees to consider substantive motions and amendments could in itself transform the nature of the proceedings and the attention which is paid to them by Members.

  11. I have acknowledged some of the weakness in the standing committee system. But I would like to draw your attention also to some of the strengths of such committees. It has for many years been fashionable to deride standing committees as wholly inadequate instruments for considering legislation. Much of this criticism, I suspect, derives either from ignorance of how standing committees on bills now operate or from a misconception of the nature of the task which they have to perform.

  12. The caricature of the standing committee suggests a body in which Ministers and Opposition spokesmen go through the motions of debating each clause of a bill, neither intending to listen to the other's arguments; while Government backbenchers attend only to see to their constituency mail and to vote when instructed by their Whip, and Opposition backbenchers participate wholly destructively and only then at the behest of their frontbench. This may have been the case 20 or 30 years ago in the golden days of the Whips, when the contents of many political science textbooks were compiled: but it has not been the case in recent Parliaments, and it is not reflected in my experience nor, I suspect, in that of the more experienced members of the Panel. Indeed, in recent years, particularly since the adoption of the informal timetabling of bills following the Jopling reforms, there seems to have been a welcome increase in the constructive participation of all committee members (and particularly Government backbenchers), and a much greater willingness on the part of both frontbenches to use the standing committee stage as a means of fine-tuning the Government's legislative drafts. There have been some obvious exceptions, but the trend seems to have been towards restoring standing committees as useful devices for debating and sometimes improving Government texts, albeit without the advantages which formal oral and written evidence might provide.

  13. Standing committees, because they are appointed ad hoc, are also too often regarded as inexpert. Yet the system of appointment, if used properly by the parties and the Committee of Selection, is in fact a means of ensuring that the right people are appointed; it is precisely the ability to appoint separately for each bill which ensures a degree of expertise which might be unavailable if bills were to be referred to committees with a "standing" membership - the House has, after all, already been through this experience in the earlier years of the standing committee system.

  14. It is also relevant to bear in mind that the much-derided "confrontational" characteristics of standing committees reflect an essential part of the political decision-making process. However much evidence may be taken, there must come the point when the parties have had their say. This will either be on the floor of the House or in committee, but one of the valued advantages of the standing committee system is that this process of confrontation is at least carried out in public, and on the record. It is not a characteristic shared by many parliaments on the European mainland, for instance, where the final and critical stages of committee consideration of legislation are frequently conducted behind closed doors. It is also not a characteristic of the deliberative sessions of our own select committees.

  15. Finally, my colleagues on the Panel are anxious that I should emphasise, and that your Committee should recognise, the value of the tradition of impartial chairmanship which they represent. Whatever changes are made to the procedures for considering bills and other legislative texts, there will remain a need for committees to be chaired at the "confrontational" stage in the same spirit and tradition of impartiality of the Chair as in the House. It is a remarkable feature of this tradition that many Members otherwise active in their parties have been able and willing to adopt the mantle of impartiality when in the Chair in standing committees, and there is in my view no reason to suppose that they would be unable to do so if rather wider functions and responsibilities are to be given to them. I do not need to seek the specific authority of the Panel to say that they are unanimously committed to maintaining their tradition of impartiality, and would seek to do so in order to accommodate any desirable improvements in the legislative procedures of the House.

  16. Panel members have been advised of your Committee's invitation to submit their own views directly to you, and some may do so. This letter ultimately reflects my own views and must therefor not be read as a formal statement of the views of the Panel as a whole.

30 June 1997