House Of Commons Select Committee Research Articles

Audit firm executives under pressure: A discursive analysis of legitimisation and resistance to reform

The UK audit profession is facing a crisis of public trust and legitimacy following a series of high-profile audit failures. This resulted in the executive leadership of UK audit firms being summoned before a House of Commons Select Committee as part of its inquiry into ‘the future of audit’. During this inquiry the audit executives walked a tightrope, to both defend the social contract from an existential threat and attempt to influence policy reforms in their favour. This paper draws on ‘neutralisation techniques’ from deviance theory and the ‘grammar of legitimation’ from legitimacy theory to inform a discursive analysis of how auditors use strategic rhetoric to defend their professionalism and maintain their social contract to operate, all the while attempting to affect policy outcomes to align with their firms’ economic interests. Data for this study are drawn from the ‘oral evidence sessions’ and submitted ‘written evidence’ provided by the audit firm leadership. Our findings illustrate how the auditors construct a variety of strategic rationalisations, couched in moral ideals, to effectively deny responsibility for corporate financial scandals while simultaneously identifying with the ‘victims’ of audit failures and representing themselves ‘heroically’, as indispensable solution-bearers, not problem-causers. Their application of logic and language is cleverly designed to defend existing practices, neutralize the allegations of the inquiry, and provide the basis for advocating preferred policy outcomes. We show how, in this UK regulatory context, the Big Four are again successful in diluting and delaying reform, especially that which would legislate a full legal and economic split of their lucrative advisory service business from their audit business - a union which has grown in prominence in recent decades and been the focus of accusations of conflicted interests detrimental to audit quality. Evaluating legitimacy as a rhetorical and communicative process can aid regulators to render visible the means by which auditors use rhetoric to influence reform, and thereby improve democratic oversight over the profession.

‘Armed with the necessary background of knowledge’: embedding science scrutiny mechanisms in the UK Parliament

The unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the demands placed upon parliamentarians to scrutinize and evaluate evidence-based government proposals, making visible the parliamentary mechanisms that enable them to do so. This paper examines the steps that led two such mechanisms to become embedded in the institution of Parliament during from 1964 to 2001: the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology (a scrutiny and information-gathering body) and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (a legislative science and technology advice body). Drawing on official papers, Hansard records and unpublished archival material, this account complements existing studies of the relationships between government ministers and experts. It highlights how individual members of the all-party Parliamentary and Scientific Committee have influenced institutional change. In so doing it exposes some of the challenges confronting Parliament in the scrutiny of science policy from the mid-twentieth century to today. In particular, it reveals MPs' concerns about their ability to scrutinize science policy in the absence of a select committee on science and technology in the Commons during the 1980s. This shows that parliamentary scrutiny of science was compromised during the very period when the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher set about making major changes to the organization and funding of government-sponsored research in the UK.

UK's economic recovery should include plans for net zero emissions, says report.

Actions taken by the UK government to help the economy recover from the covid-19 pandemic should also help achieve net zero carbon emissions, according to Climate Assembly UK.1 The assembly, commissioned by six House of Commons select committees, involved 108 members of the public that represent the UK population in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, educational level, where and how they live, and level of concern about climate change. The report has called for “strong and clear leadership from government” and laid out several recommendations on travel, energy consumption, food, and businesses, among other matters. The assembly met, initially in person and later virtually, for six weekends between January and May 2020. The members heard “balanced, accurate, and comprehensive” information about how the UK could meet its net zero target. In June 2019, the …

Leading through agonistic conflict: Contested sense-making in national political arenas

This article examines the social processes of political leadership in situations of contest and conflict, taking place within a key and long-established democratic institution, the UK Parliament. The empirical focus is on leadership in House of Commons select committees, which are concerned with holding the government to account. Headlines and media scrutiny, combined with internal challenge from the cross-party mix of politicians on the committees and a range of external stakeholders, create leadership challenges for committee chairs. The study is of two committee inquiries led by the same committee chair, which occurred concurrently and in real time, thereby providing a rare comparative study of leadership through the same leader at the same time but with different leadership challenges. Rather than shying away from conflict, as does much of the leadership literature, this research highlights how leaders who actively engage in challenge and conflict can build a degree of shared purpose among diverse groups of stakeholders. It examines and combines, in theory elaboration, two theories relevant to understanding these leadership processes: agonistic pluralism with its role in creating respectful conflictual consensus, and the theory of sense-making and sense-giving. The two cases (the two inquiries) had different trajectories and reveal how the chair recognised and dealt with conflict to achieve sense-making outcomes across divergent interests and across political parties. There are implications not only for understanding political leadership but also more widely for leadership where there are diverse and sometimes conflicting interests.

Crossman and Beyond: House of Commons Select Committees in the 1960s

AbstractAssessments of the work and impact of house of commons investigatory select committees during the 1960s usually centre on the success or otherwise of the new ‘specialist’ committees established in the second half of the decade. This article uses both quantitative and qualitative evidence to give a more rounded picture, including both new and existing committees. It concludes that 1960s select committees were more popular, active and influential than has previously been appreciated. It also argues that there has been an overvaluation of the role of the Labour cabinet minister, Richard Crossman, in promoting and establishing these committees, and that support for committee work on both front benches and back benches was rather more widespread and substantial than has been assumed. In particular, the article contends that Harold Wilson's role in advancing the work of select committees has been underestimated.

Is Japanese Knotweed inherently damaging? Network Rail Infrastructure Ltd v Williams and Waistell [2018] EWCA Civ 1514

The Court of Appeal in Network Rail Infrastructure Ltd v Williams and Waistell [2018] EWCA Civ 1514 held that the encroachment of Japanese Knotweed can be grounds for an action in nuisance if development or improvement of the property would require the treatment of contaminated soil and/or its licensed removal as controlled waste. The damage in this case was to the quiet enjoyment of the owners’ properties as a result of the loss in amenity value occasioned by the limitations on their use of the property without being encumbered with requirements for costly remediation. The case has potentially serious implications for conveyancing. The nature of the risk posed by Japanese Knotweed has recently been questioned and is being considered by the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology.

Chairing UK Select Committees: Walking Between Friends and Foes

AbstractIn this article, we aim to look at the political, social and emotional world created by the UK’s House of Commons select committees and the part played by their chairs. Drawing upon the theoretical traditions of political anthropology (Spencer (2004, Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)), group analytical theory (Foulkes (1948, Group Analytic Psychotherapy: Method and Principles, London, William Heinemann Medical Books)) and pragmatic philosophy (Dewey (1922, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology, New York, NY, Henry Holt and Company)), we view the experience of individuals as relational, created in their interaction with other individuals and groups. The context is that select committees aspire to consider evidence impartially and work cohesively to hold government to account. Our focus is on the political work of the chairs of Commons’ select committees. Committee chairs, members and staff are constrained by the architecture, rules and rituals in their bid to achieve plausibility, but at the same time find the room to express individuality in the ways that they manage emotions and communicate with others through words, silence, bodily movements or facial expressions. By embodying the committee, and mediating between those involved, the work of chair involves walking between friends and enemies—forming alliances, dealing with disagreements and disciplining the unruly—to create the impression that select committees are above party politics.

How Public Engagement Became a Core Part of the House of Commons Select Committees

Abstract This article explores the role of public engagement by select committees of the House of Commons. It shows that committees’ public engagement activity has been transformed since 1979, when departmental select committees were introduced. We start by outlining the different elements of public engagement, showing that it entails a wide range of types of activity from information about committees’ activity to opportunities through which citizens can shape parliamentary decisions. We then proceed to outline how public engagement has become a core activity of select committees in the House of Commons. We show developments taking place within all elements of public engagement. Through the use of case studies, we illustrate specific innovations that have led towards more agile and inclusive ways to consult and involve the public into committees’ activities. We finish by identifying some of the challenges still present, namely the need to reach new and more varied audiences.

A bouncy house? UK select committee newsworthiness, 2005–18

ABSTRACTTraditionally, legislative committees have been regarded as quite unimportant in the UK. Some scholars contend that recent reforms have substantially increased the powers of select committees, rendering them genuinely important to policy and the scrutiny of government; others see little sign of change. We examine House of Commons select committees in regard to exactly one indicator of significance, their newspaper coverage. We detect significant gains in salience of some committees, as compared to the period just before the Wright reforms (2005–10). But committees vary dramatically in coverage levels and trends, and it is unclear if their newspaper profiles continue to grow.

Richard Elmore: Forgotten Emancipationist

Richard Elmore: Forgotten Emancipationist Caoimhín de Bhailís Early life and career Richard John Elmore is one of the many nineteenth-century political campaigners who have fallen out of view, and hence consideration, when we discuss the history of the period. Elmore was an activist who made valuable contributions to the debate on Catholic Emancipation and was also a campaigner who sought improvements in the economic relationships that existed between Ireland and the rest of the then United Kingdom, as Ireland was a part of the Empire at the time. He was a close friend of Daniel O’Connell and a director of the National Bank; he was a defender of his Catholic business associates and, for a period, a major employer of linen workers at his factory in Clonakilty, Co. Cork. Richard was born in c.1785 and took his first appointment as a hospital assistant with the 1st Garrison Battalion in January 1807.1 According to himself, he had moved to Clonakilty in about that year with the intention of practising as a physician; however he could ill afford to continue to do so as he often had to provide his services without charging a fee, due to the poverty among the peasantry, which meant that he was ‘obliged frequently to put [his] hand into [his] own pocket; [as] no man could possibly avoid it that possessed one spark of humanity in his composition’.2 In the end, as he stated, ‘finding about me so much misery, I was naturally led to ask myself the causes’. The cause he discovered was the lack of employment for the local people and so he directed his attention to industry and set up a coarse linen factory that would eventually employ almost 1,000 people.3 His attachment to Clonakilty soon became more than just a commercial one: himself a Protestant, in 1808 he married a local Catholic woman, Marianne Callanan.4 Her father, Dr William Callanan had been involved in the Rising of 1798 and was later arrested in the aftermath of Robert Emmet’s failed Rising of 1803, along with William Todd Jones, who had been lodging with him for the greater part of the previous year.5 For some of the earlier part of his life in Clonakilty Elmore served in the Peninsular Campaigns and was injured in the retreat from Burgos in 1812, an injury which resulted Richard Elmore: Forgotten Emancipationist Studies • volume 107 • number 428 465 in his being recommended to half-pay by the Army Medical Board.6 From 1812 to 1827, he was a permanent resident in Clonakilty.7 He and Marianne had a number of children, including Alfred, who would become a celebrated artist, a Royal Academician and an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy, and Thomas, who would become H M Vice-Consul at Algiers and Consul at Nice, as well as being a noted photographer.8 A third son, Charles, is also mentioned in Richard Elmore’s War Office record, but there is no further reference to him that I have been able to find. Marianne died on 3 February 1827, along with an unnamed child, perhaps in childbirth; and shortly afterwards the eldest of their remaining children, a son, also died.9 The period during which Elmore was living in Clonakilty was a turbulent one. This was a time of agrarian upheaval and revolt, with groupings such as the Whiteboys, Ribbonmen and others active in the area. In Cork, Kerry and Limerick the notorious, and unidentified, ‘Captain Rock’ was leader of another group during the years 1821–24 and conflicts between the yeomanry and ‘rockites’ occurred around west Cork, including Clonakilty.10 One such instance involved the owner of a large farm holding being killed in response to his purchase of the land of a local, evicted farmer. On another occasion the yeomanry opened fire on a large group of peasants who were seeking the release of two prisoners and shot one of the prisoners while his hands were still tied.11 Revd Michael Collins, in a submission to a House of Commons Select Committee, outlined instances of killings and retaliations in Bandon and Timoleague, near Clonakilty.12...

Improving Parliamentary Scrutiny of Public Appointments

Since 2007, candidates for 50 of the most senior public appointments in the UK have been scrutinised by the relevant House of Commons Select Committee before ministers confirm their appointment. Committees regard pre-appointment scrutiny as a chore, but our research shows it has real impact. Candidates have not been appointed as a result, and others have been forced to resign. Since the Grimstone review in 2016 gave Ministers more scope for political patronage, parliamentary scrutiny is all the more important. Committees could be more effective if they were more selective, but also more systematic in their approach to pre-appointment scrutiny. They could range beyond the Cabinet Office list of the ‘top 50’ appointments; and they could use questionnaires to candidates to help decide the issues they wish to discuss, or whether to hold a hearing at all.

Committee Hearings of the UK Parliament: Who gives Evidence and does this Matter?

While evidence hearings by House of Commons select committees have received increasing attention by the public and the media in recent years, academic research on this topic has remained rather thin. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative methods, this article examines this topic. It begins by explaining why evidence is important: (i) it is fundamental to sustain detailed scrutiny; (ii) it builds individual-level and institutional-level expertise; and (iii) the range of evidence gathered is used by committees to engage with the public. The article then presents empirical data of the pool of witnesses on which committees rely, which arguably does not reflect the UK population, which raises important further questions over the representative claims of committees.

(Trans)Forming Single-Gender Services and Communal Accommodations

The right of transgender (‘trans’) persons to access gender-segregated space is neither a new controversy nor a conversation which is unique to the United Kingdom. Yet, despite increasingly charged political debates in North America, the question of trans access to single-gender facilities remains largely underexplored by British legal academics. In January 2016, the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Women and Equalities recommended expanding trans entry into single-gender services and communal accommodations under the Equality Act 2010. Using the Committee’s report as a springboard for debate, this article considers the right of trans populations to use their preferred women-only and men-only spaces. Critically analysing the existing possibilities to exclude trans persons from services and accommodations, as well as the policy arguments which motivate this approach, the article demonstrates how, adopting common-sense, evidence-based reforms, Parliament can introduce legal rules which both prioritize user safety and respect trans dignity.

800 years on can Magna Carta still disrupt the executive?

AbstractIn June 1215 King John put his seal to Magna Carta, which over the centuries has become an icon of English (British) liberties. Clause 40 about not selling, denying or delaying justice, and Clause 39, that no free man is to be imprisoned or dispossessed “save by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land” are still in force today. For these reasons Lord Denning described Magna Carta as “the greatest constitutional document of all times—the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot”. In other words the executive can never be above the law, but for this principle to be enforced the state must disclose evidence by due process to the public by which it can be held to account. This essay explores the threats to openness of government in the digital age, which runs the risk of undermining this fundamental principle of the British constitution. These range from the intrusiveness of our surveillance society, ill-considered notions of a post-privacy world, misconceived concepts of open data to the immense difficulty of scrutinizing born-digital data released under due process for sensitive content. Such threats are balanced by a much more assertive judiciary under the supreme court, which like its American counterpart strikes down legislation, an unelected second chamber willing to challenge the executive and House of Commons select committees that are increasingly baring their teeth. This article is published as part of a collection entitled ‘IT as a utility’.

Political Leadership in Parliament: The Role of Select Committee Chairs in the UK House of Commons

Concepts of political leadership have been applied sparingly to parliaments, and not at all to the study of House of Commons select committees in the UK Parliament, where analysis has largely focused on their institutional capacity to scrutinise government and hold it to account. Yet examining these committees through a political leadership lens illuminates the complex role of committee chairs, a role which was significantly reshaped in 2010 with a shift to election of chairs by the whole House. This article analyses select committee chairs through the lens of political leadership, and draws on a series of interviews with chairs in order to delineate the nature of the political leadership they perform. It argues that, as chairs are now increasingly important parliamentary and policy actors, our understanding of them is significantly advanced by conceptualising their role as one of parliamentary political leadership, and that this in turn enriches our analytical toolkit when it comes to the study of parliaments.

School-based drug education and prevention: the impact of inspection and curriculum provision

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the links between school inspection requirements as represented by Ofsted and the provision of drug education programmes in schools. Design/methodology/approach – An examination of relevant guidance from the Department of Education and the school inspection agency Ofsted; and reference to the research literature and evidence base around drug education. Findings – The provision of drug education programmes in schools is influenced by the requirements of the national curriculum; and the frameworks used by Ofsted in its inspections. Recent reduction in emphasis on drug education in both sources has reduced the extent and quality of drug education in schools. Research limitations/implications – The paper looks at national documentation and conclusions. It is not a quantitative study of school provision – some indication of this is provided by Ofsted reports. Practical implications – The paper indicates that reports and conclusions from Ofsted and other bodies, e.g. House of Commons select committees and the ACMD, have in the recent past reported on rather than informed governmental action. Social implications – The paper concludes that central government support and professional training and development are essential ingredients in the provision of universal drug education in schools. Originality/value – The paper illustrates some of the factors involved in the provision of drug education; the contribution this can make to drug prevention, including harm reduction; and the seeming lack of understanding of education and prevention in the wider professional and political discussions about drugs and their use.

“We Are Sure of Your Sympathy”: Indigenous uses of the politics of protection in nineteenth-century Australia and Canada

The rise and fall of humanist imperial policy across Britain’s nineteenth-century empire has received considerable attention in terms of how the principles of Indigneous protection that underpinned the 1837 Report from the House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines fared as a governmental imperative to meet the obligations of humane colonisation. In particular, scholars have examined the gulf between the theory and the practice of protectionist policy as an Indigenous legal right, the tensions between metropolitan initiatives to protect subject peoples and the neglect of those initiatives by local governments and settler lobbies, and the transition of protectionist agendas from an earlier model of Indigenous “amelioration” to a later model of Indigenous governance and surveillance. In comparison to the uses and failures of protection as a mechanism of colonial governmentality, less attention has been given to the strategic value that the humanitarian politics of protection, with its rhetoric of obligation and solicitude, might have held for Indigenous peoples. Within the comparative framework of nineteenth-century Australia and Canada, this paper will consider some of the contexts in which Indigenous people enlisted the humanitarian agendas and rhetoric of protection in encounters with representatives of the British Crown. As emergent British settler states, nineteenth-century Australia and Canada represent divergent ends of colonial governmental efforts to bring Indigenous people within the Crown’s jurisdiction. In much of what is now Canada, treaties were signed between Indigenous peoples and the Crown. They endorsed a principle that resources would be exchanged for the Crown’s protection, although in the years that followed, many of the expectations established by treaties would be disappointed. In Australia, the absence of treaty negotiations, and the subsequent violence that followed the path of settlement wherever it went, made the promise of the Crown’s protection a significantly ineffectual concept from the outset. Yet even if being within the Crown’s protection had little practical purchase in a daily sense, there were times when Aboriginal people found cause to enlist their status as the Crown’s subjects to call upon its obligations and sympathies. In different settings and across different times, their strategic engagements with the humanitarian politics of protection have much to say both about practical tensions in colonial conceptions of humane governance, and about the degrees of agency Indigenous people could deploy in asserting a political place within the colonial order.

The Commons Select Committee System in the 2015–20 Parliament

AbstractThe House of Commons select committees witnessed some of the most constructive political theatre of the 2010‐2015 Parliament. Recall Rupert Murdoch's public contrition, Margaret Hodge's assault on MNC tax evasion and Keith Vaz's timely interrogations of G4S, etc. The committees also embraced social media and adopted public engagement as a key task. These developments all reflect a newly emboldened system. In recent months, four reports have been published which reflect on these developments. They also look forward to the further substantial development of committee activity. The system thus sets sail with an abundance of specific suggestions, including ideas that could have far wider and more far‐reaching democratic implications.

The Growing Power and Autonomy of House of Commons Select Committees: Causes and Effects

AbstractThis article is an examination of the rising prominence of House of Commons select committees during the 2010–2015 Parliament, which takes into account the impact of the Wright reforms. The new system of electing committee chairs and members is explored as a central reform that has burnished the autonomy, independence and credibility of the committees. In addition, the characteristics of the coalition government and circumstances entailed by a two‐party executive are seen as factors that have made more robust the neutrality of the committees, which have been looked to ever more urgently as impartial scrutineers of government policy and personnel. As the system has been strengthened and received greater attention from the government, the public and the media, select committees have also come to present a platform upon which certain members and chairs have grown their profile. This phenomenon in turn has added to the desirability of roles on committees, which now present an alternative career route to the ministerial ladder.

Be heard in high places.

Giving evidence to MPs on a House of Commons select committee is not usually part of Karla Wilson-Palmer's job, but the opportunity was one she relished.