Hansard Society Commons Reform Agenda

Ruth Fox, Director of the Hansard Society Parliament and Government programme, said: 

‘MPs are elected to represent their constituents but they also have a constitutional duty to ensure effective scrutiny of the Government.

‘We have long argued that the balance of power between MPs and the Government in the House of Commons needs to change.

‘If public faith in our representative democracy is to be restored, radical reform is needed to:

 - provide for better scrutiny of the Government;

- improve the quality and effectiveness of the law making process;

- enhance the relationship between Parliament and the public; and

- make the institution more efficient.

Drawing on our substantial body of work in this area we recommend that the House of Commons:

1. Establish a Business Committee, putting control of the parliamentary timetable and agenda in the hands of a cross-party body of MPs rather than leaving it in the control of the Government, thus providing for greater consideration of topical issues. 

2. Set up a Parliamentary Finance Office, modelled on the US Congressional Budget Office, to provide individual MPs with independent expertise and resources on financial matters, thus empowering them to better scrutinise the Government's proposals for public spending and taxation.

3. Enhance the role and authority of the publicly popular Select Committee's. Committee Chair's and members should be elected by MPs not selected by Party Whips; the work of committee's should be better integrated into wider parliamentary activity, and more time should be set aside for the detailed scrutiny work that committee's undertake.

4. Adopt a system of e-Petitions to help revitalise public engagement with Parliament. These should be incorporated with paper petitions and processed through a newly established ‘petitions (or even public engagement) committee' to ensure that the views of citizens are not ignored, and that they are properly integrated into Parliamentary procedures and processes.

5. Appoint a Chief Executive to professionalise the organisation and operation of the House of Commons. In light of the proposal to create an independent Parliamentary regulatory body which will take over the duties of the House of Commons Fees Office, there is an opportunity to substantially reform and modernise the internal administrative organisation of the House of Commons. At present the House is managed by the Clerk of the House under the auspices of the Speaker. Clerks are expert professional advisers on process and procedure - their expertise is not in the field of management, budgets and logistics. A Chief Executive should be appointed to take over these administrative and organisational aspects of the House of Commons. ‘

Ruth Fox is available for interview - contact Virginia Gibbons at the Hansard Society on mediaprog@hansard.lse.ac.uk or 020 7438 1225 or 07812 765 552

Editors' Notes

• The Hansard Society is the UK's leading independent, non-partisan political research and education charity. We aim to strengthen parliamentary democracy and encourage greater public involvement in politics.
• The Hansard Society was established in 1944 to promote the ideals of the parliamentary system of government and to ensure that democracy would be safeguarded by being understood, debated and improved by parliamentarians and the public.
• The Parliament & Government Programme undertakes cutting edge, high quality research in the field of politics and democracy. The only research programme of its kind in the UK, our core area of work is focused on reform of the Westminster Parliament. As such our innovative research is at the forefront of debate about the role of Parliament and parliamentarians, the future of representative democracy, and the public's engagement with politics and the political process. As Parliament's 'critical friend' we have a long-standing reputation for developing challenging but realistic and workable policy recommendations to reform Parliament, particularly in the field of legislative scrutiny, many of which have subsequently been implemented at Westminster