• Our work

      Themes

    • Brexit and Parliament
    • Future Parliament
    • Governance of Parliament
    • Making better law
    • Parliaments around the world
    • Parliamentary scrutiny
    • Political engagement
    • Representation
    • publications

    • Publications Home
    • Procedural and constitutional guides
    • Briefings
    • Reports
    • Submissions
    • projects

    • Audit of Political Engagement
    • Mock Elections 2019
    • services

    • Statutory Instrument Tracker®
  • About

      about

      who we are

    • What we do
    • Our history
    • contact

    • Our people
    • Contact us
    • Contacts for the media
    • careers

    • Jobs
    • subscribe

    • Insight Notes newsletter
    • Hansard Society newsletter
  • Blog
  • News
  • Events
  • Journal
  • Scholars
Hansard Society logoHansard Society logo
  • Our work

    • Themes

      • Brexit and Parliament
      • Future Parliament
      • Governance of Parliament
      • Making better law
      • Parliaments around the world
      • Parliamentary scrutiny
      • Political engagement
      • Representation
    • publications

      • Publications Home
      • Procedural and constitutional guides
      • Briefings
      • Reports
      • Submissions

      projects

      • Audit of Political Engagement
      • Mock Elections 2019

      services

      • Statutory Instrument Tracker®
  • About

    • about

        who we are

      • What we do
      • Our history
      • contact

      • Our people
      • Contact us
      • Contacts for the media
      • careers

      • Jobs
      • subscribe

      • Insight Notes newsletter
      • Hansard Society newsletter
      • Join our newsletter

        Get the latest updates on our research and events, together with expert comment and analysis, delivered to your inbox each month.

        You can unsubscribe at any time. Read our privacy policy here.

        Thank you!

        You have been successfully added to our newsletter list.

        Follow us

        :( Oops! Something went wrong...

        Please reload the page and try again.

        Insight Notes

        Subscribe to our regular Insight Notes on parliamentary data, procedures and the legislative process at Westminster, including updates on Brexit Statutory Instruments - in your inbox every sitting Monday afternoon.

        You can unsubscribe at any time. Read our privacy policy here.

        Thank you!

        You have been successfully added to our Insight Notes email list.

        Follow us

        :( Oops! Something went wrong...

        Please reload the page and try again.

      Follow us

  • Blog

    Blog

    • blog

      • Despatch Box Blog
  • News

    News

    • news

      • News Home
  • Events

    Events

    • events

      • Events
  • Journal

    Journal

    • journal

      • Parliamentary Affairs
  • Scholars

    Scholars

    An empty House of Lords chamber, House of Parliament
    blog / 06.06.18

    Contributing to the first full-scale review of Lords scrutiny committees in a quarter-century

    Share this

    Our wide-ranging recommendations to the House of Lords Liaison Committee’s review of Lords scrutiny committees, summarised here, aim to improve legislative scrutiny, facilitate more effective horizon-scanning, address post-Brexit scrutiny challenges, and much more.

    Dr Brigid Fowler

    Dr Brigid Fowler

    Senior Researcher, Hansard Society

    Brigid joined the Hansard Society in December 2016 to lead its work on Parliament and Brexit, as well as contribute to its ongoing research on the legislative process, parliamentary procedure and scrutiny, and public political engagement. From 2007 to 2014 she was a Committee Specialist for the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, where she led on the Committee’s EU-related work. In the first six months of 2016 she was on the research team of Britain Stronger in Europe. She has also worked as assistant to an MEP in Brussels and as an analyst and researcher on EU and European affairs in the private sector and at the University of Birmingham and King’s College London.

    After completing BA and MPhil degrees at the University of Oxford in PPE and European Politics, respectively, she spent the first part of her career focusing on the politics of post-communist transition and EU accession in Central Europe, and completed her PhD at the University of Birmingham on the case of Hungary. She has given media comment, appeared before select committees and published several journal articles and book contributions. She is a Visiting Research Associate at ParliLinc – The Lincoln Parliamentary Research Centre, University of Lincoln; a Visiting Practitioner Fellow at Sussex European Institute, University of Sussex; and the Hansard Society’s representative on the Executive Committee of the Study of Parliament Group.

    On 16 May the Hansard Society gave evidence to the House of Lords Liaison Committee for its review of the Upper House’s investigative and scrutiny committees.

    Listen to the evidence session in full here

    The Society also made a written submission in advance of the evidence session. (Links to the transcript and our written evidence, when published, will be alongside this post.)

    We made wide-ranging recommendations - for new committees addressing legislative standards, devolution, and horizon-scanning; and on committee scrutiny during the post-Brexit transition period and of post-Brexit trade policy.

    Our Lords Liaison Committee evidence formed part of the Society’s long-running strand of work on parliamentary select committees and ways of improving their effectiveness.

    The first full-scale review of Lords scrutiny committees in 25 years

    The Liaison Committee’s inquiry, launched in January, is the first full-scale review of Lords scrutiny committees in 25 years. The Committee is especially interested in: ways in which the Lords committee system can best add value to the work of the Upper House, complement Commons select committees, and address the implications of Brexit; the balance between one-off fixed-term ad hoc committees and the – more-or-less permanent – sessional committees; and public engagement. The Committee wants to consider these issues in light of evidence about the strengths and weaknesses of the House of Lords committee system as it operates currently.

    The Committee launched its inquiry by publishing a consultation document, and is taking evidence from researchers, external stakeholders, MPs and Peers.

    Our recommendations

    We identified important strengths of the Lords select committee system, including its flexibility; the long-term, high-quality and often cross-departmental nature of its inquiries; the access that Lords committees have to time on the floor of the House for debates on their reports; and the fact that Lords select committees are reliably up-and-running more quickly after general elections than their Commons counterparts.

    But we also noted weaknesses, suggesting that the rotation system for Lords select committee membership could be examined to reduce the risks of losing expertise; and that the system of ad hoc committees could be reformed to increase transparency around the choice of inquiry topics, strengthen inquiry follow-up, and perhaps allow the launching of new committees more than once a year.

    New committees for legislative scrutiny, devolution and horizon-scanning

    Our main recommendations are for several new Lords scrutiny committees, in three areas:

    1. Improving legislation and legislative scrutiny

    A Legislative Standards Committee

    This is a longstanding Hansard Society recommendation which, in the apparent absence of House of Commons interest, would be better implemented only in the Lords than not at all. Such a committee would allow Parliament to play a part in holding the government to account so as to maintain and improve legislative standards, a field where there is considerable scope for improvement.

    A permanent Post-Legislative Scrutiny Committee

    With the need for improved post-legislative scrutiny widely recognised, this committee would take over and expand on the limited, piecemeal work in this area done most often by Lords ad hoc committees. In our oral evidence, we made clear that post-legislative scrutiny should encompass delegated as well as primary legislation. More systematic post-legislative scrutiny would, again, help to improve the quality of legislation, by creating a larger evidence base and enabling a greater learning process.

    We also repeated our 2014 recommendation that the remit of the Lords Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee (DPRRC) be expanded so that the Committee could report on delegated powers in bills when they are introduced, rather than only when Commons-first bills reach the Lords.

    2. Devolution and strengthening relations among the UK’s legislatures

    We recommended a permanent Lords committee on devolution, to provide a dedicated forum to examine devolution-related issues, in recognition of their increasing importance. As well as improving awareness and scrutiny of these issues at Westminster, such a committee could help strengthen relations among the UK’s legislatures by acting as a focal point and perhaps bringing their members and/or committees together.

    In our oral evidence, we also suggested that the remit of such a committee might include the UK’s regions, alongside its nations.

    3. ‘Future Forum’: horizon-scanning and policy foresight

    We recommended a permanent committee to work on policy foresight and horizon-scanning. This could reduce the need for ad hoc committees, and perhaps also subsume the Lords Communications and Science and Technology Committees. The subject matter of such a committee would be more likely to engage the public than that of many Lords committees, and the new body could become a laboratory for innovation in public engagement and consultation.

    In our oral evidence, we also mentioned financial scrutiny – for example, of tax administration – as a further area where there is scope for Lords committees to pick up work that Commons select committee are unable or unwilling to address.

    Brexit scrutiny considerations for transition and post-transition

    We recommended that the Lords European Union Select Committee be retained, at least during any post-Brexit transition period as envisaged in the draft UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement. We have identified (in a recent transition briefing note) three overarching EU-related scrutiny tasks arising directly from the draft Agreement: monitoring new EU law and policy; scrutinising UK government actions at EU level; and overseeing the UK-EU Joint Committee. The Lords EU Committee is already engaged in the first two of these. Continued scrutiny will also be needed of the post-Brexit negotiations on the new long-term UK-EU relationship, which, again, the EU Committee is already doing.

    In the longer term, the Lords select committee system will need to change to enable appropriate scrutiny of policy areas in which the UK gains substantially expanded (e.g. agriculture) or new (e.g. trade) policy competences, and of the future UK-EU relationship. The latter will depend on the nature of that relationship: the options lie on a spectrum from, on one extreme, the relationship with the EU being ‘just another’ UK international relationship that may be scrutinised as part of broader international affairs arrangements; to, on the other, it being a uniquely close relationship that potentially requires a dedicated scrutiny body and/or process.

    Pending greater certainty, we suggested that the Liaison Committee could usefully gather information on EU scrutiny arrangements employed by countries with parliamentary systems but differing relationships with the EU.

    For both the transition period and the longer term, we also flagged that Westminster committees should be thinking about inter-parliamentary cooperation with the European Parliament and other EU bodies (something we again referred to in our recent briefing note).

    Effective scrutiny of UK international trade agreements

    On trade policy scrutiny, we said that the UK’s default arrangements for Parliament’s role in treaty-making are unlikely to be adequate for post-Brexit trade agreements. An effective process for making international trade agreements is likely to need parliamentary engagement at earlier stages of the process, before and during negotiations and before signature of any agreement. A select committee scrutiny and reporting process would seem to be an appropriate and necessary part of this, and we suggested that the UK’s current European scrutiny system might act as a model.

    We highlighted the strengths that Lords committees might bring to any such process, but also the political need to balance the role of the Upper House against that of the Commons. For any scrutiny system to be effective, we also highlighted the need for a shared understanding with the government on the provision and handling of information, and for legal and technical advice. We urged Lords select committees to engage with the new inquiry into trade policy scrutiny launched by the Commons International Trade Committee.

    Defining clear objectives for public engagement

    We reported on recent research we have undertaken on barriers to public engagement with Parliament, and said that Lords committees need to be realistic about the fact that several of them work in areas which, while important to expert stakeholders, do not readily lend themselves to broad audiences and media interest. Especially given resource constraints, we recommended that Lords select committees should define clear objectives for any public engagement, rather than undertake the activity for the sake of it.

    What next?

    The Liaison Committee expects to report towards the end of 2018, so as to get any reforms in place before Brexit and the start of the 2019 parliamentary session.

    Before then, we are likely to submit more detailed follow-up evidence on some of our recommendations, as requested by the Committee; and we will be continuing to monitor, and make submissions to, select committees in both Houses, especially in relation to procedure, legislative scrutiny and select committee effectiveness, Brexit, treaty-making and trade.


    Enjoy reading this? Please consider sharing it

    Resources

    parliament.ukEvidence to the House of Lords Liaison Committee: Review of investigative and scrutiny committees

    parliament.ukTranscript of Hansard Society evidence to the Lords Liaison Committee review of investigative and scrutiny committees

    parliamentlive.tvAudio of Hansard Society evidence to the Lords Liaison Committee review of investigative and scrutiny committees

    Related

    Lord David Frost
    blog / 19.02.21

    Lord Frost appointment raises parliamentary scrutiny questions

    A table tennis match
    blog / 13.02.21

    Ping-pong and packaging

    House of Lords committee
    blog / 05.02.21

    Post-Brexit select committee changes highlight Lords–Commons differences

    Photo of the United Kindom taken from space at night
    blog / 03.02.21

    An inter-parliamentary body for the UK Union?

    EU flag missing a star, symbolising Brexit
    blog / 22.01.21

    Brexit and Beyond: Delegated Legislation

    First sitting of the House of Commons after the State Opening of Parliament
    events

    House of Commons Speaker hustings 2019

    Cover image for the Parliamentary Affairs journal
    journal

    Parliamentary Affairs (vol 73, issue 3, 2020)

    Cover image for the Parliamentary Affairs journal
    journal

    Parliamentary Affairs (vol 73, issue 2, 2020)

    Theresa May, Liaison Committee session, House of Commons
    news / articles

    Select committees are crucial for holding ministers to account

    The House of Commons debating the Withdrawal Agreement during the Saturday-sitting on 19 October, 2019
    news / articles

    Even with a majority, getting Brexit done on deadline will be no mean feat

    School pupils in an assembly with their hands up.
    projects

    Mock Elections 2019

    People walking over Westminster Bridge towards the Palace of Westminster, Houses of Parliament
    projects

    Audit of Political Engagement

    Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer in a socially distanced House of Commons chamber, 23 September 2020. ©UK Parliament / Jessica Taylor
    publica… / briefings / 2020

    Expediting of the European Union (Future Relationship) Bill through Parliament: five issues

    Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Rt Hon Matt Hancock MP during the Urgent Question on COVID-19, 7 July 2020 © UK Parliament / Jessica Taylor
    publica… / briefings / 2020

    Building on the 'Brady amendment': how can Parliament scrutinise Coronavirus regulations more effectively?

    Parliament with icons overlay
    services

    Statutory Instrument Tracker®

    Join our newsletter

    Get the latest updates on our research and events, together with expert comment and analysis, delivered to your inbox each month.

    You can unsubscribe at any time. Read our privacy policy here.

    Thank you!

    You have been successfully added to our newsletter list.

    Follow us

    :( Oops! Something went wrong...

    Please reload the page and try again.

    Top three

    Lord David Frost
    blog / 19.02.21

    Lord Frost appointment raises parliamentary scrutiny questions

    A table tennis match
    blog / 13.02.21

    Ping-pong and packaging

    Coronavirus medical animation
    publica… / data / 2020

    Coronavirus Statutory Instruments Dashboard

    Latest

    Lord David Frost
    blog / 19.02.21

    Lord Frost appointment raises parliamentary scrutiny questions

    Lord Frost’s appointment as Minister of State in the Cabinet Office to lead on UK-EU relations brings some welcome clarity about future government arrangements in this area. However, it also raises challenges for parliamentary scrutiny, above all with respect to his status as a Member of the House of Lords.

    Lord Frost appointment raises parliamentary scrutiny questions
    A table tennis match
    blog / 13.02.21

    Ping-pong and packaging

    There was controversy on 9 February over whether the government had used procedural trickery to swerve a backbench rebellion in the House of Commons on a clause inserted in the Trade Bill by the House of Lords. Apparently, it was something to do with ‘packaging’. What does that mean, and was it true? The answer is all about ‘ping-pong’.

    Ping-pong and packaging
    House of Lords committee
    blog / 05.02.21

    Post-Brexit select committee changes highlight Lords–Commons differences

    The contrasting post-Brexit fates of the two Houses’ EU-focused select committees have come about through processes in the Lords and the Commons that so far have differed markedly. This difference reflects the distinction between government control of business in the Commons, and the largely self-governing nature of the Lords.

    Post-Brexit select committee changes highlight Lords–Commons differences
    Photo of the United Kindom taken from space at night
    blog / 03.02.21

    An inter-parliamentary body for the UK Union?

    Before Brexit, mechanisms for inter-parliamentary relations and scrutiny of inter-governmental relations in the UK were unsatisfactory. Post-Brexit, the need for reform has become urgent. There should be a formal inter-parliamentary body, drawn from all five of the UK’s legislative chambers, with responsibility for scrutiny of inter-governmental working.

    An inter-parliamentary body for the UK Union?
    EU flag missing a star, symbolising Brexit
    blog / 22.01.21

    Brexit and Beyond: Delegated Legislation

    The end of the transition period is likely to expose even more fully the scope of the policy-making that the government can carry out via Statutory Instruments, as it uses its new powers to develop post-Brexit law. However, there are few signs yet of a wish to reform delegated legislation scrutiny, on the part of government or the necessary coalition of MPs.

    Brexit and Beyond: Delegated Legislation
    EU and UK flags in front of Big Ben, Houses of Parliament, Westminster
    blog / 29.12.20

    Parliament’s role in scrutinising the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement is a farce

    Parliament’s role around the end of the Brexit transition and conclusion of the EU future relationship treaty is a constitutional failure to properly scrutinise the executive and the law. As the UK moves to do things differently after 1 January, MPs must do more to ensure they can better discharge their responsibilities regarding the making of UK treaties.

    Parliament’s role in scrutinising the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement is a farce
    Prev
    Next
    • Recent pages
      • Contributing to the first full-scale review of Lords scrutiny committees in a quarter-cen…blog
    • Home
    • Contact us
    • What we do
    • Jobs
    • Privacy policy
    • Site map

    Join our newsletter

    Get the latest updates on our research and events, together with expert comment and analysis, delivered to your inbox each month.

    You can unsubscribe at any time. Read our privacy policy here.

    Thank you!

    You have been successfully added to our newsletter list.

    Follow us

    :( Oops! Something went wrong...

    Please reload the page and try again.

    Copyright © 2020 Hansard Society • Charity No: 1091364 • Registration No: 4332105.