Members of Select Committees, which hold the executive to account, should be elected by all MPs and not appointed by party whips, and should scrutinise all departmental proposals for legislation.

Parliament should scrutinise Government actions and proposals, cause amendments as appropriate, and, in extremis, change the composition of the Government.

When the Crown was separate from Parliament and appointed its own ministers then every line of their proposals was scrutinised and debated by Parliament. Now that the executive and legislative functions have for all practicality merged, there is nothing like the same scrutiny as there was in those days.

Parliamentary time is often used not to hold the Government to account but rather with its own MPs making political points for the Government. Such supposed questions as “May I congratulate my Right Honourable friend on …” are clearly sycophantic rather than designed for scrutiny. Indeed these questions are often planted by the whips with backbench MPs who wish to impress the party hierarchy, usually the majority of backbenchers who are depending on political advancement in that party for their career.

The weakness of Parliamentary scrutiny of Government is often cited by the UK media as a justification for the vigour with which they question and challenge the Government.

Most Government decisions are implemented through secondary legislation (regulations etc) with Statutory Instruments (governed by the Statutory Instruments Act 1946) being the mechanism by which such regulations are enacted. However Parliament now has no right to amend but only to reject them. Usually a minister just has to lay such an Instrument before Parliament and if there is no vote against it within a period of typically 40 days then under the “negative procedure” it is deemed to have been passed.

Over 3,000 Statutory Instruments are now authorised each year and only a very small proportion of these are ever reviewed by Select Committees or in any other way. Essentially as soon as they have obtained enabling primary legislation to allow such regulations to be brought in, there is no real check on what is proposed by each department.

The lack of scrutiny of Parliament is massively highlighted by its failure to prevent any proposed Statutory Instruments from becoming law. Theoretically any member of either House can put down a motion that an Instrument should be annulled but even if in the Commons the motion is signed by a large number of Members or is moved by the official Opposition it is unlikely to be debated. The last time the House of Commons annulled a Statutory Instrument was 30 years ago in 1979 when it rejected the Paraffin (Maximum Retail Prices) (Revocation) Order 1979 (SI 1979/797) since which time over 70,000 Statutory Instruments have become law.

Legislation can be proposed by the executive in over twenty different areas of Government responsibility represented by the various Whitehall departments. No individual MP can be expert on all of the areas and able to monitor each of them. A system of Select Committees therefore exists to monitor each of the departments of state.

Unfortunately the structural intent of the Select Committees (other than the Select Committee on Public Accounts) has been perverted by the party political system. The Members of the Committees and particularly the Chairs are now appointed by the whips of the respective parties. This means that the primary scrutiny system in the House of Commons has largely been neutralised as the Government normally has a majority of MPs on every Committee and these are most unlikely to support any report which is critical of the Government. In addition the full House of Commons is under no obligation to debate any of the reports produced by the Select Committees. In practice it is very rare that such reports are ever properly considered by other MPs or given a realistic response in the House of Commons by the Government departments concerned in a way which allows the response to be interrogated.

Select Committees have the power to call for evidence and many private sector organisations are very willing to provide their point of view to these committees. However the committees are unable to force any minister, civil servant or special adviser to appear before them. This is clearly unsatisfactory as it means that the Government is able to evade answering the questions that the Select Committee wishes to put to it. A simple solution would be to require any person paid for by the taxpayer to have to appear before a Select Committee just as it can require any other person to appear before it.

The Select Committees clearly need to be strengthened if Parliament is to provide any proper scrutiny of the executive. This should also be extended to reviewing proposed Government legislation prior to its coming before the full House of Commons for its first reading in order to improve the drafting of such laws and to identify the potential areas of contention (as is the practice in the Scottish Parliament). A further proper role for the Select Committees is to review all legislation after a period of, say, five years in order to see if the original justification for the legislation remains valid and whether there are any adjustments which are required.

The Select Committee on Public Accounts provides an example of how Select Committees could work as by tradition the Chair always comes from the Opposition. In addition it effectively has sufficient independent staff as its work is concentrated on reviewing the reports from the National Audit Office which is staffed by professional accountants and other experts who are not civil servants. Unlike the staff of other Select Committees they have full rights of access to departmental papers, records and interviews.

All Select Committees should be properly independent of the executive. The Jury Team Governance Proposal is therefore that the members of all Select Committees (using the way many committee members are elected in the City of London Common Council) should be chosen by a vote of the whole House of Commons rather then being appointed by the whips.

A secret ballot has now been introduced for the election of the Speaker and there is no reason why the same procedure should not be used for electing members of Select Committees.