 Thank you very much again for coming in without further ado I would like to introduce you to Andrew Kenan who is the Clerk of Committees and who is going to be delivering our lecture today. Thank you. Right. Good morning. I am going to talk to you about a number of recent developments and emerging issues that are happening in Parliament. As Naomi said, my name is Andrew Kenan and the Clerk of Committees and House which involves responsibility for committee's system, power and resources, as well as putting on a wig and a gown and advising members and the speaker in the chamber. But the six aspects that I'm going to cover are the 2010 intake of new MPs, the coalition in the Commons, the new timeframes we're working to, forcefully select committees, ffistly backbench business, and finally a bit about scrutiny in the House. But I'm hoping I'll provoke you into a lively discussion afterwards so we can follow up on a whole range of things, whatever you want to talk about. Firstly, the 2010 intake. Every school is used to the idea that each autumn you get a new year group joining, perhaps 20% of the school is starting at the bottom. In each university every autumn perhaps you get a third new students coming in. But the 232 new MPs who joined the House of 650 members in May 2010, a House I have to say quite demoralised by the expense of scandal, that constituted nearly 40% of the House. Now that's not quite as big a turnover as we had in 1997. But arguably it's a more significant renewal of the body politic. It's clear that the 2010 new MPs have made a great impact on the House. I think it might be quite an interesting area for a future academic study to see how much difference they make over the years ahead as well. Some characteristics are obvious in terms of gender, ethnic background and disability of the House is much more diverse. We also for the first time have the leader of the Green Party, a member of the Northern Island Alliance Party, as well as an MP independent of the party. More subtly, quite a number of the new members of Cometal House without a full past career in politics. So they bring to the House wider experience of the private sector, the voluntary sector and private public sector as well. So a lot of more experiences come in, particularly if some members have come in in their 40s and 50s. Also as Philip Cowley of Nottingham University has pointed out, this generation of new MPs are quite independent minded and quite more willing to stray from the party line when voting. In some cases this reflects the way in which they are chosen. For instance, Dr Sarah Woolaston was chosen as a Conservative party candidate in Devon as a result of an open primary, which you could say gives her a greater degree of authority and independence. The two things I have observed most in particular and make me proud to work for the House are the commitment of these new members to public service and how they really apply their knowledge of their constituencies in pursuing their objectives. The supply is on all sides of the House. As I sat in the chamber in Clarkely Wigan Garn in the summer of 2010 listening to all those maiden speeches, I heard members showing great understanding of the issues in their constituency and a genuine passion for making things better. Now that spirit has continued long after the maiden speeches have been printed and framed. The important thing here however is to make sure that the House continues to attract capable people contributing to improving the running of the country. One of the interesting things we will see as we lead up to the next election is that with a number of MPs reducing from 650 to 600, many of those existing seats will have to be contesting some sort of reselection procedure for constituencies with revised boundaries. That will generate quite a lot of political interest. Secondly, I was going to talk about the coalition. I have often been asked how well parliamentary procedure works with a coalition government, something that has not happened since 1945. The short answer is that it works surprisingly well. Before the general election we did some work on scenario planning on what might happen if no party won a majority. Twice in my career here, which goes back nearly 35 years, I have seen situations where a party does not have an effective working majority. One of the conclusions I came to is that parliamentary procedure is not just a book called Erskine May. It is a bit like a tool shed. There are some tools you use every day or every week and there are some in the back corner that maybe you only need to get out once every 10 or 20 years. A simple example of this is the casting vote. A speaker only needs to exercise the casting vote if votes are tied. Clearly, in a situation where no party has got a majority, you are perhaps more likely to get tied votes than you would do when the government has a clear majority. We felt reasonably prepared for those situations, but were quite surprised that a coalition was formed, a coalition which was able to command a majority in a house. It has settled down in a house surprisingly easily. It is fascinating seeing Conservative and Liberal Democratic backbenchers on the same side of the house referring to each other as my honourable friend rather than the honourable member opposite. Most of the procedures have actually worked quite smoothly and slight adaptations have been made where necessary. One aspect of it is the standing orders provide for there to be a second largest opposition party, which has certain rights in debate and in time. The Liberals have obviously been in that situation for many years, but now we have no official second largest opposition party. The benches on that side of the house are occupied by the Democratic Unionist Party, the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, the SDLP, Northern Ireland, Alliance and Green—quite a range of people. Interestingly enough, quite a number of those political parties, although small and independent of each other, are used to working in the same political group in the European Parliament, so a degree of cohesion amongst them is something they are used to. I wonder whether there is any validity in my impression that actually those minor parties have got more attention in this Parliament because they are not competing for space on those opposition benches with the Liberal Democrats. Thirdly, let me talk about timeframes. One consequence of the coalition is that Parliament has passed the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011. I can now reveal, but not exclusively, that the next general election will take place on 7 May 2015. In the past, Governments with a working majority have usually lasted for about four years or a bit more, and then they have chosen the most propitious time to go to the polls before the absolute deadline of five years. In many other countries, and certainly in Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland, there are absolute fixed terms when elections are held. When the bill was being discussed, one of the arguments being put forward is that we ought to have a fixed term, and it ought to be four years instead of five, but it has now been decided that it will be a five-year term. We will go away and see how that works out in practice. My guess is that there will be hidden benefits and probably unpredicted snags as well. Another change is to alter the parliamentary year. The usual parliamentary session runs from November with the Queen's Speech through to the following November, so it was out of phase both with the financial year and a couple of months later on the academic year, but with elections normally held in May and June in recent decades, that meant the first session of a parliament ran from May, June through the November to the November of the following year, making a very long session, and the last session of the five-year parliament was a very short one. What the Governments now decide to do is to run the sessions from May to May, so in an ideal world we'll have five equal one-year length sessions in every parliament, but to achieve that they've had to go for a two-year session in this first stage of the parliament, so we're actually coming up to the end of nearly two years, which is very odd. One of the things, all the statistics will show that the number of bills passed, questions asked, everything else in this session will be exceptionally high, and people may think why was that, and the answer is it's a very long session, so for those of you who are interested in statistics about activity there's a simple solution to this, when you're trying to compare uneven things just divide by the number of sitting days, and that will show you the longer term trend. The House will still carry on sitting for about 150, 145 days a year, spread over about 35 weeks, and now we have much more information about when those sitting periods will be, so we have the dates already up to December 2012. The current sitting week is a balance of two difficult things, two competing pressures on individual members' time to work at Westminster and to work in their constituencies, and also the different needs of members whose constituencies are near London and those who are far away. These are never easy things to reconcile, but one thing to look out for is the current procedure committee inquiry into sitting times, and among the options being considered, and we may see developments on this, is an idea to move to more morning sittings with the House rising every evening early rather than at 10 or 10.30 at night as it does on Mondays and Tuesdays, and dispensing with Fridays. Today is actually a non-sitting Friday, but it might be a day in which we were considering private members' bills. I'm now going to move on to my principal area of responsibility, which is select committees. The main role of select committee, of course, is to help hold the government to account, or perhaps ensure that the House makes a positive impact on Whitehall. And I'd like to thank even during the expenses scandal, though some parts of the House's work which carry on commanding public respect. But since the election there have been some interesting developments. The first is the concept of the directly elected committee chairs. Now you'll know that the party balance on a select committee reflects the party balance in the House. So a committee of, say, 13 will have six Tories, one Liberal, five of Labour, I think, and one minor party. It's exactly reflects the balance of the House, and for every size of committee there's a calculation that says what the party balance will be. Now in the past, once the members of committee were appointed to the committee, they then chose the chairman from within themselves. And in practice there are informal arrangements about which party would have the chair of each committee, and that also reflected the party balance in the House. But this was thought to give too much influence to the party whips, and so a new system was proposed by the right committee shortly before the last election. So the new process is firstly you calculate what the party balance on each committee should be, then there's agreement between the parties about which committees should have Conservative chair, Liberal Democratic chair, Labour chair, and then when that agreement has been formalised, we have elections to those slots. So if it is a committee, say, for the international development committee, it's designated as a Liberal Democratic chair. Only a Liberal Democrat can stand for that, but the whole House can vote. Now in practice what happened, certainly in Liberal Democrat cases and in a number of others, is that the individual party put up only one candidate, so that person was elected unopposed. But we did have quite a lot of competition for some of the committees, particularly those that Conservative led. I think I'm right in saying we were six candidates for the Foreign Affairs Committee, so there's quite a lot of voting. And the fact that there was a lot of interest in it is very good. It shows that these are sought after posts, and those elected chairs feel that they've got enhanced authority because they're directly elected by the House. And after they were elected, then, within each party, there was a process of electing the other members of each committee. So each party has its internal process for filling its slots on the committee. So direct election of the chairs certainly has enhanced the standing of them. And the fact that they were elected before the rest of the committee has got on with planning committee inquiries. And they're on the whole experienced members who served in previous parliaments, whereas most other committee members are part of the 2010 intake. So I think it will be very interesting to look at, over the next few years, and longer ahead, how much of a difference this makes to our committee system and to the standing parliaments, and how attractive those posts are for members, as opposed to seeking advancement within their own parties and onto the front benches and ministers and things. The second important development recently has been pre-appointment hearings for public office holders. This has grown gradually over the years, and if you're particularly interested in it, there was a recent study by the constitution units at UCL on this. The basic idea is not that committees select from among candidates for key posts, but they should take evidence and express an opinion on the person who has been selected by whatever process within the Government Department and proposed by the Minister. Committees tend to be more interested not in individual civil service appointments, but in posts which have some sort of oversight or regulatory role, like, for instance, the Office of Fair Access to Universities, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, the Head of Offstead, the Education Examination Body. These sort of posts, which understandably Parliament feels they want to be assured that people appointed to them are people of sufficient calibre and independence. Now, to ensure fairness of process and to avoid deterring good candidates, committees have to follow a very strict procedure of what they can and cannot ask about, but obviously the ability to stand up to robust questioning in public is a requirement for all these posts anyway. There have been dozens of these hearings so far, but only five cases has a committee recommended or reported against the named candidate. I think in a number of cases that's rather shown not so much weakness as the candidate, but weaknesses in the system for selecting them. In three of the cases, the candidate stood down, and in two other cases ministers decided to go ahead with the appointment, even though the committee had recommended against it. So I think we'll see this becomes the increasing growth area. To a certain extent, we're mimicking what happens in the US Congress, and, to be from time to time, there will be clashes on that. A third area of select committees, I should discuss, is their powers. Committee have long had powers to require attendance of witnesses and the production of papers. In the rare cases where this has caused problems in the past, it's usually been when the committee has been trying to get information actually from the government, from government officials or from ministers. But you may have seen last summer that Rupert and James Murdoch were originally reluctant to appear before the cultural media and sport during their inquiry into phone hacking. The committee produced a formal order to attend, and they exceeded and did come along. Although the event was rather marred by a member of the public pressing a phone pie into Rupert Murdoch's face, that committee is now investigating whether other witnesses in the same inquiry misled the committee. There have been one or two other examples of people being reluctant to appear before committees, and the Public Accounts Committee has recently even put one witness on oath because they didn't feel that he was answering their questions fully. But the reality is the House does not any longer have the power to find or imprison people who refuse to attend or mislead it. So it's a matter of discussion of how serious this problem is and whether there's any solution other than to involve the courts, which would involve passing legislation. Let's talk about that later. Can I leave you with one other thought we might discuss later, is what are the implications for committees of the reduction in the number of members to 600 and of a directly elected House of Lords with its own committee system? Now I want to talk about one completely new committee, the Backbench Business Committee. You may know that certain parliamentary days are set aside by standing orders or by convention for opposition days, private members' bills, certain debates, and within each day a certain amount of time is allocated for questions and adjournment debates. But apart from such set time, all other time is really at the disposal of the government, though it negotiates with the opposition about what the business will be for the week or two ahead. So the big change in this parliament is that the Backbench Business Committee is given the right to choose subjects for debate on 35 days a year. And this is a really good example, actually, of how things can evolve in the House of Commons, partly through a flexible approach to procedure, and partly through the dynamism of one or two individuals. And the chair of that committee, Natasha Engel, she herself has made a huge impact through the way she's led that committee. The committee conducts a sort of Dragon's Den every Tuesday at which MPs pitch for the subjects they'd like to be debated. New members in particular have been assiduous about using these opportunities, often combining with colleagues from other parts of the House, to debate matters which would not otherwise get aired. But the key thing is this does provide a chance for a specific proposal to be put to the House in a motion, rather than just a general debate that leads to no specific conclusion. Inevitably, demand exceeds supply and the committee is dependent on the government allocating specific days, usually Thursdays. Although such debates command high interest among members and more interest than the old general debates in the past, it's not always popular for a motion to be voted on, as well as debated on a Thursday, partly because members are often wanting to head back to their constituencies then. If a government disagrees with a motion, it's understandably expected its own back benches to stay behind in the House to help vote it down, at a time when that is not always convenient for members. But there have been some memorable debates on prisoners voting rights, Afghanistan, the Hillsborough tragedy, etc. This has led to a certain creative tension. Some might think that the most effective motions have been those which pushed the government just a little bit in a direction it doesn't want to go, but not so far that it will turn out a whip vote against the motion. It remains to be seen, I think, what the long-term impact of this will be in Whitehall and on specific policy changes. One awkward problem has been a government's decision to go ahead with an electronic petition system within government, but within undertaking that Parliament would debate any petition that got more than 100,000 signatures. The government then said that these debates would have to come out of back bench time. Sometimes the objective of the petition does fit in with the priorities of back benches for debate, but sometimes it doesn't. I'm interested to hear what you feel, to what extent you've registered or noticed the impact of the back bench business committee. Finally, I'm going to come to scrutiny in the House returning from committees and draw your attention to two developments that indicate perhaps some changes in long-standing practices. However secure the coalition is in terms of parliamentary majority, and with three years to go before an election, it does get questioned on the floor of the House. All the questions come around for each department about once every four or five weeks, and they now include topical questions. Prime Minister's questions continues to be the focal point of each parliamentary week, but in the period immediately after those questions sessions and before the main business, the government is under increasing scrutiny. As the Leader of the House has pointed out, the government has made more statements than its predecessors, and questioning on them often runs for an hour or more. Equally, the speaker has allowed more urgent questions than his predecessors, so on most days there's either a statement or an urgent question, if not both, to hold the government to account on a topical matter of the day. On the other hand, we may begin to see a decline in the famous early day motion, traditionally a way for an individual member to express an opinion and canvas support from others, whether on a matter of public policy or the success of the local football team. There was a debate recently in which new members in particular expressed doubts about the continued usefulness of this device. At the same time, the volume of parliamentary questions for an answer remains high, but there is dissatisfaction with the timeliness and the quality of the answers. In a world where much more government information is available on the internet, there's an argument that the quantity of questions is defeating quality. So, I'd be interested to hear what you think about that, how we moved on, or is that still a valid device. Now, that's where I'm going to stop now, and I'd be very happy to answer any questions or get a discussion going on any points that you want to raise.