What if we win office, but nothing changes? What if, instead of running a new government, triumphant Tory ministers discover that the machinery of government runs them? Making sure that does not happen requires a strategy. Opposition may be a time for tactics, but how we fare in office will hinge on having a robust, coherent plan. We must have a strategy to make government properly accountable to parliament, and parliament to the people.
The MPs’ expenses scandal has turned many people against democracy. ‘If this is how those scoundrels behave,’ runs the argument, ‘MPs can’t be trusted with anything.’ It is almost as if being elected to public office now serves as a disqualification for being put in charge of anything.
From interest rates to the NHS, there is constant pressure to hand responsibility for public policy from those we elect over to unelected ‘experts’. Already siren voices beckon a future administration further in this direction. The Institute of Government — the mandarins’ think tank — proposes yet more power for Sir Humphrey. They advocate placing entire Whitehall departments under the supervision of appointed boards. They call for non-executive directors, rather than anyone you might actually have elected, to hold those who govern us to account.
Our response must be to do the opposite. We don’t just need a change of government, we need to change how we are governed. In place of Whitehall technocrats answering inwards, we must force officials to answer outwards. Far from accommodating the quango state, we must resolve to tear it down. Unless we do, our ministers will simply be swapping places with Labour as apologists-in-chief for the failure of big government.
Our government is now intrusive, suffocating and wasteful precisely because our parliament has become so supine. Smaller, more efficient government begins not with an infusion of new ministers, but with ministers that are made properly accountable. And getting the Commons off its knees is also the first step in reviving our moribund democracy. These are the changes that need to be made — they could be completed before the summer recess.
Empowering select committees
Picking up where the Wright Committee reforms have started, the next Conservative administration should amend the Standing Orders of the House, to ensure that Commons select committees chairs are voted in by private ballots of the whole Commons – without party bosses carving things up. Doing so would subtly shift authority from ministers to Commons chairmen, from the executive to the legislature. Advancement in SW1 would no longer be exclusively up to the whips, but open to diligent legislators determined to hold government to account.
Restoring purpose to parliament is not merely a case of allowing it to decide for itself who should fill its most senior positions, from the Speaker down. It also means allowing it to decide who fills government posts, and how they spend our money.
Action: Amend Standing Orders of the House to allow full private ballots to elect all select committee chairmen.
Parliamentary hearings
Free from domination by the executive, select committees could become effective instruments of the legislature. This means giving them power to confirm appointments; the original demand of the parliamentarian side in the English civil war. The prime minister has inherited more or less intact the power that once attached to the monarchy, including the power to appoint official to the mass of executive agencies that we loosely call quangos.
These powers should be passed to parliament. Heads of executive agencies should be appointed following open hearings. Indeed, select committee approval should be required for all ministerial appointments, too, neatly resolving the problem of how to hold appointed ministers in the Lords to account.
ACTION: Amend Public Appointments Order in Council 2002 to allow select committee confirmation hearings to appoint quango chiefs. Amend Civil Service Order in Council 1995 to allow select committee confirmation hearings to appoint permanent undersecretaries.
Ratification of budgets
Select committees should be given the power annually to approve first quango, and then ultimately departmental, budgets. Such a move would lift parliament off its knees, and give us a legislature capable of ensuring we are governed wisely, no matter which minister holds office.
Tories obsessed by tactics sometimes imply that the fiscal crisis precludes radicalism. Wrong. The deficit makes a reformist strategy more urgent. It is a fact that no postwar government — Labour or Conservative — has managed to curb public expenditure in the way that may now be required. Why? Because the executive cannot resist spending our money. No Cabinet minister goes to his colleagues demanding his empire and department be shrunk. As our forbears understood, keeping government under control is properly a job for the legislature. It will not suffice to make ministers answer inward to an Office of Fiscal Responsibility any more than it is enough that they should account to the Treasury. Instead, we need to make ministers answer properly to the Commons.
Forcing quango chiefs and, indeed, ministers to plead annually before select committees for public money would create a downward ratchet on waste and on bureaucracy – especially if MPs began to have an incentive to do so. Just as Conservative governments of the 1980s introduced choice and competition into British business, the next Tory government must unleash choice and competition into our political system – making those that sit in Westminster regard themselves first and foremost as elected representatives, rather than party spokesmen.
ACTION: Bring forward primary legislation and amended Standing Orders to give select committees oversight over departmental and non-departmental expenditure.
The right to hire and fire your MP
Open Primaries, used to allow every local resident a say over who gets to be the local MP in Totnes and Gosport, have proved prohibitively expensive. A new law should allow local people and parties to petition returning officers to hold primary ballots at the same time as local or European elections. ‘Piggy-backing’ primary ballots would drastically cut the cost of holding them, making them affordable everywhere – an option to any party that wants them. And it would, at a stroke, end the job-for-life culture that has brought SW1 so low.
If your local MP has fiddled their expenses or broken election promises, you should be able to trigger a by-election. More than any phoney-sounding ‘integrity pledge’ or Commissioner on Standards, the power to recall your MP would cause them to modify their behaviour. They might even find it pays to underpromise and overdeliver. Either way, politicians would answer outward to local people, rather than merely inward to Westminster and the whips.
ACTION: Bill allowing Open Primaries and Recall by amending the Representation of the People Act 1983 and the Political Parties, Elections and Referendum Act 2000.
People’s Bills
Most law today is initiated by officials and ministers. It is debated, occasionally amended, but more often just rubber-stamped by those you voted for. Why not give everyone a chance to join in the process? If you believe only those with a degree of expertise and understanding should qualify to contribute to law-making, listen to a Commons debate. On that basis, you would exclude half of Westminster. Popular initiative, similar to that in New Zealand, could enable ordinary citizens to propose new measures. Wiki Bills could enable us to ‘crowd source’ proposals, and road test amendments, drawing on the experience of 60 million people, rather than the narrow elite in SW1.
ACTION: Amend Standing Orders of the House to enable the Table Office Clerk to receive and supervise petitions to trigger motions to be debated and voted on in government time.
Douglas Carswell is the Conservative MP for Harwich and Clacton.
Comments