The chairs of the influential environment and climate change committees have been decided, and utilities will get to know them well over the next five years, says Jillian Ambrose.

The new MPs who will lead scrutiny of government energy and environment policy emerged on 18 June,  offering the energy and water industry clues about how policy may be moulded over the coming five years.

The Energy and Climate Change Committee will be chaired by the SNP, which may opt to use the position as a platform to increase the profile of Scottish energy concerns in Westminster, effectively replacing the Liberal Democrats as the “second opposition” behind Labour. Speculation swirled around who would step into the role after long-term SNP energy spokesman Mike Weir took up the position of chief whip for the party. Ultimately, Angus MacNeil secured the party nomination and ran uncontested to clinch the top spot.

By contrast, in the Environmental Audit Committee the competition was tight, with a three-horse race between MPs highly experienced in environmental policy. Huw Irranca-Davies came out on top ahead of former ECCC members Barry Gardiner and Alan Whitehead. He replaces former Labour MP Joan Walley and will no doubt use his clout to drive forward careful scrutiny of the government’s environmental policies.

Of course, an effective committee is more than just a chair. The remainder of the members will be nominated by the house “in the coming weeks”, according to the House of Commons. Meanwhile, Neil Parish, an alumni of the Defra committee, takes over from popular chair Anne McIntosh. JA

Analysis

For utilities, the Energy and Climate Change Committee (ECCC), the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Efra) committee, and the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) are the most significant select committees.

And with the start of a new parliament comes new chairs.

The ECCC chair, the Scottish National Party’s (SNP’s) Angus MacNeil, probably has one of the hardest jobs and finds himself with one of the most difficult acts to follow: Conservative grandee Tim Yeo. The Tory MP, a veteran of 32 years in parliament, led the ECCC for five years.

During that time he hauled the bosses of the big six in front of the committee and dragged the distribution network companies to Portcullis House on the back of one of the harshest winters we have seen.

He pushed for the self-proclaimed greenest government ever to strive to be greener still, urging it not to “gamble on cheap gas” with promises of a glut of shale gas, and to press ahead with decarbonising the economy. He even joined calls made by the opposition for a 2030 decarbonisation target to be set early – something the government still has yet to do.

Not one to always stick to the party line, Yeo led the committee in doing what he thought was best for the country.

Yeo’s view on onshore wind is a prime example where he was at odds with those at CCHQ. In February this year, he said that “shunning onshore wind would be an expensive mistake”.

This warning fell on deaf ears within his party. However, the call for local communities to have the final say on onshore wind developments did not, and legislation is being pushed through to make this law.

For MacNeil, the thorny issue of onshore wind could be one of the first inquiries he leads the new ECCC into. MB

Opinion: Tom Greatrex, Former shadow energy minister

Congratulations to Angus MacNeil, the SNP MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Western Isles), who is now chair of the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee. Unlike Huw Irranca-Davies on the Environmental Audit Committee, he did not face an election of his peers to secure his position (and additional salary) – and so he did not need to provide a candidate’s statement for the ballot among all MPs.

Of course, a nationalist MP chairing a select committee is in itself a new phenomenon. Having secured a similar number of seats in 2015 as the Lib Dems did in 2010, the SNP are entitled to chair two committees. The Scottish Affairs Committee is a pretty obvious choice, and energy as the second makes a lot of sense too. Energy is an important issue here in Scotland, with the impact of the volatility of oil prices on the North Sea, one of the two UK-funded carbon capture and storage projects in Peterhead, and the increasingly imbalanced energy mix in Scotland leaving us reliant on importing power from England when the wind isn’t blowing.

In a recent report, the Institute of Government highlighted the increasing importance and prominence of select committees in the last parliament. While inquiries on phone hacking and tax avoidance caught the headlines, the energy committee chaired by Tim Yeo was widely respected as major policy changes were introduced. The detailed approach to scrutiny apparent in almost all of its reports meant they were taken seriously. As a member for a few months in 2010, and then as an observer as a shadow minister for much longer, I saw how the committee brought a degree of rigour and balance to a range of complex issues all too easily misrepresented in partisan debate.

Elected chairs of committees are credited by the Institute of Government as contributing to the significance of select committees. The independence of committee chairs from the government, and also from their own party, has helped them become taken seriously, take themselves seriously and improve scrutiny. The lack of an elected chair need not set the energy committee back – it is up to the SNP to decide, as it seems to have done, to allocate those positions to longer-serving MPs rather in the way the whips of the main parties were criticised for doing in the past.

A respected and knowledgeable committee chair can make a real difference to how policy is developed, implemented and adjusted – as the last parliament showed. Having asked just two written questions of Decc in the past five years, MacNeill’s focus has self-evidently been elsewhere. He needs to demonstrate early a resistance to pursuing party interests first, and that the committee will focus on evidence. With some of the expertise likely to be present among other members, that should be possible. Without it, the credibility of an important source of analysis could be undermined precisely when the wider energy debate needs authoritative scrutiny of government policy.

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