Opinion: I hope the SNP’s MacNeil is up to the job

MacNeil has an important job to do at the ECCC – let’s hope he does it.

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.

Tom Greatrex, former shadow energy minister