Select committees: not mere political theatre

Search for “Tim Yeo” and “energy” on Google, and you’ll find 845,000 articles in less than a third of a second. That’s a good indicator of how the Conservative MP and chair of the Energy and Climate Change Committee, interviewed this week on p10, has seized the agenda on energy. His committee hearings have created numerous front page splashes and had the Twitterati in overdrive. Memorable moments include the public pillorying of the bosses of the big six last autumn as the committee sought to get its collective head around vertical integration; the dressing down the energy networks received following the Christmas storms; and the spat with Peter Lilley over climate change.

Yeo is not the only select committee chair to enjoy his moment in the media spotlight. Margaret Hodge recently took the opportunity to give Npower a piece of her mind during an otherwise sober hearing of the Public Accounts Committee inquiry into the impact of infrastructure investment on customer bills.
It all makes great headlines, but are select committees anything more than political theatre? The answer is, or should be, “yes”. Thanks to live streaming and social media, select committee hearings have a higher profile and wider audience than ever before. Captains of industry and civil service mandarins are subject to grillings that are de rigueur for politicians; conversations that would normally be had behind closed doors are open to public scrutiny; and as Yeo points out, MPs that are not dancing to the whip’s tune in the hope of political advancement are able to ask searching questions of the government and others. Often these politicians are experts in their field and able to add a great deal to the debate – Yeo himself, Anne McIntosh, chair of the EFRA committee, and several members of the ECC committee, such as Alan Whitehead, spring to mind.
In these respects, the growing profile of select committees is to be welcomed. It would be a shame if this was undermined by political grandstanding and a selection of topics for inquiry more governed by the media than the public interest.