The Weaknesses of the Committee System

In one line

Reports that the rules themselves call advice, committees reconstituted every year, a chair filled by nomination, a jurisdiction with no definition, and a system whose only sanction is that somebody may read what it says.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the committee system is criticised on six grounds, that its reports have by rule only persuasive value and are treated as considered advice; that the departmentally related Standing Committees are reconstituted annually and so cannot pursue a subject across years; that their members are nominated rather than elected, so composition follows party strength; that the committees have no research or professional support of their own; that the reference of a Bill to a committee is not automatic and the guillotine may put unexamined Demands to the vote; and that the privilege jurisdiction under which committees inquire is uncodified, so that a power operating as criminal law lacks criminal law's certainty.

The six criticisms, each anchored

1. The reports are advice, and the rule says so

This is not an inference; it is written into the rules. Rule 277: "The report of a Standing Committee shall have persuasive value and shall be treated as considered advice given by the Committee." And rule 270(a) forbids a report on Demands for Grants to "suggest anything of the nature of cut motions".

So the recommendatory character is deliberate and express, not an oversight, and an answer that treats it as a drafting failure has misread the design.

The defence, which must be given. A committee that could bind would be deciding, and deciding is the House's function. Chapter 700 made the same argument about the Central Vigilance Commission's advice: an authority that must obey another's finding has not applied its own mind.

The reply. The paper's whole subject is institutions whose findings do not bind, and every one of them is criticised for it. The question is not whether a report should bind but whether anything follows from ignoring it, and chapter 1010 shows that only the Public Accounts Committee has solved that, by the action taken reply and a further report upon it, which is practice and not rule.

2. Reconstituted every year

Rule 269 and the practice: the term of a departmentally related Standing Committee does not exceed one year.

The consequence is the most structural criticism in this chapter. Chapter 1010 identified what makes the Public Accounts Committee effective: it does not let a paragraph go, returning to it in a later year. A committee reconstituted annually cannot do that. It cannot build institutional memory, cannot pursue a Ministry across a policy's life, and cannot make a department fear that a question will be asked again next year.