Commons Select Committee's Issue a Damning Report
My weekly take on the news with a link to A Level Politics
Commons select committees are bi-partisan groupings of backbench MPs that are elected through secret ballot to scrutinise the workings of government. Since 2010 and the Wright Reforms, they have become increasingly more assertive, independent and as a result more effective in holding the government to account.
The majority of the commons select committees are departmental ones, that is they scrutinise individual ministries. They call for evidence and then produce reports that the government has to respond to. By some estimates, some 40% of select committee recommendations are accepted.
On Tuesday, a 150-page document, ‘Coronavirus: Lessons learned to date’, was issued from the Health and Social Care Committee and the Science and Technology Committee. It lays out the failure of the government that led to over 150,000 deaths; the lack of testing at the start of the pandemic (a policy decision was made that meant testing was seen as unnecessary), the shortage of PPE, the failure to protect the elderly in care homes, and the government’s dithering that led to slow lockdowns.
It argues that many of the deaths were preventable. The report says that politicians and scientists fell prey to a ‘group think’ that is they were not able to think independently and question conclusions.
The UK still has the second-highest daily covid counts in the world.
How can you use this information?
You can use this select committee report when writing about the power of backbenchers in government. But what will come from it? The government has dismissed it as ‘hindsight’. But the pressure will increase for a full public inquiry, at the moment the government has not committed to a date.