PROCEDURE (Hansard, 20 June 1973)

§ Mr. McMaster
I beg to move Amendment No. 33, in page 17, line 40, leave out from first 'the' to beginning of line 43 and insert: 'appointment of a chairman of each consultative committee'. My hon. Friends and I feel that the appointment of a chairman for each consultative committee should be separate from the appointment of members of the Executive. It is in the interests of good government in Northern Ireland that people who serve as chairmen of the consultative committees should not be part of the Executive. They should be independent from the Executive and as such better able to criticise the Government and to have more influence in framing policy.
The purpose of this part of the Bill is that power should be shared with all sections of opinion in the Assembly. It is important that people who represent various types of opinion reflected in the Assembly should be independent of the Executive, and should sit as chairmen of important committees able to consider various facets of Government policy and to make their influence felt with the Executive. To provide that members of the Executive shall act as chairmen of the committees will inhibit the committees from acting freely and performing as useful a function as they might perform if an independent member became chairman of the committee.

§ Mr. Powell
I suggest to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State that it would be entirely in the interests of the objects he has in mind to accept the amendment. This subsection is part, so far as the Assembly goes, of the power-sharing policy implicit in the White Paper and in the Bill. Nevertheless, as drafted, the subsection imports a rigidity which, in practice and after experience, my right hon. Friend may come to regret.
There is a certain contradiction and dual nature in the consultative committees as they appear in the clause. On the one hand, they are to be the advisers, 810 guides, philosophers and friends of the respective heads of Departments, or Ministers, as we would think of them. On the other hand, it is clear that they will be critical and investigatory, and the next subsection is designed to give them the sort of investigatory powers with which Select Committees of the House are rightly and necessarily endowed.
I very much doubt whether it is possible successfully to combine the two functions. There are consultative committees known to the statute law of the United Kingdom. Several departmental Ministers for various purposes—I can think of them in the context of the Department of the Environment—are provided with advisory committees. Those committees are recruited not from the House of Commons but from individuals with specialist knowledge in different departments—housing, water, sanitation and so on—and are drawn into consultation of a kind which is expert rather than policy-making.
One may contrast the case of the committee of the local authority, at the head of which is the party leader on that subject. He is the head of the committee by virtue of being party leader because that committee is itself the governing body, in effect, for that subject. The majority in case of dispute will carry the day and it is the policy of the majority party that the committee will put into effect. That will not be the case here. The chairmen are to be members of the Assembly, selected not for the purpose of carrying by a majority whatever may be the policy of the head of the Department but rather for the purpose of putting him in a different frame of mind from that in which he might have set out.
There is the alternative kind of committee that is as separate as possible from the Department, which approaches its doings in a critical frame of mind with independent sources of information and presents not merely to the Department but to public opinion and to open discussion inside and outside the Assembly criticisms and alternatives which might not have been thought of in the ordinary way by the Department.
We are here storing up trouble for ourselves by an unhappy attempt to combine these different kinds of committee. It may 811 in some cases be found possible, or it may experimentally be desirable, to try such a committee with the head of the Department as its chairman, but I seriously suggest to my right hon. Friend that this is an experimental field, that as time goes on no doubt changes will be desirable if the experiment begins to work and that my right hon. Friend may find it most inconvenient to be obliged in all cases to place these committees in the charge of the head of the Department.
Nothing in the wording which my hon. Friend has proposed would prevent that happening, but the amendment will relieve my right hon. Friend from the embarrassment of being either obliged to carry on in that way or to come back to the House of Commons for an amendment of the law if he wants to try a different form of consultative committee. Without in any way criticising or entering into the larger question of power-sharing for the Assembly, I suggest that the greater flexibility which my hon. Friend's amendment would import is here desirable.

§ Mr. Whitelaw
Here, again, there is a genuine problem of which is the right way to go. There are arguments both ways. On the one hand, there is the argument put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, East (Mr. McMaster) and developed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell) for a committee which is entirely separate from the Department. On the other hand, there is the argument, particularly in a comparatively small Assembly of 78, that by divorcing the two one may produce a built-in area of conflict.
On the basis proposed in the Bill it is also true that there is a strong argument for saying that the head of a Department has to carry the consultative committee with him in many of his legislative proposals. The fact that someone can carry a consultative committee with him, especially if he has to test some of the views of his Department before that committee, is a valuable process in a pre-legislation sense.
I have thought a lot about this. I had considerable experience of it as Leader of the House. I have thought a great deal about the right way to proceed, and I have come to the conclusion that this 812 is the best way. However, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West makes the very fair point that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander and that if I argue for flexibility in some cases I cannot argue for rigidity in others. For that reason it is fair to say that the point of flexibility is an important one to be considered.
I am prepared to consider this matter, without commitment. Frankly I believe that the way we are proposing is right. I do not wish to fob off my right hon. and hon. Friends by saying that I am impressed to the point of changing it. But having heard their arguments, it would be wrong for me not to say that I shall consider them, without commitment, on the basis that it may be right to proceed in the way that we propose and that it may be wrong to be totally inflexible about it.

§ Captain Orr
My right hon. Friend's open-mindedness on this subject is helpful to us. It is a matter of judgment and I agree that it is difficult to judge. I come down on the side of having committees which are critical in nature. It is better for the parliamentary process that this should be so. It is a better check upon the Executive. I have the feeling that if the Assembly and the committees of the Assembly are used to form policy or to advise upon policy we get away from the proper function of an Assembly.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell) spoke about advisory committees. There was never any prohibition upon members of this House belonging to advisory or consultative committees. On one occasion I was a member of such a committee concerned with the Post Office. There would be no bar to heads of Departments inviting any member with any specialist knowledge of a subject to become a member of a consultative committee.
I still come down on the side of the sense of this amendment. But I welcome my right hon. Friend's comments. There is a great deal to be said for not tying him. If the amendment were accepted it would still be possible to make the head of a Department the chairman of the appropriate committee without my 813 right hon. Friend tying himself. However, in the light of what my right hon. Friend said, I am inclined to advise my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, East (Mr. McMaster) to withdraw his amendment.

§ Mr. McMaster
I must thank my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the sympathetic way in which he considered my suggestion. In view of his remarks, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.