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September 3, 2006
The Kaufman Select Committee on public libraries 2005
Susan Hill asks
"Do Select Committees have absolutely no power then and if they do not, what is the point of them ?"
I gave a great deal of evidence to the committee, which they quote and include, and make the following personal observations:
1. The report and the analysis it contained were truly excellent and induced, in me, a great respect for Parliament.
2. However, I know the people in both DCMS and MLA whose job it is to respond to the recommendations of the report and they are truly expert in the arts of civil service management and unlikely, in my estimation, to respond to the report in the way the committee would have wished.
3. Therefore, writing a report and publishing it was not going to be a satisfactory way of addressing the problem on behalf of the public.
4. The officers of the MLA were well aware that at the impending election Sir Gerald would retire as chair and most of the committee members would change. Therefore if they delayed response until after the election, the new committee would not have libraries at the top of their agenda (the preparation for the Olympics in 2012 would be)
5. In normal process of good management the committee should have sat in open session with both officers and board of the MLA and made sure that the messages of the report were understood and if they were agreed by the Government, were embedded in the working agenda of the MLA. But that is not the practice and it certainly did not happen
6. The board members of the MLA should have ensured that they did the same thing and absorbed the messages of the select committee or had very good reasons for not doing so- and they were asked to do that-- but they did not.
7. Consequently the senior civil servants of the DCMS and the executive management of the MLA did no more, in my view, than pay pathetic lip service to the Select Committee report. I have heard it said that the view was that Sir Gerald and the committee simply didn't understand what the "new agenda" for libraries was about.
8. The response of the DCMS to this Select Committee was therefore not only inadequate and irresponsible (as MP Michael Fallon said in a speech to the House of Commons in January), but the question could reasonably be asked as to whether the response was fundamentally disrespectful of Parliament
9. The permanent secretary at the DCMS has now been replaced and, in my view, there should now be a full Parliamentary inquiry into the behaviour of both DCMS and MLA in response to this Select Committee report. I, for one, have a huge volume of correspondence between myself, the Chair and board members of the MLA and other senior civil sevants and also Sir Gerald and officers of the committee, which is contemporaneous to the events and I would be very happy to make it available to a Parliamentary enquiry. I believed, as the events unfolded that what was happening was entirely deliberate and those who should have intervened refused to do so or did so in an ineffective way. I said so repeatedly at the time, and gave warnings, which, in my view, were not heeded and have lead to the current situation.
Posted by Perkins at September 3, 2006 10:48 AM
Comments
In other words, Select Commitees have no power and can safely be ignored.
Posted by: SUSAN HILL at September 3, 2006 1:16 PM
Susan is not quite right. The value of the Select Committees is entirely down to the respect their reports are shown by the Ministries they scrutinise. That this report has not ben debated in the House is a disgrace as is the way the DCMS attempted to do a Jo Moore on it on the run up to the general election.
In essence the DCMS attitude shows that library parsnips will remain unbuttered for the foreseeable - all the while stressing just how important parsnips are to the Sunday dinner table - if not the bedrock of Sunday Dinner.
Posted by: Elgar Atkins at September 4, 2006 11:16 AM