Adhocracy attack

A year after losing ministerial office, Hilary Benn is relishing his role as shadow leader of the Commons – and, he tells Sam Macrory, gearing up for the coming battle over Lords reform.

In the glamour stakes of the ministerial ladder, the leader of the Commons comes at the low end. There’s no huge Whitehall department to run, a Thursday morning graveyard shift in the parliamentary timetable, and scant press or public interest.

So imagine being shadow leader of the Commons. Especially if you’ve just been a cabinet minister. “I’m enjoying it enormously,” insists Hilary Benn, the current holder of that post. “It’s the engine room of Parliament and it’s about making sure the place works.” Benn is looking beyond mere tinkering with the engine. He is designing plans with potentially significant consequences for British politics, and last Wednesday he gave a speech entitled ‘Making Parliament Work for the People’, in which he set out proposals to improve public engagement with Parliament. This is territory which has been crossed before by numerous parliamentary navelgazers, but Benn sounds like he means business.

“All of us should be concerned about Parliament’s reputation and its capacity to do its job effectively,” he says. “I’m passionate about Parliament and the capacity of politics to change things for the better, and I worry most about the people who don’t think that is the case.”

Faith in Parliament has nose-dived, he says, because of the “exceptionally traumatic moment” of 2009’s expenses crisis – Benn emerged intact – and “the cycle of great expectation which is quite difficult to sustain”. “This isn’t about aspiration; it’s about being straight with people – we need a slightly more even process.” In other words, don’t raise hopes. But didn’t the last Labour government, which Benn was a senior part of as environment secretary and international development secretary, do just that?

Benn sees a problem in the recent tendency among constituents to be satisfied with the work of their MP, yet to deride Parliament as a whole. “What is it about the mirror we hold up to ourselves which means that we get those two different views about what is going on? It’s unhealthy that we have those differences.”

Nevertheless, he is hopeful for progress, arguing that the changes made to parliamentary procedure at the end of the last government, such as the introduction of a backbench business committee, are “quite profound”. So why did it take 13 years for his party to make those changes, introduced only after the suggestions of former MP Tony Wright’s reform committee following the expenses crisis?

“In the past you were dependent on what the government would decide to put forward and, looking back, it’s quite surprising that Parliament allowed that to happen,” he says, apparently shifting responsibility. “We now have a means for backbenchers to give expression to what people want to see.”

Benn also believes that the way that legislation is scrutinised needs reform. “Legislation cannot be about government putting a towel over its head, thinking it has worked it all out, unveiling legislation to the world, and seeking to repel all boarders,” he argues, unable to resist citing the paused Health and Social Care Bill as evidence. “Bill committees are set up on an ad hoc basis, but shouldn’t we consider them having a greater degree of standing expertise? We should also consider greater use of pre-legislative scrutiny,and I am very strongly in favour of amendments to bills having an explanation of what their effect may be.”

Though Commons-focused, Benn’s remit stretches further. He recently sat on a cross-party committee which looked at reform of the House of Lords, a subject on which its members did not see eye-to-eye.

“We have had three areas where there is a clear difference of view,” Benn reveals. “One is on whether it should be wholly rather than mainly elected – I’m in favour of wholly. When you are constituting a piece of your legislature, then what is the argument for doing it other than on the basis of election? The second is on voting systems. I am in favour of open lists. Thirdly, we fought the election on the commitment to have a referendum, but I’m not sure the government is that keen on the idea. But this is a major constitutional change, and a referendum, assuming it goes in favour, says to the Lords that people have backed this. It would then make it more difficult for the Lords to say that they wouldn’t go for this change.”

Given the fault lines, could partisan politics – the chance to outflank embattled Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg by insisting on a wholly elected Lords, rather than the 80 per cent that he is expected to settle on – obscure real debate? “It’s not about that, it’s a matter of principle,” Benn insists. “It does cut across party lines, in the same way the AV referendum did, because it’s a pretty fundamental choice.” So fundamental, indeed, that his government stalled after the early abolition of all but 92 hereditary peers? “That was one of the reasons that we weren’t able to make more progress,” Benn agrees. But if the second chamber were to be fully elected, on a proportional system, might it be seen as more legitimate than the Commons? “I don’t agree,” Benn quickly replies. “It will have broadly the same power and role as the current Lords: its job is to revise and scrutinise, and not as a directly elected rival to the first chamber, the Commons.”

However, he admits that there is a question over whether “prevailing conventions will hold, or whether you need to codify”.By codify, does he mean the elaboration of a written constitution? Benn won’t rule that development out. “That’s one of the debates. Who decides what the words mean? Parliament or the courts? There isn’t a settled view.”

Beyond the Westminster Village, or even the hamlet of the parliamentary estate, Benn’s chosen subject matter might sound a little dry, yet his Thursday sessions with Sir George Young often contain some of the more light-hearted exchanges of the Commons week. “I’ve known him for a long time,” says Benn of the Commons leader. “He and I were on opposite sides in a football match in 1976. I was playing for the Ealing Acton Labour Party, and he was playing for the Ealing Acton Conservatives. We won 3-1.”

Despite the Thursday morning bonhomie, Benn is serious about his job: “One purpose is the business, but it’s also about pressing the government on things that it is in difficulty on. You want ministers to go away thinking that they haven’t got something quite right.”

He also wants Parliament to accept that it is not doing things quite right either, and he appears to be well-suited for the task. For while Hilary Benn could only ever be a member of the Labour Party, and not just through being the son of Tony, he always seems too polite to be partisan. As such, it is almost impossible to find a bad word said about this experienced politician. If he ever got the chance, he appears more capable than most of making Parliament work for the people.

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