Interview: Andrew Tyrie

There are many stereotypes about the Conservative Party – and one is that it’s stuffed full of diehard traditionalists, convinced that Britain has been going downhill ever since the days of the Victorians. There’s some truth in this stereotype. But the party contains just as many people who, while they greatly admire the institutions, traditions and practices of British government, don’t automatically fight to preserve them, unchanged, for all eternity.

For these people our government’s structures and mores, painstakingly built up over hundreds of years, represent an accumulation of expertise and experience which must never be hastily discarded. Yet such Tories value that ability to incrementally evolve just as highly as the systems it has created: for them, this built-in flexibility keeps our structures adapting to a changing world – albeit at a couple of steps behind contemporary society – and enables us to avoid revolutionary change. This group may love the legacies of the Victorian era, but they’re just as interested in the ambition, vision and enterprise which allowed the Victorians to create them.

Andrew Tyrie (pictured above) is just such a Tory. And like many such Tories – including Malcolm Rifkind, who chairs the intelligence and security select committee – his views are founded on real experience of government. Soon after his education – at an Essex public school, followed by Oxford, Bruges and Cambridge – he joined the Treasury as a special adviser to chancellor Nigel Lawson. There, he worked with the current cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell and Number 10 permanent secretary Jeremy Heywood – and developed views that will hearten officials appearing at the Treasury select committee, which Tyrie has chaired since last year.

Happy memories
“Working in the Treasury was a tremendous and educative experience,” he says, draping his long frame over a chair and firing out leisurely bullet points; in his delivery, Tyrie is more muzzle-loader than machine-gun. “Highly collegiate; relatively small teams, working very hard; highly-motivated; output-driven; relatively flat hierarchy. It’s left me with a considerable respect for the civil service ethos, and convinced me that one of the key principles that underlies the British civil service – that it should be wholly non-partisan – is a good one, and can still be made to work even under the pressures of late 20th and 21st century politics.”

Tyrie has a lot of sympathy for the Treasury’s position, he says: “Many spending departments are inevitably deeply engaged with powerful vested interests most of the time. The Treasury sits – or should sit – at one remove from them, and tries to hold the ring. It’s a tough job.” It is, he adds, a “great institution” that normally succeeds in this task – though he does concede, when asked whether it grew too powerful during the Brown years, that “it needs to be clear both about the scope and the limitations of its role. And maybe some of those things got a little out of kilter, perhaps as a consequence of relations between Number 10 and Number 11. It wouldn’t have been the first time there have been such problems.”

Asked about the recent report by think-tank Demos, which argued that the Treasury is still too dominated by ‘generalists’ and needs more professional and specialist skills, Tyrie replies that during his time there “there were quite a number of people who had generalist degrees, but they’d certainly learnt how to specialise by the time they got to mid-career.” He is, he adds, “basically sceptical of the need for radical further civil service reform to recruit graduates with specialist degrees. The idea that there’s something fundamentally wrong with our civil service takes quite a bit of justifying.”

Instead, he suggests, skills gaps can be plugged by encouraging people to move into and out of the civil service – an interchange that would be fostered by reducing the generous public pensions that, he says, tie officials into the public sector until their retirement. “It shouldn’t be largely or entirely a service of lifetime, career civil servants,” he says. Recruitment in mid-career “should go further and, vexed question though it is, civil service pension reform can facilitate this.”

Evolutionary reform
Tyrie is no radical. But he does believe in steady improvement and modernisation – a process that, he says, has given us today’s select committee system. “In 1979, a big decision was taken: that select committees should be formed, with the intention of shadowing particular departments,” he says. “It took 20 years for some to make headway. That’s typically British: we don’t do revolutions, we do evolutionary constitutional change. But they are now quite effective.”

Over that period, Tyrie continues, the system – “like so much else in British political life – has evolved, with people hardly realising it, into something far more formidable than those who created it over 30 years ago perhaps intended.” Now, he believes, it’s time to make it a little bit more formidable – and in a recent speech at think-tank the Institute for Government, he set out nine reforms designed to improve the system (see below).

In his speech, Tyrie argued that the British political system is suffering from a loss of popular trust and consent caused, at least in part, by the executive’s dominance over Parliament. When the government can push through policies or legislation without sufficient scrutiny, he said, it’s not just Parliament that’s damaged: the consequences include ill thought-out law, personality-focused politics, and greater public distrust of our political leaders. By strengthening the select committees, Tyrie believes, MPs can improve policymaking, reconnect with the public, and reclaim their legitimacy as checks on the executive – a role that, he says, has in part been lost to the media. And these changes will, in turn, help rebuild trust in the government: “Higher quality government could result, and the legitimacy that all governments need could be enhanced by higher-quality scrutiny,” he tells CSW.

The nature of change
Sceptics fear that strengthening the select committees might lead to a more confrontational approach, but Tyrie argues it’s unlikely that such reforms would heighten conflict with the executive; the anticipation of greater scrutiny would, however, encourage ministers and officials to devise better policies in the first place. “The knowledge that parliamentary scrutiny awaits can and should influence policy formation in Whitehall,” he said in his speech. “For each public governmental re-think, there may have already been five behind the scenes, triggered or influenced by the instruments of parliamentary scrutiny even before they are deployed.”

This dynamic, Tyrie tells CSW, provides an important argument for one of the reforms he advocates: giving select committees the power to veto the appointment or sacking of a set of key public figures in the “quango state, for which responsibility has been passed out of this formal constitutional hierarchy, where ministers are directly accountable, to a somewhat grey constitutional world where, sometimes, nobody is”. The Treasury committee has already won this right as regards the chief executive of the Office of Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) and his two deputies, and Tyrie says that 25 further appointments should be subject to the same rules. Giving committees this power, he believes, would not lead to “a lot of dramatic interventions, rejections of senior appointments, vetoing of dismissals. I think it would, though, alter the choices made by ministers over who to appoint.”

Would better appointments result? “Probably,” he replies. “And I hope it would also alter to some degree the behaviour of the people in these appointments, who know they will have to explain their actions a little more carefully”. What’s more, Tyrie argues, it would offer these appointees greater independence and protection – not least from select committees themselves. “Once one is involved in a decision, it’s not enough just then to say: ‘I don’t like a particular outcome’,” he says; after this reform, select committees would have to accept some responsibility if things went wrong, rather than carping from the sidelines.

Meanwhile, giving committees the power to prevent ministers from sacking quango chiefs would offer “those appointees greater independence and protection from political interference”. In the case of the OBR boss, Tyrie adds, this veto is “perhaps more important than the appointment power, because what you want [in this role] is somebody who has a high measure of visible independence. The fact that they’re not directly beholden [to the chancellor] for hanging onto their job is certainly quite a bit of protection – and I think essential protection”.

On member election and witness selection
Another reform championed by Tyrie is the election, by secret Commons ballot, of all select committee members; while chairs are now elected by all MPs, members are elected only by their own party colleagues. Polling the whole House to elect chairmen has, he says, increased chairs’ accountability, improved their authority in the eyes of fellow committee members, and “taken a little piece of partisan patronage off the table – which I think is healthy”. Fears that elected chairs would be more confrontational have, he says, so far proved groundless: “Perhaps select committees are more rigorous than they were, but I don’t think they’re more negative or destructive.”

This is an important point for senior civil servants, who may be called before committees – and will, if Tyrie has his way, have less ‘wriggle room’ when summonsed. As CSW has reported (p3, 9 March), Tyrie wants to change the ‘Osmotherly rules’: a set of government guidelines, built around the principle of ministerial responsibility, which allow ministers to turn down select committees’ requests to interview particular officials.

“The theory is that somehow, in this hugely complicated 21st century governmental system, ministers are still responsible for myriad decisions. The reality is that a large portion of them are in practice taken by civil servants, and the accountability for the way those decisions were taken has to lie partly with those civil servants,” he says. The Osmotherly rules are “part of the fabric of a previous age of accountability”, he adds, “so it’s time to look at them again. It’s reasonable for Parliament to want to talk to the person who really took a given decision.”

To civil servants concerned that they’ll be dragged into the firing line, Tyrie presents the change as a way to protect them from ministers who might otherwise use the select committee platform to pin the blame for mistakes on their officials. We should not “find ourselves in a situation where ministers are able to exculpate themelves for things they could have intervened or handled by saying: ‘Oh well, it was all the fault of someone else’,” he says.

A promise: no torturing of officials
If civil servants do end up in front of the Treasury select committee, says Tyrie, they’ll have a sympathetic audience. “Civil servants make their share of mistakes like the rest of us,” he says. “But the vast majority of civil servants, most of the time, are trying to do a good job. When good policy intentions go horrendously wrong, it’s important not to reach for the megaphone to criticise the civil service as your first action.”

Many officials, he continues, “tend to assume that going before a committee is necessarily some form of institutionalised torture”. But “the select committee’s task with civil servants is certainly not to parade them or fire cheap shots at them; on the contrary, the task is to ensure that they’re provided with an opportunity to explain their part in the way that decisions were made.”

The Treasury committee is only interested in finding out what happened, Tyrie says: witnesses should give clear, straightforward answers. “If it’s a reasonable question, [they should] try to give as direct an answer as they can,” he comments. “That’s how any witness earns the respect of select committees.” His members will see straight through evasiveness, he suggests: the committee “now has a considerable range of parliamentary and economic experience”, and “questions are substantive, reflecting research on the issues as well as wider public concerns.”

Going on the front foot
As Tyrie’s advocacy of reform suggests, his style is more proactive than reactive. And he intends to extend this approach to the Treasury committee: it will not only respond to the government’s work, he says, but also instigate its own pieces of research into potential policies or reforms. Challenged on the committee’s record, he acknowledges that it – along with all the other watchdogs – failed to bark a warning in advance of the credit crunch: “That’s why the Treasury select committee has launched an inquiry into the accountability of the Bank of England in the form it will have after 2012. The bank will become the most powerful quango in the land, and will have primary responsibility for the identification of systemic risk. Who is going to scrutinise the bank? How will that scrutiny be conducted? These are big questions.”

It will be awkward for the select committee to report on the reformed bank’s regulatory activities, Tyrie says, because in some cases simply examining its interactions with a financial institution might cause the very loss of confidence and market value that the Bank’s intervention had been designed to avoid. This will be a topic for debate, he says – as will the performance and management of HMRC, which “has had a rough time”. A longtime sceptic on the fusing of the customs and revenue functions, Tyrie believes that the merger, and frequent changes in tax policy, have hit morale. “Some better management and some better policy, and some continuity of policy, might be able to improve the sense that [staff] are connected to those taking the decisions,” he says. The agency can certainly recover, he believes: “They have been, and they can be again, the salt of the earth: uncorrupt and dedicated in a way that other countries would envy.”

Catching up and getting ahead
It is time, Tyrie believes, for Britain’s select committees to catch up with an altered political system – one in which the executive and the media have been changing faster than our methods of parliamentary scrutiny. “We’re one of the last parliaments to build powerful committees. Most others went down this road decades ago – some of them 100 years or more ago,” he says.

Tyrie clearly wants to seize this moment of parliamentary reform to secure a significant strengthening of the powers and roles of our select committees. He’s not the type to call for radical action, but he does believe that our system of parliamentary scrutiny should evolve to catch up with the real world.

The thing about evolution, of course, is that while you can’t rush it, neither can you stop it: as the environment changes, politicians must adapt to survive. And Andrew Tyrie is a patient guy. “I hope the government accepts these reforms, although I don’t think they will initially,” he concludes. “Britain evolves over time. You put an idea into play, and wait for it to gestate for a while.”

Tyrie's nine select committee reforms
1.    Committees should be given a greater role in scrutinising appointments to major quangos and other public bodies;
2.    During periods when Parliament is sitting, a dozen senior committee chairmen should hold monthly meetings with the prime minister;
3.    The liaison committee, comprising the select committee chairmen, should play a bigger and more proactive role;
4.    Commons votes and committee hearings should be timetabled to avoid clashes;
5.    Committees should win additional resources and recruit more expert advisers, while the system of House staffing should be reviewed;
6.    Committees should have the right to summon named civil servants;
7.    The freedom for committee members to hold outside interests should be protected;
8.    Committees should take the initiative as well as responding to government action;
9.    All committee members should be chosen by secret ballot of the Commons.