ABSTRACT
What are committees for? In 1978, the Select Committee on Procedure described them as not an end in themselves, but ‘a means to secure greater surveillance of the executive by Parliament’.1 The purpose has not changed. The committee also noted, in words which many will find applicable today:
The House has continued to respond to new pressures by adapting the committee system by considering the functions which each new committee or type of committee has to fulfil, rather than by trying to contain new committees within some pre-ordained, logically structured system. Although the committee system in the present House of Commons is perhaps not as unstructured as the Procedure Committee implied, this evolutionary development makes it hard to draw up any scheme; exceptions and anomalies will always abound.
