It is an obvious next question. Westminster chose to open that can all in one go and in some ways, it is difficult to disaggregate the impact of electing chairs from the impact of electing the whole committee, which is what happened at the start of this Parliament at Westminster.
Approximately a fifth to a quarter of the current chairs at Westminster would not have been committee chairs under the old system. That fact became particularly visible in the two by-elections that we have had since the start of this Parliament, which were for the Health Committee and Defence Committee. Both of the candidates who ended up being elected as chairs of those committees are candidates who would never have been chairs under the old system, because they were first-term members and were regarded in some respects as mavericks in their parties. They were not the obvious candidates, and it was not the result that the whips expected.
Of course, we are talking about a sample of two, so it is not in any sense scientific. Interestingly, however, both—again, this is supposition—might have been elected by their peers, partly because they brought with them previous experience of the subject matter of the committee that they were going on to and had clear ideas about the policy questions that they wanted to look at when they spoke about their manifestos.
Looking at them and more broadly at the chairs who were elected at the start of the Parliament, I think that you can say that some different people have been elected chairs and that that has had an impact on scrutiny. Some of those who have been elected chairs—I am thinking in particular of Andrew Tyrie, who was unexpectedly elected chair of the Treasury Committee at the start of this Parliament—have pushed the boundaries of the powers and practices of committees a little further than has been the case in the past.
Based on what those chairs have told me, I think that they thought that the legitimacy that they felt of having been elected by their peers gave them a mandate to try different things. In Andrew Tyrie’s case, there was the parliamentary commission on banking standards, in which he deliberately tried to be innovative and take some new approaches to scrutiny. The election of chairs has definitely had that kind of impact on scrutiny.