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Watching the watchdogs

• Robert Peston
• 14 May 07, 07:30 AM

The transfer of royal prerogative powers from 10 Downing Street to Parliament, as , sounds like a thoroughly democratic and progressive idea. But what does it mean in practice?

Well part of what the prime-minister-in-waiting proposes is giving MPs more power over public appointments. Which again seems appealing.

Enormous power, to make or break businesses and touching all our lives, is held by those who run the assorted utility, transport and postal regulators, the competition authorities, the media watchdog, the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Trust, and so on and so on. They are the potentates of the New Labour era. Naturally we would want our elected representatives to hold them to account on our behalf.

But hang on a tick. Doesn’t that happen already? Aren’t all these regulators and public bodies constantly being grilled by committees of MPs and scrutinised in minute detail by the value-for-money auditors?

They already get a healthy regular kicking from Parliament and spend much of their time fretting about the next beating. Perhaps one or two of them are a bit aloof and arrogant. But actually there’s evidence that Commons select committees have a significant influence on their agendas, rather more influence than Whitehall in some cases.

Before welcoming Brown’s putative return of power to the people, it’s as well to think for a moment about the system it would replace. For all the criticism of Tony Blair augmenting the powers of his office, he has in fact gone some way to reduce his own and his ministers’ personal ability to place their mates in public sector jobs.

Most top appointments are made after public advertisements and scrutiny by independent panels. Appointments to the of the Bank of England are the murky exception to this rule – which is amusing, given that they are in the Chancellor’s own bailiwick.

The prime minister or a departmental minister may retain the power to make the final choice, but only after candidates’ abilities and impartiality have been evaluated in a fairly methodical and detailed way.

That said, a disproportionate number of jobs still seem to go to Labour’s supporters and friends.

There, it seems to me, is the rub. Perhaps I’m too fastidious, but on the whole I’d rather politics played a minimal role in the appointment of board members and executives at most of these public bodies. What I want in a regulator or watchdog is intellectual rigour and fearlessness, not a sense that he or she is beholden to a political party or any interest group.

The risk of giving more power to parliament over public appointments is that party politics will play an enhanced role in choosing the successful candidates, more so than it does now.

Are Labour MPs really less likely to appoint a Labour friend to a top job than a prime minister surrounded by independent civil servants whose purpose is to keep him on the straight and narrow? Are they more likely to appoint someone they perceive as a political opponent?

Were there a hung parliament, as well there might be in a couple of years, the kind of horse-trading between the various parties when making these appointments could be unseemly.

And if parliamentary committees held televised, adversarial ratification sessions for appointees to public bodies, along the lines of US Congressional practice, would it be easier or harder to recruit top class technocrats, like John Fingleton at the Office of Fair Trading or Callum McCarthy at the Financial Services Authority? My guess is that a number of talented possible candidates for such jobs would de-select themselves.

So in advance of saying hooray for Gordon Brown’s proposal to advance parliamentary democracy, I want to read the small print.

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