Non-Committal
“T'HEIR purpose,' says Sir Alan Herbert of Crown commissions and committees, in his pamphlet Anything But Action? (Institute of Economic Affairs, 3s. 6d.), 'is to advise and inform the government and parliament where there is need, or may be a need: (a) to make a new law; (b) to amend the law; or (c) to improve the administration. But that is exactly the work which ministers, civil servants and MPs arc paid to do.'
It seems hardly necessary to add anything at all to that summing-up by Sir Alan of his rigorous, yet fair, examination of Ilhe creeping committee-fungus that has been spileading over British political and administrative life for years. That there is a case for some committees and commissions is undeniable: the quasi-judicial variety, set up under the Tribunals of Inquiry Act of 1921 (though its procedure, as the Specta- tor has pointed out on more than one occasion, leaves much to be desired) is obviously doing a job it would be difficult, if not impossible, to do in any other way. But this kind forms only a small minority. The blunt truth is that, almost without exception, Royal Commissions and Select Committees are today used by the gov- ernment when it wants either to delay taking a decision, or to shift the responsibility for that decision. The archetype of this kind of shuffling- off is Mr. Butler's action in referring the question of corporal punishment to his Home Office com- mittee: the decision is properly one for Mr. Butler, but it appeared to be a little too hot for him to handle, so he passed it to somebody else. That, on a larger scale, is what governments have been doing for decades. And they ought to stop.
The usual defence of the commission or com- mittee is that it finds out facts on which the.. government can make up its mind as to the action it ought to take. The defence is dishonest in at least three different ways. In the first place, as Sir Alan points out, finding out facts is one of the things for which we pay Ministers. MPs, and civil servants. In the second place, however many facts most of these bodies discover (and it Is not often many: all they usually collect is opinions), the decision has to be made on ques- tions of principle or expediency quite unaffected by the committee's facts. And in the third place, the melancholy record of treatment meted out to the reports of these patient bodies gives the lie to the defence argument: most of them are quietly put on one side and forgotten. (And when they cannot be put aside, like the Devlin Report, they are flatly contradicted by the government which set them up on the clear implicit under-
standing that it would be guided by their con- clusions.) What is to be done about the fungus-growth is another matter. What would solve the problem is a breed of government that was both honest and courageous: this would solve a lot of other problems, too. Until then (and it may be quite a while coming) the most we can hope for is a habit of stronger criticism of these bodies, starting with their appointment and ending with their reports and the government's treatment of them. If the committee system is to be a sacred cow we might as well see that it gives milk.
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