Pre-appointment Scrutiny Hearings 

In 2007, Gordon Brown announced that the most important senior public appointments would be opened to scrutiny by departmental select committees. The Constitution Unit was then commissioned by the Cabinet Office and House of Commons Liaison Committee to evaluate this innovation. Peter Waller and Mark Chalmers conducted over 60 interviews of the candidates, select committee chairs and clerks, senior civil servants and head-hunters and carried out an analysis of media coverage. The report An Evaluation of Pre-Appointment Scrutiny Hearings, evaluating the impact of the first 20 pre-appointment scrutiny hearings, was published in February 2010 and extensively cited in a House of Commons Liaison Committee report. This was later followed by an article by Professor Robert Hazell, Mark Chalmers and Dr Meg Russell in the Journal of Legislative Studies, ’Pre-Appointment Scrutiny Hearings: All Bark, or some Bite?’.

In 2016, we decided to revisit this topic. 80 pre-appointment hearings had been conducted, with five negative reports, so there was a lot more data. Professor Robert Hazell led the project, working again with Peter Waller, and supported by research volunteers Qalid Mohamed, Turan Hursit and Harmish Mehta. They compiled a detailed analysis of the transcripts of 71 pre-appointment hearings and their results and conducted a further 25 interviews with select committee chairs and clerks, candidates and head-hunters. The report Improving Parliamentary Scrutiny of Public Appointments was published in July 2017. Professor Hazell followed this with an article in Parliamentary Affairs, Improving Parliamentary Scrutiny of Public Appointments.

Project information

This project was led by Professor Robert Hazell. Its first iteration was jointly funded by the Cabinet Office and House of Commons Liaison Committee.

Image attribution: Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.