For the first time since the 1980s, the Conservative party will Chair the Transport Committee, but does it have what it takes?
The process for setting up the new parliamentary select committees following the general election has begun.
We don’t yet know who the individual Chairs and committee members will be for a few more weeks yet. But it has been agreed which political party will chair which committee, and the Conservative Party has been allocated the Chairmanship of the Transport Committee.
I’m digging into the depths of my memory, but I think the last Conservatives Chair of the Transport Select Committee was the late Robert Adley who chaired it for a few years from the late 1980s until he died in May 1993.
However, he was by no means a soft touch for the Conservative government, being a fierce critic of both rail privatisation, which he described as “a poll tax on wheels”, and of bus deregulation.
Since his premature death in 1993 the Transport Select Committee has been chaired by Labour MPs, first the late and highly competent Gwyneth Dunwoody, followed by Louise Ellman and most recently Lilian Greenwood.
A soft touch?
Both Robert Adley and Gwyneth Dunwoody were formidable Committee Chairs, but since then the standard has dropped somewhat, if truth be told, with Louise Ellman and Lilian Greenwood being relatively soft touches.
I’m not suggesting that Chairs should be unduly aggressive or unpleasant to witnesses, but I do think they need a bit of “grit” but that just wasn’t Louise Ellman’s or Lilian Greenwood’s style or temperament.
I wonder who the Conservative Chair of the Transport Committee will now be. A good choice would be Stephen Hammond, the Conservative MP for Wimbledon.
He was an opposition transport spokesman from 2005 until 2010 and for a short while was also a transport minister from September 2012 until July 2014 (and, as an aside, was Minister of State for Health from November 2018 until Boris Johnson became Prime Minister and had to put him back onto the backbenches because of his opposition to Brexit).
After Brexit
Stephen Hammond has a deep knowledge and understanding of the transport industry.
However, I suspect he may well have ambitions to be the Chair of one of the rather more senior select committees, such as the Treasury Committee or the Public Accounts Committee, and he may also have ambitions to hold ministerial office once again.
He did lose the party whip for a short while because of his position on Brexit, but now that this issue is done and dusted, giving ministerial jobs to a handful of Remain backbenchers in the forthcoming reshuffle would be a wise move to restore unity to the party and show real reconciliation.
Aside from Stephen Hammond I must confess that I can’t immediately think of a Conservative backbencher who stands out as a really strong candidate for the chairmanship of the committee.
But whoever it is I just hope that he or she and indeed the wider committee membership are rather “grittier” than their predecessors. I want to see a transport committee with some real bite!
