Lorely's life - Select Committees

Written by Lorely Burt Member of Parliament for Solihull and published in Solihull Observer on Thu 10th Nov 2005

Have you ever wondered why, when you sometimes see pictures of the Chamber in Parliament, there seem to be very few MPs sitting there? Where are they all? Are you getting your money's worth from your MP?

An MP's job involves many more things than sitting on the green benches, occasionally being able to contribute to the debate after possibly hours of bobbing up and down to 'catch the speaker's eye'.

One worthwhile but un-glamorous job is to be a member of a Select Committee. The committee is composed of members from all parties and has tremendous power to require almost anyone to come before it and explain how they have been managing our affairs.

I sit on the Treasury Select Committee, and amongst other things we've recently been trying to ascertain who is responsible for the complete fiasco of child and family tax credits.

Introduced in 2003, the Inland Revenue managed to overpay a third of all families in their first year of operation alone, then demand the money back at the year end. How can they imagine that most hard working families will have a stash of cash they can just pay back if the revenue has made a mistake?

Hardly a week goes by in my surgeries when some distraught family does not turn up asking for help to comprehend what has gone wrong and to get an answer from the interminable telephone queue waiting to even speak to someone about their case. One woman in Shropshire who had had her payments stopped was reduced to selling her possessions at a car boot sale to feed her family.

Dawn Primorolo the Labour Paymaster General and David Varney, Executive Chairman of Revenue and Customs (newly merged government departments of Inland Revenue and HM Customs), have been grilled in turn and left squirming in their seats over this whole fiasco.

They have promised urgent reforms: well the Treasury Select Committee will be there breathing down their necks to ensure they do.