Parliament and administration : the estimates committee 1945-65

This study of the work of the Estimates Committee of the House of Commons in the twenty years since the war is a description and analysis of some of the ways in which Parliament probes into the work of government a question of increasing urgency. After a brief account of the history of the Committee before 1945, Mr Johnson comments on its pro cedures, powers and ways of operating. He con tinues with a classified survey of the Committee's reports and evidence in the period. His main purpose is to show here how widely the Committee's scrutiny ranged and to make its output more acces sible to students of British government. ere is then a section in which three reports are treated as case studies, showing how the Committee tackles its enquiries and the kind of problem it is capable of identifying. After an assessment of the impact it makes on the Departments and the House of Com mons, the author discusses some of the shortcom ings of the Committee and proposals for improving it. He adds some brief reflections on the signi ficance of the Committee's work in the British parliamentary context.

Mr Johnson has considerable experience of British administration from the inside, and has been a close student both of the Whitehall machine and of many aspects of Parliament for a number of years. He was prompted to write this work because the published results of the parliamentary scrutiny of administration are neglected by so many students and its value underestimated. He suggests that the secrecy of British administration and the weakness and ineffectiveness of Parliament have often been exaggerated for this reason. This study is a contribu tion towards redressing the balance.