Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 3:46 pm on 11 November 1997.
My hon. Friend will know that the Select Committee has made that recommendation. When I appeared before it last week, I made it clear that the Government have an open mind on the matter, but I also made it clear that I thought that the Committee could discharge its obligations and responsibilities to hold the MPC to account whether or not it had those powers. I do not regard the Committee's having those powers as an essential precondition to its holding the MPC to account.
For the sake of completeness, I said also that, were the House to decide to go down that road, I would find it difficult to see how it could confine confirmatory hearings to simply the MPC. After all, Ministers appoint many people who have influence not only in economic fields, such as the regulators, but in other, sometimes controversial, areas—the head of the Prison Service, for one. We have an open mind on the matter, and the House will need to consider it in due course.