Battle lines drawn on the committee corridor

Behind the scenes, in select committee land, they're digging the trenches for a long war of attrition.

The newly empowered chairs of the Commons committees want more powers and more resources - and a sub group of the Liaison Committee, the super committee of all the chairs, is beavering away to reshape the rules under which they all operate, with the Treasury Committee chair, Andrew Tyrie, leading.

This matters because the hidden wiring of the parliamentary system is being asked to bear more voltage. Select committees - and particularly those pesky chairs - have been acquiring new significance and new roles. In health, Stephen Dorrell has been busily re-writing the Health and Social Care Bill. In Culture, Media and Sport, John Whittingdale and his committee have been peering into the murky depths of the phone-hacking scandal. In the Treasury Committee, Andrew Tyrie's committee has maintained a running commentary on the financial crisis and made helpful suggestions on tax simplification to the government. There are plenty more examples. Committees have acquired powers over the hiring, and sometimes firing of key quangocrats, and are learning to use the availability of debating time via the Backbench business Committee to push their agendas more effectively in the Commons.

But some chairs have come to feel that they need bigger budgets and more powers over their own operations. They look pretty certain to be disappointed on one of those fronts; funding for travel by select committees was cut by a third early in the Parliament, before the committees were re-established, and the Lib Dem MP John Thurso, who chairs the Commons' finance committee, has bluntly told his colleagues there is no money available. But, in any case, the more interesting battle is over the powers and perquisites of the committee chairs. A number of them have already augmented the research back-up available to them with bright young things seconded from places like the National Audit Office. Expect to see more of that, and perhaps some controversy, if the secondees come from some more contentious body, or if they seem to be purely the creature of the committee chair.

Then there's the question of the choice of clerk for a particular committee. The time-honoured way in which these things work is that the clerks to particular select committees are appointed by an internal process - rather as the Permanent Secretaries, to top civil servants at Government departments are allocated, without much involvement of politicians. Some select committee chairs want more say, complaining that, with the new importance of their committees, bright generalists, however bright they are, may not cut the mustard in dealing with intricate issues in highly specialised areas.

There's quite a fierce internal battle around this. The clerks see themselves as the guarantors of a committee system directed by all the MPs involved, not just by the chairs; the chairs - or some influential ones, at any rate - think the system needs to be more responsive and less hidebound, as well as having more specialist expertise. This battle mirrors the '90s arguments over the appointment of special advisers to ministers - which was justified as providing extra political bite in the running of Government.

Would the changes make the system more agile, respected and effective - or would they undermine the non-partisan, all-party ethic that is supposed to pervade the work of committees? Or could any change be bogged down in the Commons' labyrinthine committee system, until an election begins to loom, and the politicians are diverted by other concerns?