House points

Loose ends are gradually being knitted together on the Commons committee corridor.

The latest select committee to twitch to life is the Joint Human Rights Committee, which looks likely to be chaired by Labour's former deputy leader, Harriet Harman, who is after all a former law officer as well as a luminary of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty).

The lordly members of the committee will be nominated from the other end of Westminster, and they should swing into action in good time for the consultation on the proposed British bill of rights. That document, I'm told, will emerge by the end of the autumn, although it is not clear whether that is according to the astronomical or meteorological definition of the seasons.

Privileges Committee

There is now some urgency about another loose end, the Commons Privileges Committee. With the recent finding by the Parliamentary standards commissioner that Justin Tomlinson, now the minister for disabled people, broke parliamentary rules by leaking a committee report to the payday lender, Wonga.

There is a Standards Committee in operation, but this is a matter of parliamentary privilege, so it's one for the Privileges Committee, which has not yet been constituted. They are the ones who will have to recommend a suitable punishment and put it to MPs in a Commons motion and the leader of the house has just announced it will be set up in the next few days, probably with its membership duplicating its sister committee, the Standards Committee, minus the non-MP lay members.

Any Conservatives exercised about the handling of allegations against the late Leon Brittan by Labour's deputy leader, Tom Watson, will then have someone to complain to.

House business committee

Cunning procedural manoeuvres continue in the guerrilla Commons campaign to set up a house business committee. Last week in a little noticed, but virtuoso procedural move, Labour MP Graham Allen attempted to force a vote in a Westminster Hall debate on the issue. The house business committee was a key recommendation in Tony Wright's proposals to reform the working of the Commons.

The idea was to take control of the Commons agenda out of the hands of the "usual channels", the behind the scenes carve up by the main party business managers and create a committee with more backbench representation. The idea was accepted on all sides at the time of the Wright Report (2009) and then quietly dropped.

But Graham Allen and others are not letting go. Because votes are not held in Westminster Hall, Mr Allen's action kicked the issue onto the agenda for the full Commons Chamber; but without the time allocated for a vote to be held. So now, rather elegantly, he and his allies (P Bone) have used another Wright creation, the Backbench Business Committee, to allocate time for that vote, next week. The slight snag is that it is not at all clear what the vote will actually signify, given that the motion is rather anodyne: "that this House has considered the creation of a House Business Committee."

The issue might be rather overshadowed by the other backbench debate on tax credits, but it will be an interesting to see how many MPs vote, all the same.

Labour committee members

Some Labour heavy-hitters are going to be taking their seats on assorted Select Committees after the slate of non-Corbynista refuseniks swept the board in internal Parliamentary Labour party elections. So Chuka Umunna is heading for Home Affairs, Rachel Reeves to the Treasury and Mary Creagh (unopposed) for Environmental Audit. And in the elections to the Parliamentary Committee (a key internal Labour forum) Tom Blenkinsop and Angela Smith cruised home with a very comfortable majority. The results amount to an effective flexing of muscles by the PLP majority, whether it has any effect, whatsoever, is another matter.