SINGAPORE - Setting up parliamentary committees to oversee each ministry will do little to enhance accountability or increase efficiency, and can even eat into the time ministries have for other work, said Leader of the House Indranee Rajah, responding to a proposal by Workers’ Party MPs.

In fact, Singapore’s parliamentary system – where policies and issues are brought to the House through motions or during the Budget debate, and where ad hoc committees are set up to look at specific issues – already allows for good governance, she added.

“What we have is a system that works,” she said, during the debate on Parliament’s spending plans.

“I do not think that having select committees, essentially overseeing or having ministries reporting to them, will improve things.”

Mr Gerald Giam (Aljunied GRC) and Ms He Ting Ru (Sengkang GRC) had proposed setting up more standing select committees, which are appointed for the lifetime of a Parliament. 

There are currently seven such committees – the Committee of Privileges, Committee of Selection, Estimates Committee, House Committee, Public Accounts Committee, Public Petitions Committee and Standing Orders Committee.

None of the seven is specific to individual ministries, said Mr Giam, pointing out that this is unlike the practice in other legislatures around the world.

Britain’s House of Commons has select committees for every government department, and Australia’s Parliament has standing committees on health, aged care and employment, among others.

Citing these examples, he said such committees examine each ministry’s policies, spending and administration, and are empowered to look into any matter referred to them by the House or a minister.

They can also call in subject-matter experts to give testimony, and receive special briefings from the government, said Mr Giam.

He called for a similar set-up in Singapore, with committees consisting of MPs from both sides of the aisle set up to oversee each ministry or group of related ministries.

“This process will lead to more informed and constructive debate and better decision-making in Parliament,” he said.

Ms Indranee said Parliament’s current processes already provide a lot of room for the Government and ministers to be held to account.

“A select committee is really a mini version of Parliament as a whole. But here you have everybody that is able to ask questions, participate, debate. So the public does not lose out by this,” she said.

She added that having more of such committees may not be very productive, as they require significant time and effort to set up, and ministries will also have to expend scarce resources reporting to their respective committees.

Instead, what Singapore has done is to convene ad hoc select committees for smaller groups of MPs to study and report to Parliament on specific topics and novel issues of national interest, she said.

An example is the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods, set up in 2018 to look at how Singapore can combat misinformation and disinformation.

Citing the committee, Ms Indranee said it had taken 16 meetings over eight months, as well as public consultations with multiple stakeholders and public hearings just to examine the one policy issue alone.

“So you can imagine having many more standing select committees, each one to inspect one ministry that oversees many policy issues, would be very costly in terms of opportunity cost, as well as just the time taken up under civil servants and the ministers and the ministries to do this,” she said.

To this, Mr Giam said that time and resources were also used up when ministries briefed Government Parliamentary Committees (GPCs), which are not Parliament organs, but People’s Action Party (PAP) organs.

Ms Indranee said he had got it “back to front” as the purpose of the GPCs – set up by the PAP to scrutinise the legislation and programmes of the various ministries – is to allow MPs to give feedback to ministries and ministers.

Ministries do not have to brief GPCs or report to them but can choose to do so when they want to seek the input of GPCs, she said.

On other countries with standing select committees for each ministry, Ms Indranee questioned if they necessarily had better outcomes.

“Are they necessarily better governed? Do they necessarily have better outcomes? Are their Parliaments more efficient? Is their government more trusted? I would venture to say no, not necessarily to all of those questions,” she said.

“In fact, on many international rankings by any measure, you will find that Singapore fares well, in governance, transparency, in lack of corruption or in low corruption, and where it is discovered, it is dealt with promptly, quickly and decisively.”

Speaker of Parliament Seah Kian Peng, in his customary closing speech, said more was not necessarily better, whether it was of committees or parliamentary questions.

He quipped: “Indeed, from my perspective, crisper and sharper speeches are much preferred and the order for the day.

“When speeches go on for too long, some of us may start to wonder whether they were written by ChatGPT.”

He added that he was glad there was no need for him to cut anyone off during the debate, though there were quite a few who breached their time allocations and those who attempted to slip in a speech during clarification time.

In the spirit of give and take, he had cut them some slack, he said, adding that he would be more strict in future.