Lines of Questioning in the UK House of Commons: How Have Prime Ministers Been Held to Account in Committee Hearings?

Accountability is a cornerstone of democratic politics, not least in parliamentary systems where is a crucial dimension of the relationship between governments and parliaments. Parliaments have institutionalised a range of mechanisms to hold executive actors to account, notably through oral questions in the plenary but also in committee settings. This applies also to heads of government, which are usually the single most powerful and important political actor through their powers to make key political appointments and policy decisions at home and abroad, to set the agenda within and beyond government, and to provide wider national leadership. Recent research suggests that most parliamentary democracies have at least one formalised way through which a parliament holds the head of government to account, often through oral questions in the main chamber or plenary (Serban 2022). In the UK House of Commons, Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) is arguably one of the most well-known and regular examples of direct accountability of a head of government to parliament, which has also been subject to range of studies to analyse the nature of adversarial discourse (Bull and Wells 2012; Bull and Waddle 2020), gendered nature of debate (Lovenduski 2014) and extent of accountability (Bates et al. 2014). Far less well-known, and even less studied, are 90-minute committee hearings that occur three times a year, in which the prime minister is subject to questioning by a committee of MPs. This committee – known as the Liaison Committee – is made up of chairs of other committees, who have become increasingly influential actors in parliamentary work (Crewe and Sarra 2019; Kelso 2016). These hearings were introduced in 2002 to complement the more adversarial style of PMQs and introduce more systematic and detailed scrutiny of the prime minister (Kelso et al. 2016). In this paper, we analyse Liaison Committee hearings with the prime minister according to three dimensions. First, the nature of the questions asked of the prime minister, including the types of questions asked, the aims of the questions, and the topics that are covered. Second, the nature of the replies from the prime minister, including the extent to which they avoid answering questions. And third, the nature and type of interruptions in questions and replies. In combination, this allows us to make a fruitful contribution to further research on parliamentary accountability. Empirically, it offers the first detailed analysis of how the UK prime minister is held to account in the House of Commons. It complements and offers direct comparisons to existing research on PMQs. And methodologically, the coding framework provides a template for further research on committee hearings that can be adapted and used by others to analyse discursive practices and strategies used by parliamentary actors.