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Gwyneth Dunwoody
Born
Dunwoody chaired the Commons Transport Committee and its predecessors for most of the period from 1997 until her death in 2008, and was so independent that Labour whips tried to remove her in 2001; the Commons voted to reinstate her, a revolt that helped bring in more independent selection of chairs. Her committees were scathing about rail privatisation and Railtrack's safety record after the Hatfield crash. She is the patron saint of awkward chairs.
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Chris Mullin (politician)
Born
Before chairing anything, Mullin's journalism and campaigning helped free the Birmingham Six. As chair of the Home Affairs Committee from 1997 to 1999 and again in 2001 to 2003 he led inquiries into freemasonry in the police and judiciary, leading to a register of membership for new judges, and into drugs policy, whose 2002 report recommended reclassifying cannabis and more treatment. His diaries are among the best accounts of what a backbencher's scrutiny work involves.
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Edward Leigh
Born
Leigh chaired the Public Accounts Committee from 2001 to 2010, the convention being that an opposition MP holds the post, and his committee produced hundreds of reports on value for money based on National Audit Office work. Its inquiries into the NHS IT programme, the Ministry of Defence's equipment overruns and the Rural Payments Agency's failures to pay farmers set the pattern for later PAC chairs. He was quieter on camera than his successor, but the volume and consistency of reports mattered.
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Tony Wright (Cannock Chase MP)
Born
Wright chaired the Public Administration Committee for a decade and then, after the 2009 expenses scandal, the Committee on Reform of the House of Commons. Its report led to the 'Wright reforms' of 2010: select committee chairs elected by the whole House by secret ballot, members elected by their parties, and a Backbench Business Committee controlling time for debates. Those changes are the reason later chairs on this list could be so independent of the whips.
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Andrew Tyrie
Born
Tyrie chaired the Treasury Committee from 2010 to 2017 and, after the LIBOR scandal, the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, a joint committee with unusual powers including the use of counsel to question witnesses. Its 2013 report led to the senior managers regime, making named bankers personally accountable, and a new criminal offence of reckless misconduct in managing a bank. He also pushed the Treasury Committee to hold pre-appointment hearings for Bank of England officials.
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Margaret Hodge
Born
Hodge made the Public Accounts Committee famous from 2010 to 2015 with hearings into the tax affairs of Google, Amazon and Starbucks, telling Google's executive that the firm was 'devious, calculating and, in my view, unethical'. Behind the soundbites, the committee's sustained work on HMRC's 'sweetheart deals' with large firms fed directly into the diverted profits tax of 2015 and the push for public country-by-country reporting. Her criticism of HMRC's leadership was itself contested by officials.
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John Whittingdale
Born
As chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Whittingdale led the phone-hacking inquiry that questioned Rupert and James Murdoch in July 2011, the session in which a protester attacked Rupert Murdoch with a foam pie. The committee's 2012 report found News International's senior executives had misled Parliament, a rare formal finding. The Leveson Inquiry did much of the deeper work, but the committee's evidence sessions kept the issue alive when it could have faded.
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Frank Field, Baron Field of Birkenhead
Born
Field chaired the Work and Pensions Committee from 2015 to 2019, and its joint inquiry with the business committee into the collapse of BHS produced a 2016 report calling Sir Philip Green 'the unacceptable face of capitalism'. Green later paid £363 million into the pension scheme. The committee's work on Carillion and on Universal Credit's five-week wait for a first payment pushed changes to advance payments. Field brought decades of poverty campaigning to the role.
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Sarah Wollaston
Born
A former GP, Wollaston chaired the Health Committee from 2014 and then the Liaison Committee of all select committee chairs. The Health Committee's reports on social care funding, childhood obesity, the sugar tax and the effects of austerity on the NHS were notably cross-party and evidence-led, and she helped build the case for the soft drinks levy introduced in 2018. She left the Conservatives in 2019, which ended her time as chair when she lost her seat as a Liberal Democrat.
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Yvette Cooper
Born
Between front-bench careers, Cooper chaired the Home Affairs Committee from 2016 to 2021. Its 2018 inquiry exposed the Windrush scandal, in which long-settled Commonwealth citizens had been wrongly detained and deported, and contributed to Amber Rudd's resignation as Home Secretary over evidence on removal targets. The committee also pressed social media companies over hate content. She later returned to the cabinet, so the committee years are easy to overlook.
More about Yvette Cooper11
Damian Collins
Born
Collins chaired the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee during its 2017 to 2019 inquiry into disinformation and 'fake news', which used rarely invoked powers to seize internal Facebook documents and published its findings on Cambridge Analytica. Its final report called for a statutory duty of care on platforms enforced by a regulator, an idea that fed into the Online Safety Act of 2023, whose draft bill Collins later chaired a joint committee on. Mark Zuckerberg's refusal to appear became part of the story.
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Bernard Jenkin
Born
Jenkin chaired the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee for most of the 2010s and later the Liaison Committee. Its 2016 report on the collapse of the charity Kids Company examined how ministers had overruled civil servants to keep funding it, and its 2015 call for a standing independent body to investigate NHS patient safety incidents fed into the creation of the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch. He is a reminder that unglamorous machinery-of-government work counts.
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Hilary Benn
Born
Benn was elected the first chair of the Committee on Exiting the European Union in 2016, a large committee that included both prominent Leavers and Remainers. It managed to agree a series of reports scrutinising the Brexit negotiations, and pressed ministers successfully for the release of the government's sectoral impact assessments in 2017. Holding such a divided group together long enough to publish was an achievement in itself, and it built his authority for the 2019 act that bears his name.
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Dominic Grieve
Born
As chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, Grieve oversaw the Russia report, completed in 2019, which concluded that the government had not seriously sought to assess Russian interference in British democracy. Its publication was delayed until July 2020, after the election, and its release became a test of the committee's independence when the government's preferred candidate failed to win the chair. The committee's 2018 report on detainee mistreatment after 9/11 was equally significant.
More about Dominic Grieve15
Clive Betts
Born
Betts chaired the housing and local government committee for most of the period from 2010 to 2024, a long tenure in an unfashionable brief. After the Grenfell Tower fire his committee's work on cladding pressed for leaseholders to be protected from remediation costs, and its reports on council finances, social housing regulation and private renting fed into the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023. His style was low-key and consensual, which helped his committee agree reports across party lines.
More about Clive Betts16
Meg Hillier
Born
Hillier chaired the Public Accounts Committee from 2015 to 2024 and then became chair of the Treasury Committee. At PAC she oversaw the scrutiny of pandemic spending, including the Test and Trace programme, whose 2021 reports found no clear evidence it had achieved its main objective despite a budget of £37 billion, and of the procurement of personal protective equipment. She also championed the committee's work on HS2 and the Post Office Horizon scandal. Her tenure shows the PAC's value as a long-term memory for public spending.
More about Meg Hillier17
Harriet Harman
Born
Harman, by then the longest-serving woman MP, chaired the Privileges Committee's inquiry into whether Boris Johnson had misled the Commons over lockdown parties in Downing Street. The committee, with a Conservative majority, concluded in June 2023 that he had deliberately misled the House and recommended a 90-day suspension; he resigned his seat before the report was published. It established that the Commons can hold even a former prime minister to account, despite intense pressure on its members.
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