[Shelley Burke]

Lord Beecham has already made a pitch for it. This is from one of the localism bill debates:

"After 24 years chairing committees and leading a council, I was eventually voluntarily dispatched to my Siberian power station; that is, the arts and recreation committee in Newcastle. I found that being a back-bencher was very different from chairing a meeting. As the chairman of a meeting, you had an agenda and if you were any good at it you knew what you wanted, you had a discussion and you got it through. In Newcastle's case I would have a pre-meeting with 15 Labour members for an hour. That represents an average of four minutes each. The dialogue was not Socratic in its nature. It was not the highest level of political debate and many members were simply concerned to get through the meeting as quickly as possible. By contrast, scrutiny actually allows people to think. Some people found the transition to be rather difficult, but it is welcome."