The Business and Trade Select Committee is a select committee of the House of Commons in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The remit of the committee is to examine the expenditure, administration and policy of the Department for Business and Trade, and any departmental bodies.
The committee came into existence as the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee on 1 October 2009, replacing the Business and Enterprise Select Committee, which was dissolved on 30 September 2009. The House of Commons agreed to the committee's establishment on 25 June 2009,[1] following Prime Minister Gordon Brown's replacement of the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills on 5 June 2009. Following the merger of the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in July 2016, the name of the committee was changed to the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee in October 2016 to reflect the name of the new department.[2]
Following the 2024 United Kingdom general election, chairs and member of committees are yet to be appointed.
The chair was elected on 6 May 2020, with the members of the committee being announced on 2 March 2020.[3][4]
The chair was elected on 12 July 2017, with the members of the committee being announced on 11 September 2017.[5][6]
Occasionally, the House of Commons ordered changes to be made in terms of membership of the select committee, as proposed by the Committee of Selection. Such changes are shown below.
In July 2022, the committee published its report "Energy pricing and the future of the energy market" which examined the turmoil in retail energy arising from unusually high wholesale gas prices, leading to the collapse of several suppliers and the need for government support of Bulb Energy. The committee found that the industry regulator Ofgem had been incompetent in its supervision of the finances of supplier companies, and that the government overlooked this lack of supervision because it prioritised competition over market regulation. The report also criticised Ofgem's design of the energy price cap, recommending that the government consider introducing a social tariff; stated that the government's May 2022 support package for customers was no longer sufficient; and criticised the absence of a home insulation programme.[7][8]
In response, Ofgem accepted that its previous financial resilience regime was not sufficiently robust, and had contributed to some of the supplier failures since August 2021.[9]