If Renske Leijten appt what criticism of the Chamber she no longer wants to hear

Each House of Representatives has its own informal hierarchy, and Renske Leijten (SP) is one of the leading members in the current generation.

This is of course due to the enthusiasm with which she and Pieter Omtzigt exposed the scandal of the Allowances affair. It has given her infinite credit among victims, and a high esteem among colleagues and journalists.

This is how I heard an interview with her this week in a podcast by two former BNR reporters.

“I will miss you,” says one of the reporters, when her possible departure from The Hague is discussed. “I think you are a very genuine politician. That touches me, that makes me emotional,” says the other.

In parliamentary debates, you can see it in body language, politicians and listeners pay extra attention when Leijten takes the floor.

It happened this week, too, in a debate that unfortunately received too little attention: an attempt to understand the root causes of the ongoing problems at government executive organizations – from the Tax and Customs Administration to the National Police.

In the previous period, the House formed a committee of inquiry led by André Bosman (VVD). That concluded February 2021 that no less than “20 percent” of citizens cannot cope with the rules, and cited the reason that “the House, ministries and implementing organizations do not work well together in the formulation and implementation of policy”.

A monumental failure that puts the Benefits Affair in context.

Yet this report received a chilly reception. It took more than a year before a plenary parliamentary debate was finally held this week, in which the committee itself was not allowed to participate.

And when I inquired about it this week, I began to understand what was going on: apparently (new) limits had arisen to the criticism that you can express in the House against the House.

Committee chairman Bosman already spoke in September last year NRC expressed his surprise that parliament had not exchanged a word on his report after seven months. His “pushing, pulling, and dragging” had not even led to a hearing.

Politicians talk about a new administrative culture, he said, but if the House does not see that “poor implementation by government services is the result of bad Chamber work”, he was gloomy about the outcome.

Then there was movement: the Home Affairs Committee invited its inquiry committee for “a discussion” in November.

Leijten was especially critical in this regard. She disputed that ‘the House’ is co-causing the problems, and pointed to policy choices made by cabinets and coalitions, and to the behavior of senior officials. “I do not feel addressed.”

Now the view that the House does not share responsibility for problems in executive services is surprising. The Van Dam committee that investigated the Allowances affair – Leijten was part of it – concluded that “the legislator – cabinet and parliament – can count on itself that it has enacted legislation that was rock hard”, without enough attention “for individual situations”. Informer Herman Tjeenk Willink wrote last year in its final report that “systematic control” on policy implementation is lacking in The Hague: “In all parliamentary investigations, the House also encounters itself.”

App contact between Bosman and Leijten, shortly after the conversation with the House Committee in November last year, showed more specifically what was bothering the SP MP. According to her, Bosman used his report too much “to give the House the black pete”.

At the time, he held out hope that his committee would have a plenary debate: Leijten texted him that she would ‘try to move something’ so that his committee could still sit ‘in Box K’.

But Bosman later noticed, he said, that Leijten “actively lobbied against the committee’s participation in a plenary debate”. That’s why he decided to give me insight into their app traffic. “Then everyone can see how it went.”

It was also a factor in this discussion that the Presidium was of the opinion that the Bosman Committee was not allowed to participate in plenary discussions: none of the members of the Bosman Committee (of the VVD, SP, D66, CDA, PvdA, GroenLinks and 50Plus) had been re-elected as MPs. , and the regulations did not allow the participation of non-MPs for debate, according to the presidium.

A questionable position. Take last year’s famous April 1 debate. This was what the House conducted with the non-Members of Parliament Annemarie Jorritsma and Kajsa Ollongren, who were also no longer a scout.

After the decision of the presidency, in February, Bosman made phone calls to political groups in an attempt to get his committee allowed to participate in a debate. He received support from the coalition and from several opposition parties. He texted Leijten again.

She was now explicitly holding off the boat. “I really don’t see the added value,” she replied February 14.

She thought it was unfair that he continued to suggest that the House does not look critically at itself. “I would say: invite us to a substantive debate in the House,” Bosman responded. “Well, that didn’t work in the conversation either,” Leijten appended. “One-way street with the meaning ‘the whole Chamber’.”

Bosman persisted, and a month later, March 9, in a debate about manners in the House, the group leaders of the coalition, on the initiative of Gert Jan Segers (CU), supported a debate “with a role for the Bosman Committee”. . One of these group chairmen received a disgruntled text message from Leijten.

But chairperson Vera Bergkamp emphasized that the presidency rejected a debate with the committee, and the group chairmen let it go.

Bosman’s mission had failed. Inquiries in his committee taught me that he kept his fellow committee members informed. Among them the former SP MP Cem Lacin. He understood Leijten’s objections, he said, because the SP often had an eye for implementation. “But a committee transcends parties: the recommendations are for the entire House.” The outcome disappointed him: “A debate without the participation of the committee does not do our report justice.”

Renske Leijten did not want to respond when she heard that Bosman had shared app traffic.

For example, it was an instructive week for future members of committees of inquiry in the House: anyone who draws too critical conclusions about the House may no longer count on decent treatment from the House.

And what was also striking: that because of all this hassle the main insight of the Bosman report disappeared in the mist. Because anyone who read the piece thoroughly could find an explanation in it that linked the Allowances affair with other implementation concerns: the desire in the 1990s, initiated by people like Pim Fortuyn and Hans Wiegel, to completely separate policy and implementation.

You got implementing organizations on their own two feet that had to work as cheaply as possible, and therefore avoided contact with citizens. And you got politicians who only thought in terms of measures – not in terms of people, because people came under ‘the implementation’.

It explained why so many affairs proliferated without the knowledge of politicians and senior officials. But it seems after this sad episode that this insight from the Bosman report will not make the history books.