On the Committee itself various suggestions have been made: to extend the terms of appointment of members of the MPC, to make those longer terms non-renewable, and to appoint people with more diverse backgrounds. By far the most fundamental of these suggestions is the proposal to appoint representatives of different industries or regions to the Committee, as opposed to monetary policy experts. That would change the nature of the debate and undermine the mutual confidence of members of the Committee in each other if it were felt that some were representing a specific interest group. With experience of the MPC, I think that this argument has come to be accepted. The proposal that the minutes of MPC meetings should include more description of individual views I discussed earlier. The Committee has been opposed to such a change for the reasons I gave. In its early days the Committee was sensitive to the view that the minutes, then published six weeks after the meeting, should be published earlier, and it shortened that lag to 13 days in October 1998. The forecast process has attracted much attention, and was discussed at length in the Kohn Report. Presenting the forecast in terms of a fan chart, in order to highlight the balance of risks to the outlook, has proved successful. But it has proved more difficult to explain the role of a projection conditioned on the assumption of constant official interest rates.
Third, the votes on the MPC are transparent, and hence members can be held accountable. The merit of individual accountability is that each individual in the group has a genuine incentive to reach a good decision. This aspect leads us directly into my second question. 2. Second, does it matter that there are differences of view among Committee members? From the outset, commentators have been unable to resist labelling members of the Committee as either ‘hawks’ or ‘doves’. I have argued before that it makes no sense to use these descriptions because each member of the Committee has the same objective. Members of the MPC cannot entertain closet views about their desired inflation rate because they will be held personally accountable for their judgments about the level of interest rates necessary to meet the mandated inflation target. As circumstances change, it is easy to imagine that ‘hawks’ shall be ‘doves’ and ‘doves’ shall be ‘hawks’. But that is not to say that differences of opinion do not, and should not, exist amongst committee members. If part of the reason for the improvement of groups over individuals is their pooling of knowledge, then differences of opinion during the discussion that takes place at each MPC meeting should be central to the Committee’s performance. As The Economist put it back in 1998 (when there 4 were only eight serving members): 4  Economist, 18 April 1998, p. 28.