The government's collective responsibility is to have the confidence of Parliament at all times. If at any time this confidence is questioned the governing party must be subjected to a vote in Parliament. Failure to win the vote requires the government to either resign or dissolve Parliament. Collective responsibility enables the government to rise, put forth policy and resign as one collective unit.
Its purpose is to reinforce the united front of the government, both nationally and in parliament. The doctrine is supported by:
- Secrecy of Cabinet proceedings (30 year rule on release of Cabinet minutes): The confidentiality of Cabinet discussions is protected by prohibition against disclosure by members of the Cabinet. Additionally, there is a rule that a current government cannot publish previous government’s papers without their consent, or to a government with different political persuasions, unless a document which is an exception to the above.
The justification of this is to prevent any outgoing government from removing politically sensitive documents in fear that they may persuade next government to make political capital out of it.
- Disagreements before or after decisions are made not made public. However, parties have the right to differ from agreement during circumstances when decisions are not yet made. This was instated when The Labour government in 1975 allowed open debate on Europe by Cabinet ministers over the referendum. Thus in situations where there are political disagreements of a great magnitude, PM can waive the convention if it is more expedient to have it set aside rather than broken.
- Ministers should uphold cabinet secrecy having left office. The publication of a former minister’s memoirs is generally not allowed. This is to protect discussions of national security, and of confidentiality from being open to public in order to safeguard the government and country, as stated in the Radcliff Committee Report.
However since it is not a legally binding rule, an ex-minister cannot be stopped from publishing a paper by the courts. This was apparent in AG v. Jonathan Cape Ltd, where courts refrained from granting injunction to Richard Crossman, an ex-minister who was publishing memoir of his political life (“Diaries”, which revealed Cabinet disagreements in their memoirs). This is a chief strain upon the operation of the convention of collective ministerial responsibility reducing the extent of accountability due to the government through this convention.
Less collective decision making e.g. advisers and cabinet committees. The Westland crisis of 1986 came to a head because Michael Heseltine believed that the Cabinet should have had a fuller consideration on the options.
A most recent example of resignation due to collective responsibility is of Robin Cook and others over the Iraq war, March 2003. Here the House of Commons leader disagreed with PM Tony Blaire decisions of supporting America in a war against Iraq and his disagreement with the otherwise collectively supported stance of government led him to resign.
Individual ministerial responsibility can be divided into two sub-components. First a minister must answer to Parliament for any wrong doings that is done by their department while at the same time defend the actions of their department. These two elements combined ensure that Ministers are ultimately held accountable. This is especially held true when matters that are done properly under his instructions or in accordance with governmental policy.
The convention is designed to create accountability of ministers to parliament and to safeguard civil servants from blame. It covers such things as policy errors, mishandling of policies and personal misconduct. In practice the first two parts of this convention have become diluted and politicized: ministers are reluctant to accept responsibility for policy errors or failed policies, and whether they go or not usually depends on the support or otherwise of their party.
Usually what happens though, if a departmental mistake is brought to the attention of a Minister he usually denies any foreknowledge therefore asserting no personal blame. Whenever an issue is brought up that has hard evidence concerning Ministerial knowledge, the minister would usually blame it upon his officials and answers to Parliament with the fact that the individual responsible will be disciplined.
One political convention is that when a public servant makes a serious mistake, he remains 'faceless' to the public eye. This convention has it roots in the principal of political neutrality. This is supposed to enable the civil servant to carry out the actions of their minister despite their own political views and public opinion on governmental policy. It is the Minister's duty to respond to Parliamentary request concerning the actions of his subordinates but they cannot name the official or officials who may have cause a mistake.
In reality a minister cannot be held totally accountable for the actions of their departments. With the trend of downsizing the cabinet in recent governments, and cabinet shuffles the norm, there is no way that a minister can ever be specialized in accordance to the group that they hold.
Also important is individual responsibility for personal misconduct of ministers. Recent cases of personal misconduct is Ron Davis as Secretary of State for Wales 1998 over a questionable liaison on a London Common; Peter Mendelssohn for not disclosing a loan from a ministerial colleague. However, such cases seemingly do not always come open to public.
"A minister can't possibly know everything which is done in the Department by every last civil Servant and therefore it would be folly to try and pretend that the Minister will be held accountable and must resign when somewhere down the line at the end of a corridor the ten thousandth person committed something illegal or contrary to Government standards or norms."
In practice these conventions have been much weakened. Cabinet divisions, especially under the Conservatives over Europe, the greater distancing of policy making from the full cabinet, and the increasing trend of political memoirs from former cabinet ministers revealing divisions has reduced the extent of collective responsibility a great deal. Also, despite the presence of this convention, in recent years, Ministers have refused to resign even under pressure to do so. Similarly, it is quite difficult to hold responsible one particular minister for actions in a certain department as obviously, none would come forward with a confession or accept responsibility and blame.
Thus in my opinion, being a convention, the concept of ministerial responsibility has become more of a formality rather than a regulation of magnitude. As seen from the stated examples, ministers are still publishing memoirs, revealing Cabinet discussions, which this convention wants to prevent. Relaxations of the rules have allowed PM to waive this convention when he feels the need arise. At the same time, the government feels that it is virtually impossible to hold one individual minister responsible for certain actions.
Even though the violation of the convention does not bring legal sanctions, its breach can give rise to political sanctions. Thus the idea of a resignation or of political disrepute can play its role in persuasive answerability of ministers to the government.
However, its attempts to provide a unified Parliament are successful where it compels ministers to support the government’s stance and takes away those who do not support. Thus overall, even though some practices have taken away the power of this convention to control ministers, it does aim to provide an accountable and responsible Parliament, if abided by.
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