'The conventions governing ministerial responsibility are uncertain in scope and inadequate to provide proper safeguards against incompetence or impropriety. Discuss.'

Authors Avatar

Sahil Suleman                Constitutional Law

                Ms Costello

‘The conventions governing ministerial responsibility are uncertain in scope and inadequate to provide proper safeguards against incompetence or impropriety. Discuss.’

As we have learnt from out study of conventions, it would be very difficult to track down every convention relevant to ministerial responsibility, as they can be found from a variety of sources, some of which are unwritten.  I shall be attempting to examine the most significant conventions, and examining their nature to determine exactly how effective they are.  In particular, I shall look at the nature of convention itself to establish criteria on which we can judge the scope and adequacy of the conventions.  I shall also examine incompetence and impropriety throughout ministerial departments and the civil service, because as we shall discover shortly, ministers are accountable for more than just their own actions.

Conventions are the rules which regulate the day-to-day functioning of the legal constitution, described by some as the rules of constitutional morality.  The most important conventions in the constitution are commonly regarded as those which either limit monarchical power or, as is applicable here, regulate the relationship between government and Parliament.  The nature of convention is such that some may be well-established and clear, like that which ensures that Parliament meets at least once a year, whereas others are less clear and tend to cause controversy.  For a convention to be properly established, it needs to be accepted by those whom it affects.  However, a convention is not directly enforceable by law, which is where matters of inadequacy play a part, as we shall discover later on.  

Ministers are members or supporters of the party in power which holds political office, who often have departmental responsibilities for which they are politically responsible to Parliament as individuals.  Ministers are thus responsible for their own actions, a concept known as individual responsibility, and are accountable for the actions of their department, and I shall discuss the distinction between the two later on.  Ministerial responsibility has been the accepted basis of parliamentary government in Britain since the mid-19th century, along with particular development in the other main aspect of ministerial responsibility – collective responsibility. This is the idea that ministers must hold a united front once a cabinet decision has been made, having been given the chance to dissent or resign when the decision itself was being made.

It is necessary to outline some of the governmental conventions used regarding ministerial responsibility.  The Ministerial Code created in 1945 is the primary source for most of these conventions, which were revised and reissued by Blair in 1997.  The principles of ministerial conduct stated in this code include a duty to uphold collective responsibility and a requirement for ministers to account for the activities of their department/agency.  More specifically, the code also states that, ‘ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation to the Prime Minister,’ and the word ‘knowingly’ is of particular significance.  Ministers have a duty to be ‘as open as possible with Parliament and the public, refusing information only when disclosure would not be in the public interest.’  A minister must ‘behave according to the highest standards of constitutional and personal conduct in the performance of their duties.’ The Carltona Principle also states that ‘if a decision is made on behalf of one of his officials, then that constitutionally is the minister’s decision.’  It is also a duty of a minister to send civil servants under him to select committees for questioning, if they are called upon.  However, in most cases, civil servants are not responsible for their actions and decisions, unless powers have been formally delegated from a minister.

Join now!

Despite the apparently clear nature of these conventions, the system of ministerial responsibility has been shown by many to be an insufficient means of scrutinising government, and ways of breaking these conventions, or amending them to suit circumstances have exposed their uncertainty and inadequacy.  If we examine some of the conventions that I listed, we can show how each of them has failed in their duty to govern ministerial responsibility.  

I outlined that ministers have a duty to account for their departments, but there is a growing ‘accountability gap’ which is allowing ministers to distance themselves from ...

This is a preview of the whole essay