Committees

Submissions wanted on government decision-making safeguards

8 February 2018

Following their conclusion that the Government is still rejecting the need for stronger decision-making safeguards, the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee is opening a further inquiry on the matter.

Lessons from the Chilcot Inquiry

In its report on the Lessons Still to be Learned from the Chilcot Inquiry, published on 16 March 2017 as HC 656, the Committee recommended that in the future:

There should be a mechanism of written Ministerial direction, similar to that used by Departmental Accounting Officers, reflecting the responsibility of the Cabinet Secretary and other senior officials to ensure that proper procedure is followed as set out in the Cabinet Manual. 

This would include ensuring that when Ministers consider decisions they can draw on advice covering all the relevant issues, including legal advice when appropriate.

This was to ensure that important decisions, such as whether to take part in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, were more likely to be subjected to robust and informed scrutiny within Government through the process of formal consideration by the Cabinet and its committees.

The recommendation was based on submissions from the Better Government Initiative (BGI), a group of former senior civil servants that provides advice on the processes necessary to achieve sound governance. As BGI has highlighted, the Government failed to address this recommendation in their response to the Committee's report. The Committee has therefore decided to carry out a further inquiry focussed on these issues.

Call for written submissions

It would therefore welcome written submissions of evidence on:

  1. Would the right to request a formal direction provide an effective safeguard against the circumventing of proper collective agreement and the resulting harm identified by the Chilcot Report?

  2. What would the implication be for the relationships between the Prime Minister, Cabinet Ministers, and the Cabinet Secretary (or other Permanent Secretaries), and their accountability to Parliament? Accounting Officer directions indemnify them on matters that they are personally accountable for Parliament for; while the Cabinet Secretary and Permanent Secretaries are not, currently, accountable to Parliament for the operation of collective decision making or the quality of the decisions made.

  3. Is the Cabinet Manual sufficient to provide a basis for judging if a direction is required? What steps would the Prime Minister need to follow if they wished to change the Cabinet Manual, and therefore the basis on which a direction could be sought?

  4. How should the process of seeking a direction work in practice?

    a. Who would have the right to ask for a direction? The Cabinet Secretary alone or any Permanent Secretary who believed their Departmental ministers were circumventing the proper processes?

    b. In what circumstances should they be able to seek a direction? Should they be constrained to matters of defence and national security, or on any matter where there is a clear public interest in proper collective consideration? How should these be defined?

    c. What procedure would be followed a direction has been made? How and when should it be published or reported to Parliament?

    d. What safeguards would be needed to protect national security, the confidentiality of cabinet discussions, and allow for effective decision making in emergencies?

The deadline for submissions is 16 April.

Further information

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