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The Conventions of Individual Ministerial Responsibility and Collective Cabinet Responsibility: A Note

Page last edited:05/02/2012

Under the terms of the Convention of Individual Ministerial Responsibility individual Ministers are deemed responsible to Parliament  for the policies and administration of their department  and for their own personal conduct. The Ministerial Code contains broad guide lines establishing appropriate ministerial behaviour which obviously provide ministers with useful advice regarding the performance of their ministerial duties but the Code is not a legal document and its precise implementation depends upon the interpretation s of the Prime Minister.

Individual Ministerial Responsibility means that Ministers introduce their departments' new legislation and explain and defend it in Parliamentary debates and that  that they speak in other parliamentary debates , answer oral and written Parliamentary Questions and appear before select committees on matters affecting their department. All of this helps to some extent to improve the accountability of the Executive to Parliament and , indirectly, to the electorate although the limitations of all of the above mechanisms of parliamentary scrutiny are well known.

The convention of Individual Ministerial Responsibility implies also that a Minister should resign if there have been serious policy and/or administrative errors in his/her department or if s/he has been guilty of serious personal misconduct. Examples of resignation over policy errors and personal misconduct respectively include the resignation of the Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington and two junior Foreign Office Ministers[ Humphrey Atkin and Richard Luce] for their apparent failure to predict the likely Argentinean invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982 and the resignation of Conservative Minister Cecil Parkinson in the mid 1980s following revelations of the details of an extra-marital affair with his secretary Sara Keays . More recently Peter Mandelson was obliged to resign twice from the Cabinet first for failure to reveal details of a personal loan and then for attempting to fast track an application for British citizenship from an influential business man... although he was later exonerated from any wrong doing in this latter case. Ministers may be obliged to resign if they are considered to have misled Parliament: David Willetts [Conservative] and  Beverly Hughes [Labour] were both obliged to resign for this reason. Click here and here for BBC coverage of Beverly Hughes resignation.

{Click here and here for Guardian/Observer coverage of the resignation of the Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury David Laws }

{Click here for the BBC coverage of the resignation of Defence Secretary Liam Fox }

Chris Huhne resigned as Secretary of State foe Energy and Climate Change on February 3rd 2012 after learning that he will be charged with perverting the course of justice as a result of allegations that in 2003 Mr. Huhne had committed a speeding offence but agreed with his then wife Ms. Vicky Price that she would admit to having been the driver of the speeding car and would accept the resultant penalty points on his behalf. Mr Huhne claims that is is innocent of all charges and states that he has resigned "in order to avoid distraction to either my official duties or my trial defence." The following links provide additional information.

Click here [BBC] and here [Guardian] for the resignation of Chris Huhne

Click here for a BBC assessment of Chris Huhne’s career and here for a BBC assessment of the implications of Chris Huhne’s resignation for the future of Coalition environmental policies. 

 

Nevertheless there remains considerable uncertainty surrounding the circumstances under which a Minister may be obliged to resign.

  1. There may be circumstances where policies have been poorly implemented at local level so that the Minister cannot reasonably be blamed for such failure as when in the early 1980s an intruder gained entrance to the Queen's bedroom suite and despite calls for the resignation of the then Home Secretary William Whitelaw he could reasonably claim that he was not ministerially responsible for this specific error.
  2. A Minister might claim that even though serious administrative mistakes have been made s/he should nevertheless remain as Minister and be allowed to rectify these mistakes. This was the claim made by Charles Clarke in 2006 in relation to administrative errors in the Home Office: he survived for a few weeks but when Mr Blair in a Cabinet reshuffle wished to move him from the Home Office to the Ministry of Defence Mr Clarke resigned rather than accept what he perceived to be a demotion.
  3. A Minister might argue that his /her policies have been discussed and agreed in Cabinet so that if there are policy errors the entire Cabinet is collectively responsible all of which suggests that the conventions of Individual Ministerial Responsibility and Collective Cabinet Responsibility are in some respects incompatible.
  4. The introduction of the so-called Next Steps Agencies which deliver public services but with relatively limited connections with Whitehall Departments blurs the responsibility for policy failure. For example in 1995 there were several significant prison escapes as a result of which the then Home Secretary Michael Howard faced calls for his resignation but instead shifted blame onto Derek Lewis , the Chief Executive of the Prison Service, claiming that the mistakes occurred to as a result of policy failure but as a result of failures of operational management for which Mr Lewis was responsible, a view which was widely questioned at the time.
  5. Attitudes toward Ministers' personal relationships may well have changed in recent years: the former  Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and the former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott were not obliged to resign when details of their extra-marital affairs became public.
  6. An important general point is that if an individual Minister has the support of the PM and the rest of the Cabinet s/he may be able to survive calls for resignation under the terms of the Individual Ministerial Responsibility Convention. A Prime Minister may appear weak if s/he seems to be giving in to political pressure to dismiss a minister but sometimes a PM may be forced to do this: Tony Blair would have liked to save David Blunkett from resignation but felt unable to do so.

 

The Convention of Collective Cabinet Responsibility was originally designed to enable the cabinet to present an image of unity in Parliament and in public. This Convention has the following implications.

  1. Once decisions are taken in Cabinet and in Cabinet Committees all Ministers must support these decisions in public ,even if they were not present when the decisions were taken, and, if they cannot do so, they should resign. The Convention applies not only to Cabinet Ministers, but to more junior  non-Cabinet Ministers and to MPs [known as Parliamentary Private Secretaries] who are assistants to Ministers .
  2. All details of Cabinet discussions should be kept secret unless it is agreed that it can be made public. This is designed to promote full discussion without revealing evidence of Cabinet disunity and to  prevent sensitive information from being made public.
  3. A government which is defeated on a Vote of Confidence must resign since such a vote signals no confidence in the government collectively not in an individual minister. Notice that the Cameron-Clegg government hopes to introduce a new provision whereby a 55% Commons majority will be necessary to defeat the government on a vote of confidence.

Important examples of resignations which occurred because Ministers could not accept Collective Cabinet Responsibility for policies with which they disagreed include the following.

  1. 1986: Michael Heseltine refused to accept government policy on the Westland helicopter affair.
  2. 1989: Nigel Lawson refused to accept Mrs. Thatcher's interventions in the management of economic policy.
  3. 1990: Sir Geoffrey Howe refused to accept the Thatcher Government's stance on European policy.
  4. 2003 : Robin Cook and John Denham both resigned because they disagreed with government policies on Iraq. Clare Short remained briefly in Cabinet despite publicly disagreeing with the Government policy on Iraq but she too soon resigned.

Nevertheless it must be noted that the Convention of Collective Cabinet Responsibility has not always been applied rigidly.

  1. It was suspended temporarily in 1975 when the Labour Government was disunited over continued membership of the then EEC [now the EU] and Labour Ministers were allowed to campaign for or against continued membership in the 1975 referendum campaign. The convention was relaxed also in the vote on the European Assembly Bill in 1977.
  2. Free votes are often allowed on conscience issues such as capital punishment, abortion and gay rights.
  3. Ministers and the PM often ignore the convention of Collective Cabinet Responsibility by leaking their own policy preferences to the mass media.
  4. Blair's Cabinets appeared more united in the early years but there have subsequently been leaks of the great disputes between Blair and Brown and also of disunity in the Brown Cabinet.
  5. We can only speculate about what problems may be involved in maintaining Collective Cabinet Responsibility in the current Coalition Government .

        It is easier to sustain the doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility in a united government but since all governments are to some extent plagued by disunity it is recognised that the convention of collective cabinet responsibility is to some extent a fiction : even if ministers claim that the government is united it is widely recognised that there are ongoing disputes at the heart of government.