Lord Goodlad
Main Page: Lord Goodlad (Conservative - Life peer)Cabinet Office: Constitution Committee Report
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Lord Goodlad
To move that this House takes note of the Report of the Constitution Committee on The Cabinet Office and the Centre of Government (4th Report, Session 2009–10, HL Paper 30).
Lord Goodlad
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to debate the fourth report of the 2009-10 session of your Lordships' Select Committee on the Constitution, entitled The Cabinet Office and the Centre of Government. The committee was grateful to all who gave evidence to us, including a number of your Lordships, and to our specialist advisers. I am also grateful to the previous Government for their response to the Select Committee report, whose consideration by the committee was forestalled by the Dissolution of Parliament.
The Cabinet Office originated in 1916. Its role has evolved greatly over time and continues to do so. Its three core functions today are: supporting the Prime Minister; supporting the Cabinet; and strengthening the Civil Service. Some of the most important elements of the centre of government are the Treasury and the Prime Minister’s Office. The committee considered the relationship between, and functions of, the Cabinet Office, the Treasury and the Prime Minister’s Office, and the roles of the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Minister for the Cabinet Office and the Cabinet Secretary. We also considered Cabinet government and collective ministerial responsibility, departmental responsibility and accountability for policy, the genesis and co-ordination of policy across departments and the accountability of government to Parliament. We asked all our oral witnesses what they viewed as the main constitutional principles affecting the Cabinet Office and the centre of government. Five themes emerged: the role of the Prime Minister; the role of the Cabinet and collective responsibility; the role of the Civil Service; the changing role and function of the centre; and the accountability of the centre. The committee’s report is based on the evidence which we received. We have made a number of recommendations, some of which I shall draw to your Lordships’ attention.
The world has moved on very considerably since the response of the previous Government to the report and I know that the House greatly looks forward to the remarks of my noble friend the Minister. The committee was agreed that structures of accountability should mirror structures of power and, where the latter have changed, that the structures of accountability should change accordingly. For this to take place, all elements of the centre and its work must be transparent and parliamentary scrutiny must be upheld and improved. The previous Government, in their response to the report, agreed that transparency and accountability are key aspects in the working of the centre of government and that accountability structures should adapt to reflect changing roles and responsibilities. The question now is what must be done to achieve these objectives.
We received conflicting evidence on the relationship between the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s Office—whether the latter is a subset of the former and a business unit, or whether the two are functionally distinct. We suggested that the nature of the relationship should be clarified by the Cabinet Office and reflected in government publications, which recently appeared to suggest that the two offices are independent institutions.
The Prime Minister’s Office is crucial to the role and structure of the centre of government. The establishment by the previous Government of the post of Permanent Secretary to the Prime Minister’s Office was a new step in the evolution of the structure of the centre. We noted the arguments advanced by Sir Gus O’Donnell and Jeremy Heywood for the new arrangements, and Sir Gus O’Donnell’s analysis of the roles of the six Permanent Secretaries now located in the Cabinet Office. We recommended that the Prime Minister’s Permanent Secretary, and the six Permanent Secretaries located within the Cabinet Office, should be subject to appropriate parliamentary accountability mechanisms.
A substantial involvement in and influence by the Prime Minister on policy formation and delivery is a feature of recent years, although there is no shortage of historical precedent. As with the Cabinet Office, the role of the Prime Minister has evolved over many years under different Governments. Successive Prime Ministers have made different uses of financial, human and other resources in what they have seen to be their roles. We recommended that the Prime Minister’s and the centre’s roles in policy development and delivery should be both transparent and accountable to Parliament, as should the Delivery Unit and the Strategy Unit.
We accepted the evidence of the then Minister for the Cabinet Office that the current flexibility of the structure of the centre of government is in the public interest. We accepted the value of an incubator role, where the Cabinet Office develops units and functions which are subsequently transferred to other government departments, but shared the fears of some witnesses that the Cabinet Office has sometimes operated less as an incubator and more as a dustbin. That policy units for which there is apparently no other obvious home have been put in the Cabinet Office underlines the importance of ensuring that the Cabinet Office and all the units within it are properly held to account.
We consequently recommended that a review of the units which have accrued to the centre be undertaken by the Government, including an examination of the justification for each unit’s continued existence and for its location at the centre of government rather than in a department. We recommended that a copy of the review be circulated.
We took evidence on the subject of special advisers and recognised that they can play an important role in government, but thought that their role should complement rather than diminish, or, indeed, duplicate, the role and responsibilities of Ministers and civil servants. Transparency should apply to the role of special advisers as elsewhere. We supported the idea of a code of conduct for special advisers. We recommended that the Government should define the role of special advisers and prevent a recurrence of the 1997 Order in Council giving advisers the power to instruct civil servants.
Following our recommendation that structures of accountability should reflect the existing structures of power, we expressed the view that the role of the Prime Minister should be subjected to more effective accountability and greater transparency. While the committee welcomed the biannual appearance of the Prime Minister before the House of Commons Liaison Committee, we did not believe that these appearances went far enough in achieving adequate parliamentary accountability of the Prime Minister’s Office. There is a view that transparency has gone far enough. It is not a view which I share. I regard it as complacent and potentially dangerous.
We did not support calls for the creation of a separate Office of the Prime Minister, or an Office of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, as we did not believe that either would enhance the effective functioning of government. Rather, we recommended that supporting the Prime Minister should remain a core function of the Cabinet Office, provided that the manner in which the office fulfils the role is accompanied by full transparency and that the accountability mechanisms reflect the importance of the function.
The ever-changing kaleidoscope of issues involving more than one department poses a ceaseless challenge to the machinery of government. So as to ensure that structures of accountability reflect structures of power, we in Parliament must, of course, ensure that our own accountability mechanisms take account of changing circumstances. But government must, we believe, ensure that the mechanisms of policy formation and delivery in respect of multidepartmental issues remain transparent. The previous Government in their response concurred.
We recommended that the post of Minister for the Cabinet Office should be retained in order not only to ensure that the work of the Cabinet Office is transparent but that Parliament can hold the Cabinet Office to account effectively—namely, through one of its own members. We were concerned that the responsibility of the Cabinet Office Minister seemed to be ill defined. We recommended that the Government should reassess the functions of the Minister for the Cabinet Office to ensure that his or her responsibilities accurately reflect the strategic role that the Cabinet Office plays. The world has moved on and this recommendation has in my view gained greater force now that the Deputy Prime Minister is in the Cabinet Office.
We examined the circumstances surrounding the proposal to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor in June 2003 and were critical of the procedures followed. We recommended that the Cabinet Office should consider means to ensure that such failures did not recur.
We also recommended that the Cabinet Office should play a formal role in investigating the likely consequences of any machinery of government changes, particularly those with constitutional implications. We recommended that Parliament and its committees should have a role and that ministerial Statements should be made in Parliament.
On the Civil Service, we were persuaded by the arguments which we heard that the current arrangements whereby the Cabinet Secretary has acted as head of the Civil Service have worked well. We recommended that the Cabinet Secretary should continue to fulfil the function of head of the Civil Service and that the Cabinet Office should continue to exercise responsibility for managing the Civil Service.
We noted with concern the evidence which we received suggesting that the authority of the Cabinet Secretary had diminished, despite being assured by Sir Gus O’Donnell that he had all the authority he needed. We agreed with his assessment that much,
“depends on the engagement between the individual Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister of the day as to how they use their Cabinet Secretary”.
Clearly, the Cabinet Secretary has a key role in promoting the effective operation of government and can fulfil that role only with the full support and backing of the Prime Minister.
The report necessarily covers a complicated network of offices, structures, functions and trends. The operation of the centre of government is of vital importance to our system. The committee’s core conclusion was that structures of accountability should mirror structures of power, and where the latter have shifted so should the former. Our recommendations are designed to achieve that outcome, and I hope that they will be implemented.
It may appear to some that what we are debating is somewhat arcane—even abstract. Perhaps it is. However, not only at times of crisis, but rather over the lifetime of a Government and well beyond, structures and procedures have a very large, some would say insidious, influence on the balance between success and failure, both in war and in peace. As ever, the sands are shifting. My noble friend will, I trust, unlock their riddle.
Lord Goodlad
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in welcoming my noble friend to the Dispatch Box and I thank him very much for his very thorough reply. I would expect no less from a fellow Lincolnshire yellowbelly.
My noble friend emphasised the Government’s commitment to accountability and openness about which there has been a confluence of views during the course of this debate. The Government will of course be judged not only by their words but in future by their deeds. I am extremely grateful to all other noble Lords who participated in the debate. We had extremely trenchant contributions from the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, about the avoidance of muddle and from the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and others about the regrettable—if not disgraceful, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said—events of June 2003. I will not add to that other than saying that I hope that they act as an example to the present Government in their ambitious programme at the centre of government to have regard for due process and respect for our constitution and institutions. I have every confidence that that respect will be forthcoming.
I have had far less contact with the centre of government and the Cabinet Office than many noble Lords in their places tonight, but over the years I have developed an enormous admiration for their dedication and skills and I hope that the committee’s report and our debate tonight will make some contribution towards the future development of these institutions. I suspect that other noble Lords will join me in assuring my noble friend that, like General MacArthur, we shall return.