Carol Harlow

Accountability in the European Union

Introduction 1. Thinking About Accountability 2. Some Accident Blackspots 3. The Power House 5. Accountability through Audit 6. Accountability through Law

Promoting Accountability in Multilevel Governance: A Network Approach

This article addresses problems of accountability in the system of multilevel governance, organised around networks, as it exists in the EU. An ‘accountability deficit’ arises when gaps are left by the accountability machinery of the several levels of government, supranational and national. This article suggests a new evaluative framework based on the concept of ‘accountability network’, questioning the hierarchical and pyramidal assumptions that presently underpin accountability theory in the EU context. Using case studies of the Community courts and European Ombudsman, the article suggests that ‘accountability networks’ may be emerging, composed of agencies specialising in a specific mode of accountability, which come together or coalesce in a relationship of support, fortified by shared professional expertise and ethos. At present fragmentary and imperfect, these might ultimately be capable of providing effective machinery for accountability in network governance systems.

Accountability, new public management, and the problems of the Child Support Agency

This paper seeks to evaluate the accountability of Next Steps Agencies through the medium of a case study of the Child Support Agency (CSA). The CSA was widely considered to offer a substandard service to its customers. It was the subject of multiple reports by the House of Commons Social Services Select Committee, the Select Committee on the Parliamentary Commissioner, and the Public Accounts Committee. In addition, these committees had at their disposal internal reports from an adjudicator and the Child Support commissioner. The interlock between internal and external machinery for accountability is also considered.

Disposing of Dicey: from Legal Autonomy to Constitutional Discourse?

The authorized version of the relationship of law and politics in England presents us with two autonomous worlds where, to cite Barker, law is ‘neutrally detached from the contests of political ideas and argument’, ‘legal ideas [are] invisible in the elaboration of political argument’, and ‘the general assumptions of law have been little considered in debates about the political character and goals of the nation’.1

Law and Administration: Red and green light theories

Law and state Behind every theory of administrative law there lies a theory of the state. As Harold Laski once said, constitutional law is unintelligible except as the expression of an economic system of which it was designed to serve as a rampart. By this he meant that the machinery of government was an expression of the society in which it operated; one could not be understood except in the context of the other. In 1941, Sir Cecil Carr made a similar point in a series of lectures on administrative law given at Harvard University, in the course of which he said: We nod approvingly today when someone tells us that, whereas the State used to be merely policeman, judge and protector, it has now become schoolmaster, doctor, house-builder, road-maker, town-planner, public utility supplier and all the rest of it. The contrast is no recent discovery. De Tocqueville observed in 1866 that the State ‘everywhere interferes more than it did; it regulates more undertakings, and undertakings of a lesser kind; and it gains a firmer footing every day, about, around and above all private persons, to assist, to advise, and to coerce them’ (Oeuvres, III, 501). Nassau William Senior, a Benthamite ten years older than Chadwick, a colleague of his on the original Poor Law Commission, had justified this tendency. A government, he thinks, must do whatever conduces to the welfare of the governed (the utilitarian theory); it will make mistakes, but non-interference may be an error too; one can be passively wrong as well as actively wrong. […]

Law and Administration: Inquiries: A costly placebo?

Chapter 10 of this book was devoted to complaints. Adopting a ‘bottom-up’ perspective, we considered the machinery for complaints-handling, its place in the administrative-justice landscape and various possible components of ‘proportionate dispute resolution’. In Chapter 11 we turned our attention to tribunals, firmly established by the Franks Committee as ‘machinery for adjudication’. We looked at their emergence as a two-tier system of administrative adjudication in terms of the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007. As the JUSTICE–All Souls Committee perceived, inquiries ‘though often referred to in the same breath as tribunals … have quite a different origin, purpose and status and their development has been somewhat different’. Wade too had noted their ambiguous character: they were, he thought, a hybrid legal-and-administrative process, and ‘for the very reason that they have been made to look as much as possible like a judicial proceeding, people grumble at the way in which they fall short of it’. This ambiguity is a central theme of this chapter. The chapter looks at the genesis of inquiries as ‘machinery for investigation’, using procedures usually classified as ‘inquisitorial’. These, however, both resemble and differ from the investigatory procedures of the Parliamentary Ombudsman studied in Chapter 12. We ask how far this inquisitorial procedure differs from the common law adversarial procedures that we have come to accept as the adjudicative norm. Have inquiries followed tribunals too far down the path of judicialisation, drifting back to the adversarial procedure that common lawyers instinctively prefer?

Law and Administration: Transforming judicial review

Beginnings Kenneth Culp Davis, a leading American academic visiting England in the 1960s, described English judicial review as restricted by an old-fashioned, positivist corset ‘astonishing to one with a background in the American legal system’. English judges strove to avoid consideration of the policy aspects of the issues they decided and the typical lawyer: responds with consternation to an inquiry into the soundness of the policies embodied in a judicial decision, and, if he persists, the inquirer is gently reminded that judges do not consider policy questions and that only Parliament can change the law; the task of the judge is wholly analytical – to discover the previously existing law, and to apply it logically to the case before the court. Not only were judges precluded from considering ‘policy questions’ but the lawmaking powers of the judiciary were scarcely recognised. The judicial function was seen as limited to ‘discovering’ previously existing law and applying it logically to the case before the court. A strict interpretation of the doctrine of precedent inhibited rapid changes of direction and it was accepted that only Parliament could change the law. As Lord Reid (perhaps too modestly) put it, if doctrine had developed in such a way as to cause injustice, appellate judges should, if they could, ‘get the thing back on the rails’, but ‘if it has gone too far we must pin our hopes on Parliament’. Jaffe attributed the different behaviour of English and American judges to constitutional factors; it had always been anticipated that the federal American judge would ‘assume a role in the polity far greater than that played by his confrere in Britain’.

Teaching the Political Context of EC Law

Books reviewed in this article: D. Dinan, Ever Closer Union? An Introduction to the European Community J. Greenwood, Representing Interests in the European Union F. Hayes-Renshaw and H. Wallace, The Council of Ministers S. Hix and C. Lord, Political Parties in the European Union N. Nugent, The Government and Politics of the European Union R. Dehousse, The European Court of Justice: The Politics of Judicial Integration P. Craig and G. de Burca, EC Law, Text, Cases, & Materials D. Chalmers and E. Szyszczak, European Union Law. Volume One. Law and EU Government