G. W. Jones

Leaders, Politics and Institutional Change: The Decline of Prime Ministerial Accountability to the House of Commons, 1868–1990

Political institutions are created in complex ways: by formal organisational arrangements, by conventions and agreements which surround and insulate these mechanics, by shared understandings and cognitions, and by emotive attachments and identifications (March and Olsen, 1984, 1989). At their core, however, what gives institutional arrangements peculiar moral force may be their ‘natural’ quality, their apparent analogy with easily understood or larger processes at work in the physical world or the broader society (Douglas, 1987). The practices of legislatures often embody some longstanding basic principles (such as majority voting and the rules of fair debate) whose apparent ‘naturalness’ and ancient origins play an important part in assuring legitimacy for legislative outcomes. In maintaining the accountability of governments, most liberal democratic legislatures rely on apparently simple ‘answerability’ mechanisms — making members of the executive directly and personally explain government policies and decisions. This approach is fundamental, creating potent interactions where precise verbal formulations and personal responses function as clues to underlying attitudes in a way that indirect accountability inherently could never replicate.

Inquiry and Analysis

The second set of functions performed by the traditional core of the Cabinet Office — undertaking different forms of inquiry and analysis — is often hard to distinguish from the first — servicing committees. Indeed these functions sometimes seem to be little more than an extension of the first and second stages of the handling of committees: information-gathering and preparation. Functions of inquiry and analysis can be identified separately from the usual run of committee work described in the previous chapter because they do not normally involve ministers on a daily basis. They are in general performed by a designated bureau, secretariat or unit with specific terms of reference. The science and technology secretariat between 1986 and 1992 was a good example of a mixture of the two sets of functions. That section of the Cabinet Office serviced Cabinet committees and advised on ways to assess scientific and technological research.

The Political Office

Although The Civil Service Yearbook did not recognize ‘the political office’ as a distinct part of the Prime Minister’s Office until 1983, political advisers had long served at No. 10. The official designation reflected growing specialization and formalization within the Prime Minister’s Office, but the political office has always been the least structured and collegiate unit at No. 10. It corrals together a set of actors whose main task is to relate the prime minister to the world of party politics. They send to the party messages from the prime minister and carry back the views of the party. They look at items the prime minister is dealing with from the point of view of the party. They link the prime minister to party members both in parliament and in the country, to win their support for the government and its programme and for the prime minister as an individual. Their assistance is especially needed in preparing and running election campaigns, when the 24-hour system of advice and support to the prime minister from permanent officials necessarily fades away.

The Environment Agencies

This chapter examines the Next Steps Agencies under the responsibility of the Secretary of State for the Environment between 1989 and July 1992. Its objective is to reveal the impact of the establishment of these agencies on parliamentary accountability. It seeks to show the extent to which civil servants working in the agencies were more, or less, accountable to Parliament after their agencies were established. The question explored is whether agencies increase or reduce the parliamentary accountability of Government.

Innovators at 10 Downing Street

The objective of the research reported here was to discover who were the innovators at 10 Downing Street — who were the politicians or officials who made significant contributions to changing the way prime ministers were assisted between 1868 and 1997. In looking for motives for change we concentrated our attention on the innovator, but external factors could not and should not be ignored. There are institutional and contextual constraints on all would-be innovators, such as the number of staff that can legally be publicly funded; the expectations of party, parliament and monarch; and relationships with colleagues and rivals in Cabinet and departments. People who were influential at 10 Downing Street were not isolated from the colleagues they worked with and for. An equally vital caveat is that our set of five characters — Gladstone, Lloyd George, Waterhouse, Rowan and Wilson — were chosen from a mass of evidence for the ‘quantum-leap’ nature of their innovations. This selection left out not only those who introduced what we decided were comparatively minor reforms, such as filing systems in the 1920s or some specialized functions in the 1940s, but may also have omitted some quiet revolutionaries still to be discovered.

Servicing Cabinet and its Committees

Until the Second World War the Cabinet Office appeared little more than an aggregation of committee secretariats held together through the secretary. Maurice Hankey was secretary to the Cabinet, the Committee of Imperial Defence, the Committee on Civil Research and the Economic Advisory Council, and was also Clerk to the Privy Council.1 The Cabinet Office was seen partly as ‘the Secretariat proper’, i.e. the staff who serviced ministers collectively in Cabinet and in its committees, and partly as a series of standing secretariats it was convenient to house within the same framework.

The Policy Unit and Other Policy Advisers

The role of the policy unit and other policy advisers located at 10, Downing Street is to provide the prime minister with advice about substantive policy. To carry out their essential role of coordinating the work of their cabinet colleagues prime ministers need staff to advise them on policy. In her first years as prime minister Mrs Thatcher seemed to have realized the drawbacks of having a substantial group of policy advisers inside No. 10. She reduced their number from the seven to eight of James Callaghan to three: a senior policy adviser, a part-time special adviser and a civil servant. She wanted to show that her style of government was different from his, and she could not convincingly preach economy in government if she maintained a large political staff of her own.1 From 1982 the number of policy advisers rose, fluctuating between four and eight with a peak in 1983 of nine, including two civil servants. During her period of government she appointed a few other policy advisers not located within the policy unit: two for foreign affairs, one for defence and one for economic affairs, and occasionally other part-time advisers. Specifically to help her fulfil her responsibilities as minister for the civil service she appointed a series of advisers on efficiency in government who worked from the Cabinet Office (discussed later in Part II, Chapter 12).

The Press Office

The role of the No. 10 press office is to link the prime minister to the media of mass communications, the press and broadcasting organizations. The office is headed by the chief press secretary. Prime ministers have chosen various ways to solve the problem of organizing No. 10’s press relations. Some previous chief press secretaries were political appointees, brought in as temporary civil servants for their known political views and experience of journalism. Such overtly partisan advisers can support the prime minister across the full range of press and public relations activities. Joe Haines, press secretary to Harold Wilson, wrote nearly all Wilson’s public speeches made outside parliament in his 1974–6 term of office. He could suggest policy options that fitted with party principles and would be simple to communicate to voters, such as a flat-rate increase in wages.1 Then there is less ambiguity about the political nature of advice given but briefings lack non-partisan authority — journalists are less likely to believe the press secretary, and some may be actively and politically hostile. The press secretary brought in from outside does not have the expertise across Whitehall of a permanent civil servant from one of the principal departments. Donald Maitland, press secretary to Edward Heath 1970–3, who had been head of the Foreign Office News Department, had particular knowledge of the European Community Britain was entering. The No. 10 press secretary most ill at ease in negotiating the fuzzy border between the ‘political’ and ‘official’ worlds was a journalist, Trevor Lloyd-Hughes, in post 1964–9. Untrained in Whitehall ways, he interpreted civil service proprieties so narrowly that Wilson appointed Gerald Kaufman as parliamentary press liaison officer to handle the more political tasks. Colin Seymour-Ure considers that the best chief press secretaries were those who were able to blur the partisan—non-partisan line, whether or not they were partisan supporters when first appointed.2

The Private Office

The core of the Prime Minister’s Office consists of a small group of civil servants who work in two rooms adjacent to the room where the Cabinet meets and where prime ministers often work on their own. The two ‘private-office’ rooms have an interconnecting door which is always kept open — Figure 4.1 shows the room layout. The head of the private office (the principal private secretary) and the private secretary who deals with overseas affairs have desks in the room next to the Cabinet room. In the other room sit three private secretaries, handling respectively economic affairs, Parliamentary affairs and home affairs. Crowded into this room are two more desks; one staffed round the clock by a team of duty clerks who provide administrative backup to the private secretaries; the other used by the prime minister’s personal assistant or diary secretary. In 1994 John Major added a fourth private secretary, mainly to assist the overseas secretary, who was found a space across the corridor from the other secretaries.

The Administrative Setting of Cabinet Responsibilities

Since the 1970s the administrative support given to ministers collectively has been reshaped, partly to provide for British membership of the European Community and partly as a result of changes in the conception of managing the civil service. Ideas for improved civil service management and for altering the boundaries of the executive by privatization and hiving-off were put into practice through various extensions of the Cabinet Office. The latter, originally a secretariat serving meetings of the Cabinet and its committees, became a ‘centre of the machine’ in ways which previous generations had not envisaged. The secretary of the Cabinet retained formal responsibility for Cabinet meeting arrangements, security and ‘ceremonial’, i.e. the honours system, and acquired general responsibility for public service management and the machinery of government. A second permanent secretary was added to work alongside the Cabinet secretary on the day-to-day work of these general matters; this official ran the efficiency and restructuring exercises, such as the Next Steps programme, and supervised a set of executive agencies, such as the Recruitment and Assessment Services Agency which carried out routine tasks for the Civil Service Commission. As the organizational diagrams in Figures 8.1 to 8.3 show, the civil service annexe to the Cabinet Secretariat has undergone frequent rearrangement, when duties shifted between Treasury and Cabinet Office or because of civil service reforms and the managerial ideas of particular ministers, notably Michael Heseltine in 1995.