At the outbreak of the first world war Britain was governed indisputably by a Cabinet of nineteen men deliberating in private and relatively informally about the major business of state. No one but a minister could be present and the only formal record of their deliberations was contained in the letter written by the Prime Minister to the Sovereign after each meeting to tell him what had been decided. Ministers themselves were responsible for telling their departments, when they were affected, what the decisions were, and there are some well known stories which indicate that they themselves were not always certain what conclusion had been reached. When an issue was hotly debated, the Cabinet might continue its deliberations over a number of days while a compromise was thrashed out: only rarely was there resort to a committee to try to resolve the dispute. The work of government was not extensive although concern for the condition of the people was already widening its sphere of action and changing the character of its work.
Almost half a century later when John Mackintosh was asked to help in the revision of a classic account of the workings of Cabinet government, he concluded that the changes which had taken place since the second world war had made it necessary to start afresh. The first version of his study of the British Cabinet, published in 1962, suggested that it was misleading to characterise British government as Cabinet government and he described how the country was "governed by the Prime Minister who leads, co‑ordinates and maintains a series of ministers all of who are advised and backed by the civil service. Some decisions are taken by the Prime Minister alone, some in consultations between him and the senior ministers, while others are left to heads of department, the Cabinet, Cabinet Committees, or the permanent officials. Of these bodies the Cabinet holds the central position because though it does not often initiate policy or govern in that sense, most decisions pass through it or are reported to it and cabinet Ministers can complain that they have not been informed or consulted."
In contrast the distinguished Dutch political scientist, Hans Daalder, when he published his classic study of Cabinet Reform in Britain 1914‑63 less than two years later came to the conclusion that the place of the Cabinet in the British political system had not changed fundamentally since before the first world war. The Cabinet in his view remained a committee of leading parliamentarians drawn from the majority party in the House of Commons who together took or approved the main political decisions. Daalder was perfectly prepared to admit that changes in the scope of British government had brought about considerable modifications in the structure of the Cabinet and the way in which it operated. However in Daalder's view these had not destroyed the centrality of the Cabinet as a decision‑making body.
Before exploring these changes it is worth examining the reasons for them. They relate to the growing burden of government. That the work has increased and has gone on increasing is obvious from a whole battery of statistics. The most obvious measures are the changes in the size of the civil service and the growth in the percentage of the gross national product that is devoted to public expenditure. Supply expenditure which in 1910 represented only 6% of GNP had doubled by 1930 and had risen to a total of 22% by 1960. More startling still is the percentage of the gross national product which is devoted to public expenditure. By 1961 this was reckoned to be about 42.5%. On the revised definitions which were adopted in 1976 that figure would have been reduced to a little under 34%. By 1967‑8 using the new definitions, public expenditure as a percentage of GDP had reached 40.2% and on other earlier definitions stood at almost 52%. Although the upward trend was temporarily reversed by Roy Jenkins, the ratio was again on its way upward in the later years of the Heath Government, and in the first flush of a new Labour government, even on the new definitions, it reached the dizzy height of 45.6% before falling back post 1976 to just under 40%. The reasons are to be found in the sterling crisis of 1976 and the decision to call in the International Monetary Fund, an episode of which you will no doubt hear more than enough during this course. Under Mrs Thatcher's government reality departed from rhetoric to such an extent that the ratio again rose. Although the rise has been checked more recently the ratio is still well above the 40% mark.
In some ways the figures for the growth in the civil service are even more striking. From 229,000 in 1914 the number of non industrial civilian staff had risen to 387,000 by 1939 and by 1950 to 684,000. By 1976 the figure had fallen to 572,000 but this is more than a little misleading. In fact, as Brown and Steel calculate, on a strictly equivalent basis the size of the non industrial civil service was about three and a half times greater than it had been in 1939 and about 50% greater than it had been in 1960. Over the years which Daalder studied there was an even faster rate of growth in the higher civil service, then designated the administrative class. From less than 500 in 1914 there was a sevenfold growth to about 3500 in 1955, and the number of Treasury personnel grew almost tenfold in the same period to about 1300. That suggests that the changes are very imperfectly measured in quantitative terms. It is not just the volume of work which has increased but its complexity and interrelatedness.
This is only in part the result of the new responsibilities taken on board by government. Certainly they could not simply be aggregated in separate compartments as had been done in the nineteenth century boards and was still possible with the extensive but rather ad hoc social services of the 1930s. As a result of the Beveridge report the post war concept of the State was that of a social service state in which these things were the concomitant of citizenship. Central to that concept was the guarantee of full employment and that in turn entailed continual government management of the economy. The emphasis on economic management implied qualitative changes in the way in which the individual functions of government were discharged. Lord Bridges then head of the treasury and of the civil service, spelt out the consequences in 1950: "it is economic factors more than anything else which have compelled Departments to work more closely together . No government can today discharge its responsibilities unless it has a coherent economic policy, and such a policy must be framed after bringing together the views of separate departments, while its execution demands constant consultation between them." But the increasing scale of government and the public reluctance to think that almost any sphere of human conduct lay outside its remit would in any case have meant that decisions taken in one sphere were likely to have repercussions in others. The civil service has moved out of the restricted environment of Whitehall as extensive service functions have been added to purely regulatory work. International factors and more recently Britain's place in the European Community have complicated what were once purely national decision making processes.
Daalder identified a number of trends in the development of British central government, which he grouped into six broad categories. The first two reflect the problems of an overburdened government: the increased workload on ministers and hence their tendency to leave more to civil servants; the need for more departments; constant pressure to enlarge the Cabinet, which is resisted because it destroys all chance of effective discussion; and the fragmentation of decision taking. Clearly this increases the problem of co‑ordination within government and a number of steps can be identified which have clearly reflected a conscious attempt to grapple with it. More Cabinet meetings and a greater formalisation of business, the introduction of an extensive system of Cabinet committees and the use of a secretariat to service them, the use of co‑ ordinating ministers, and, more recently, the creation of giant departments and the Central Policy Review Staff as committees were seen to be as much a problem as a solution.
All of this had its effect on the ministerial hierarchy. The most obvious change, the reinforcement of the Prime Minister's position has been the focus of most recent debate, but equally important in Daalder's eyes were the strengthened position of other senior ministers, the changed role of the sinecure offices, and the creation of a ministerial hierarchy with Ministers of State playing a key role in many departments and even junior ministers being given responsibility for blocks of work where once their role was largely Parliamentary. In a sense this has been the political answer to changes in the relationship between ministers and civil servants.
Daalder noted the way in which the administrative apparatus grew both in size and complexity and concluded that it had become more and more difficult to direct it. Ministerial control over the civil service therefore became more problematical, and it is not just Labour ministers who have expressed concern that they may have become prisoners of their civil servants. This is the subject of a later lecture, and the extent to which such feelings are justified is one of the major concerns of this course. Here I simply want to note that what is felt about the activities of Sir Humphrey is mirrored in the debate about the roles of civil servants in the co‑ ordination of policy across Whitehall. Interdepartmental committees of officials are the target here, and there is a widespread if slightly erroneous belief that behind every ministerial committee there is an official committee which, if it does not pull the strings, at least to vary the metaphor, doctors the pitch on which ministers play.
Many decisions, however, have been removed from the direct control of Whitehall altogether. Much of the development of the welfare state has taken place under the official auspices of local government. The eighties not only saw Whitehall exert a steadily tightening financial grip on its activities, clearly at the behest of a Treasury worried about burgeoning public expenditure, but a growing disposition to take more control of policy also. The 1988 Education Act is an obvious example. However, it is not at all easy to run things from Whitehall and there has been a tendency to create statutory bodies of one kind or another to manage whole areas of service delivery. Nowhere does the artificial distinction between policy and administration show up worse than in bodies like the Civil Aviation Authority or the National Curriculum Council. Appointed by the Minister and responsive to him, they are nonetheless not under his control and much that they do is clearly policy making within the broad framework of what is laid down by statute. Again fragmentation and bureaucratisation loom, but a good deal of the reason for such developments goes beyond the administrative complexity of the modern state to its need for expertise. This is another trend noted by Daalder, and as the course develops you will no doubt spot the increasing part played by scientists and economists in government, the role too of advisory bodies of one kind or another, and the potential consequences for ministerial control.
Daalder's final theme was the changing relationship between ministers and Parliament but this is less new than he supposed. It had already gone a very long way before 1914 and owes much to the development of the modern party system. Although party is a major variable in the policy making system, it is best looked at when we come to study the power of the Prime Minister and the origins of policy and I propose to say no more about it today.
For the most part clearly the trends which Daalder identified in the early sixties have continued over the last thirty years. Two themes have dominated debate about the central executive, although as both John Barnes and Patrick Dunleavy note, they are hard to reconcile. The first concerns the power of the civil service, the second the power of the Prime Minister. Ever since Mackintosh's findings were brilliantly vulgarised by the late Richard Crossman, who argued in a new introduction to Bagehot that the Cabinet had joined the dignified elements of the constitution, there has been an ongoing debate between the proponents of Prime Ministerial power and those who argue that Britain still has a collegial system. There can be no real doubt that the position of the Prime Minister has been reinforced, but most political scientists feel that the case for his overweening role has been overstated. If there is a growing feeling that the description Cabinet government, when used of Britain, seriously understates the crucial role played by the Prime Minister in the system, the term used by George Jones "Prime Minister in Cabinet" is closer to reality than Presidential analogies.
Still more to the point, there is a general consensus amongst present day senior civil servants that the centre of government is surprisingly weak. Let me give you some quotes. The late Lord Armstrong ‑ not Robert but William ‑ who moved from being the permanent head of the Treasury to headship of the entire civil service, used to argue that government in Britain is best characterised as a "government of departments." He emphasised that it was because they were "to a very great extent independent entities and in a very real sense masters of their own affairs" that we had a situation in which not the Prime Minister but the Cabinet is in charge of affairs.
However, Lord Hunt, Cabinet Secretary from 1973‑79, concluded that, difficult as it was for a department to make hard choices and implement the preferred policies, it was far harder for the Cabinet to develop a strategy for the Government as a whole. "Cabinets are not well placed to exercise this role of continuing strategic oversight alongside the taking of specific decisions," he told the Royal Institute of Public Administration in 1983. "Cabinet Ministers are heavily preoccupied with their departmental work and find it difficult to make time to think about the problems of other Ministers when those do not concern them directly: and of course the more they get involved with their own work the harder it is for them to see the Cabinet strategy wood from the departmental policy trees." There was therefore a "hole at the centre of government" which had to be filled. Sir Douglas Wass, Permanent Secretary of the Treasury from 1974 and Joint Head of the Civil Service from 1981‑83 put the point even more strongly. "The form and structure of a modern Cabinet and the diet it consumes almost oblige it to function like a group of individuals, and not as a unity," he wrote: "Indeed for each minister, the test of his success in office lies in his ability to deliver his departmental goals.... No minister I know of has won political distinction by his performance in Cabinet or by his contribution to collective decision taking.... The first consequence is that the general thrust of the government's policies is seldom if ever reviewed and assessed by Cabinet; strategic changes of course in response to substantial shifts in circumstance are not subjected to collective consideration; and the ordering of priorities is discussed in only the most general terms.... The second consequence is that Cabinet does not have adequate safeguards against a strong departmental minister. An issue which comes to Cabinet is presented by the minister whose interests and reputation are involved, and he is bound to be partisan. No mechanism exists to enable the Cabinet to challenge his view unless the interests of another minister are involved, and even then the challenge itself may be partisan. Cabinet can too easily be railroaded." Sir Kenneth Berrill, sometime head of the Central Policy Review Staff and later Chief Economic Adviser to the Government, when making a case for a Prime Minister's Department, argued that because the role of the department "was to fight for their own programmes, their own public expenditure, their own share of the legislative timetable", it was inevitable that they should come to see the world and any proposed action in terms of the possible effect on their own particular interests and objectives and he added that this was so much the case that insiders could predict with a high degree of certainty just what line a department was going to take on any given topic. Predictably the longer a minister is in a department, the greater the tendency for him to see matters increasingly through their eyes and less in terms of the strategy of the government as a whole. "Of course this is never universally true," Berrill adds, "but it would be strange if it were not usually so, given the very long hours they spend immersed in the details of their department's affairs and the continual batterings they get on those affairs in the media, in Parliament and from the ever more professionally organised pressure groups." It is Berrill's contention, surely undisputed, that the sum of spending department's interests can be a long way from adding up to a coherent strategy, that no one is more aware of this than the Prime Minister, and that incoming ministers speedily donning their departmental spectacles may well be worst placed to see what is happening.
It is small wonder that Crossman concluded that perhaps "the biggest task of the Prime Minister in any radical Government is to stop this fragmentation of the Cabinet into a mere collection of departmental heads. i
In this context it is instructive to recall some remarks made by a leading Labour Minister, Barbara Castle, when she was reflecting on her experiences as a minister for the benefit of a civil service seminar. Before she served in government she had the naive belief that Cabinets "were groups of politicians who met together and said these are the policies that we are elected on, now what will be our political priorities? And they would reach certain political decisions and then would refer those to an official committee to work out the administrative implications of what they had decided." She was "soon disabused of that.... I suddenly discovered that I was never allowed to take anything to Cabinet unless it had been processed by the official committee. In the official committee the departments had all their inter‑departmental battles and probably made their concessions to each other. The departments did the horse‑trading and having struck their bargains they then briefed their Ministers on it, and so at cabinet meetings I suddenly found I wasn't in a political caucus at all. I was faced by departmental enemies."
Ironically, Mrs Thatcher, by insisting that decisions should as far as possible be taken at Cabinet Committees, opened up the possibility that the Cabinet might revert to being a more political forum, and under the more relaxed chairmanship of John Major, this has certainly seemed to be the case. "She did not see it as a body to take decisions, except for decisions of the very greatest importance," Nicholas Ridley reports: "She saw it as the forum in which all important activities of government were brought together and reported upon. She saw it as the body to approve individual ministers' policies. She used it as a tactical group to discuss the immediate problems of the day." Cabinet business came under four headings ‑ Parliamentary Affairs, Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs and Community Affairs. Any special topic was then taken. "One could raise any matter that troubled one, or that one thought that one's colleagues should know about," Ridley recalls, and he notes also that all decisions of importance were reported to Cabinet, except those which were market sensitive or just plain "sensitive." Only rarely did anyone try to reopen a question because he did not like the decision, and it is quite clear that Mrs Thatcher discouraged votes in Cabinet. "She didn't see it as that sort of body."
We are dealing in the main with the less contentious but no less far reaching proposition that the Cabinet has changed from a small and intimate discussion group into a large and complicated piece of administrative machinery. Decisions once made collectively in Cabinet are made now by Cabinet committee or even in less formalised gatherings of ministers. Many indeed argue that they are effectively made in the official committees which parallel the ministerial committees and predigest the questions which they are to consider.
If we are to understand the functions of a particular institution, it is often helpful to glance at its origins. In the nineteenth century, open discussion in Cabinet could be prefaced by informal consultations amongst its leading members and during the long recess decisions were often left to the few ministers remaining in town. During the Crimean war an actual war committee sat but its decisions were always gone over agin in full Cabinet. Later in the century it was quite common to use committees of the cabinet to prepare bills. The bases of the bill disestablishing the Irish church, for example, were discussed at two sessions of the Cabinet and the detail left to a committee. Dilke was given a committee to help with the 1884 redistribution bill, but used it little, while in the case of Bruce's licensing bill in 1872 a committee had to come to the rescue of what was little more than an outline submitted by the minister concerned. Gladstone shrewdly noted that a "committee keeps the Cabinet quiet", but that did not prevent him from making the error of drafting the first Home Rule Bill himself with the help only of the Irish Secretary. It proved a mistake and he did not repeat the error in 1893, when the second Home Rule Bill was carefully worked over by a committee which contained all the interested parties. By the time Sir Coutney Ilbert wrote his book on Legislative Forms and Methods at the turn of the century, reference to a Cabinet committee was thought part of the regular procedure. Despite textbook accounts therefore which suggest that the Cabinet Committee system is a post second world war phenomenon, the use of committees can be traced to the nineteenth century and, as Mrs Bennett will tell you in next week's lecture, they were in common use between the wars.
If the earliest Cabinet Committees traceable seem to have been used in the main to draft legislation, their task often involved the need to settle the details of policy also. It is not altogether surprising therefore to find that on occasion fairly major issues were discussed and sometimes settled in committee, although always ad referendum to the Cabinet. There is no instance, as far as I know, of committees settling anything important without the Cabinet having a chance to go over and revise their work. When the Liberal Government contemplated giving home rule to Ireland in 1911, the task of framing the necessary legislation was handed over to a small group of ministers chaired by the Lord Chancellor and including the Irish Secretary, the Home Secretary and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Their discussions centred on the possible exclusion of Ulster from the terms of the bill and the problem of Irish representation at Westminster once the bill was passed. The first draft of the bill was ready by July, but it had to wait on the passage of the Parliament act, and the Cabinet did not discuss it until 6 February 1912. The question of what to do about Ulster was then debated at great length before the conclusions of the Cabinet committee were endorsed. Privately the Cabinet resolved that they might have to come back to special treatment for Ulster, but the bill as introduced was to apply to the whole of Ireland.
It would be wrong to give the impression, however, that even before the first world war committees were not appointed for other purposes than legislation. In January 1911, for example, a Cabinet Committee consisting of the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor, and three other ministers (Crewe, Morley and Runciman) was set up to consider proposals made by the German Chancellor for a naval arms limitation agreement and a political understanding between Britain and Germany. Another committee scrutinised the naval estimates for 1911‑12. The key decisions on the defence of Ulster against possible insurgency were the product of an investigation by a Cabinet committee and they were implemented as the result of a small ministerial meeting in No 10 attended only by a handful of ministers, but with the Prime Minister himself in the chair. Indeed as early as 1870 such a process can be detected in a decision by Gladstone's Cabinet to appoint five ministers to consider whether the Suez Canal was to be considered available in time of war.
By far the most important committee before the first world war was the Committee of Imperial Defence, and this, Mackintosh observes, was because the Cabinet was not a good body for carrying out long and detailed enquiries, hearing evidence and writing reports. There is no need to describe the earlier experiments with defence committees which preceded the establishment of the Committee in 1902, but it is worth observing that in its initial form, the Committee seems to have been conceived as something more than a Cabinet committee. Ne At first it hough a consultative and not an executive body, advisory to the Lord President, and within a year to the Prime Minister himself, its initial task of surveying the defence needs of the Empire gave place to a more deliberative body settling what might be called matters of grand strategy. Much of its detailed work was carried out through sub‑committees, its decisions were minuted, and from 1904 it had both a secretary and a permanent staff. Although Mackintosh noted that the committee met weekly under Balfour's chairmanship, he tended to play down its importance. D'Ombrain, however, noted the extent to which in its early years it actually settled Imperial strategy, invariably favouring the Admiralty's line, and how as a result an effort was made to consolidate its position "as the directing brain of the National Policy of defence." With the coming of the military entente with France, the community of interest between the Admiralty and the CID secretariat waned, while the incoming Liberal Government convened it less often. Increasingly the Admiralty and the War office went their own way, and the secretariat concentrated on useful but essentially minor work. It was, however, at meetings of the CID in 1911 that discrepancies between military and naval contingency planning first became apparent. However the same meetings also revealed just how controversial joint military planning with the French could b e in a Liberal Government, and thereafter, as both Asquith and Haldane noted, it abandoned policy in favour of factual information and technical advice. It is quite wrong therefore to see it as the direct ancestor of Lloyd George's War Cabinet, although its secretariat and some of its practices were taken over by that body.
After the outbreak of war in 1914 the Cabinet decided to vest the conduct of an operation so vital to its early end as the Dardanelles campaign in a Cabinet committee and that committee was serviced by the CID secretariat. In turn the Dardanelles committee gave place to a war committee but like its Crimean forebear, it was an instrument for predigesting issues. It had no executive power. The War Cabinet originated in the reflections of a number of politicians and one civil servant, the secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Marice Hankey, on the defects of the war committee as an instrument to wage war. Since the War Cabinet was composed of only five ministers, only one of whom had departmental responsibilities, much of the work had to be done by the use of an extensive committee system, and that necessitated the creation of a Cabinet secretariat to keep the committees and the War Cabinet in touch and to ensure that the policy decisions taken by the War Cabinet were translated into executive action. Almost inevitably the task of creating the secretariat fell to Hankey and this in turn has given rise to the myth that the War Cabinet was the lineal successor of the pre‑war C.I.D.
The War Cabinet survived the war, but in the face of political pressures, was abandoned later in 1919. Apart from the key innovation of a Cabinet secretariat, therefore, and one or two new departments, little of the machinery created under Lloyd George survived the war. Even the Cabinet secretariat subsequently came under fire as an instrument of Prime Ministerial dictatorship, but thanks to Hankey's astute lobbying and the fact that Lloyd George's successor, Bonar Law, had wartime experience of its value, it survived. Had it not done so the Cabinet Committee system, as we know it today could hardly have developed. During the post‑war coalition, while there were few Cabinet Committees, Lloyd George continued to use conferences of ministers to achieve the decisions he wanted. It is easy to see in these meetings Cabinet committees by another name. One committee, that on Home Affairs, did survive the war and took on the rather specialist role of approving legislation. Lloyd George also created a standing Finance Committee in 1919, and a year later an Unemployment Committee. The latter was to become a familiar feature of inter‑war governments, so much so that Naylor in his study of Hankey describes it as a standing committee of the Cabinet. It was never quite that.
The inter‑war period saw the steadily increasing use of Cabinet committees and while it would be wrong in my opinion to say that there was a committee system, there were committees which lasted the lifetime of an administration and some like the Foreign Policy Committee in the late 30s which survived a change of Prime Minister. The regularity with which one or two committees appear in the list of committees set up by each administration testifies to the importance of the advice offered by the Cabinet secretariat. In the light of past experience Hankey would advise the incoming Prime Minister about the kind of committees a government would find useful during its term in office.
When war came in 1939, Neville Chamberlain returned to the tried and tested Lloyd George model of the War Cabinet, although his version contained many more departmental ministers than that which had operated in 1918. Once again much of the work had to be done by committee but there is little evidence at the start of the war of clear thinking about the pattern of committees that were needed. Nor was Churchill the man to put this right. He took the chair of the relevant defence committees for operations and supply, but came increasingly to neglect them as he found his best instrument for waging war was his relationship with the Chiefs of Staff and staff conferences at Downing Street. Fortunately Churchill had in his deputy Prime Minister, the Labour leader, Clement Attlee, a man who had thought long and hard about the organisation of government and the pattern of civil committees which emerged in 1940 owed much to him. Perhaps the systematic use of committees can be said therefore to date to 1940. The novelty of the system, it should be observed, lay less in the extensive use of Cabinet Committees than in their systematic use to prevent business reaching the cabinet agenda. In the light of the report made on the system by the Machinery of Government Committee chaired by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Anderson, Attlee made revisions to the system and used it extensively during his period as Prime Minister. It has remained a major feature of all subsequent Governments, but the way in which it works will be the subject of next week's lecture. What I want to do today is to say something of Colin Seymour Ure's charge that the Cabinet seems to have disintegrated.
His case is largely based on the findings of John Mackintosh and the reflections of Patrick Gordon Walker ‑ himself a Cabinet Minister in the Attlee and Wilson Governments ‑ about Cabinet Government. As far back as 1924 Beatrice Webb had concluded that the "Cabinet does not govern" and, on the basis of his research, Mackintosh agrees: "Some decisions," he writes, "are taken by the Premier alone, some in consultations between him and the senior ministers, while others are left to heads of departments, to the full Cabinet, one of the many Cabinet Committees, or to the permanent officials." ii
In fact the Prime Minister can do surprisingly little on his own, although that little is important. His most important role is to advise the Queen whom to appoint to office and to which office she should appoint them. He also determines which of those offices should be included in the Cabinet. Similarly and without consultation, he can put a term to a Cabinet's existence by his own resignation or by recommending the dissolution of Parliament. This last right has a somewhat curious provenance since no Prime Minister before 1914 seems to have thought that dissolution was anything other than a Cabinet matter. Haldane advised the King otherwise in 1916, and both Lloyd George and Bonar Law subsequently agreed in 1918 that it was a matter for the Prime Minister alone. Balfour also agreed and so advised the King and no Cabinet has subsequently challenged the view that this power properly belongs to the Prime Minister alone.
By convention the Prime Minister also has the power to reshape Whitehall. Wilson in 1964 decided that there should be a Ministry of Technology and a Ministry of Technology was duly created. Callaghan on becoming Prime Minister in 1976 decided that the Department of the Environment should be split and a separate Ministry of Transport revived, and again this happened. Like so many of his powers, these too are circumscribed by political constraints and the need to carry Parliament. The efforts made by Macmillan and Duncan Sandys to strengthen the Ministry of Defence at the expense of the Service departments in 1958 were only partially successful in the face of determined opposition by the latter while Peter Walker in his recent memoir has set out at some length the details of his ultimately unsuccessful campaign to keep energy within the Department of Trade and Industry. Functions are transferred from one minstry to another by order in Council and these are subject to Parliamentary resolution. Where a whole department is to be closed down this has to be an affirmative resolution. Otherwise a negative resolution procedure may be used. But in practice Parliament debates such matters very rarely and, as far as I am aware, it has never managed to alter the Government's mind. Incidentally it may be worth adding that primary legislation is involved if a statutory function is to be abandoned rather than transferred to another department. iii
Only the Prime Minister can call a Cabinet, as George Brown found to his cost in 1968, and he also determines its agenda and the order in which the items are taken. In the middle of the nineteenth century it was open to any Cabinet minister to call his colleagues together, and it was Gladstone, aided and abetted by Disraeli, who put a stop to the practice, so much so in fact that in 1894 he forbade his colleagues to call a Cabinet while he was away on holiday in Biarritz. There has been much fruitless debate over his control of the agenda in particular, but there is no doubt that it exists, that Prime Ministers have used it on occasion to postpone an issue, but that in practice, short of provoking a resignation, no Prime Minister can for long resist taking an item in Cabinet if the minister concerned insists. In this respect as in many others the Westland case is instructive. Most people remember Michael Heseltine being silenced when he tried to raise the matter orally in Cabinet on 12 December and his subsequent protest that his dissent had not been minuted. Few remember that subsequently on 19 December the matter was discussed and the Prime Minister's line that the choice between Sikorsky and the European consortium was a matter for Westland was endorsed. iv It is a point to which I want to return.
This lecture is not primarily concerned, however, with those powers which the Prime Minister enjoys nor with the political limitations upon them. That I will deal with later in the term. What I want to illustrate here is the effect on the process of decision taking of the fact that the Prime Minister has so few formal powers. It is true that wide latitude is conceded to him in emergency, and it may be difficult for a Cabinet to undo what a Prime Minister has done on his own, if only because the subsequent row would do great political damage. Thus Neville Chamberlain in September 1938 invited himself to meet Hitler without consulting the Cabinet ‑ although his motive was primarily a fear of leaks and he had shared the idea with a number of colleagues. Prime Ministerial initiatives of this kind are rare, though not unknown, and one of the more potent grievances held against Mrs Thatcher was her propensity to make policy on the hoof. ?Identity cards.
More normally, and simply because the Prime Minister does not enjoy executive powers, he and the Minister concerned will work together to determine what should happen. Haldane recalled an instance in 1924
What study of the Westland affair also underlines is that when the Prime Minister wished to enforce her view, the only way in which she could do so, short of sacking the dissident Minister, was by seeking authoritative rulings from the Cabinet, something which she did on 19 December 1985 and 9 January 1986. Although Heseltine was prevented from raising the issue orally in Cabinet on 12 December, and subsequently asked for his protest to be recorded in the minutes, Westland was discussed by the full Cabinet on 19 December and a decision reached along the lines indicated by the Prime Minister, that it was for the Westland Board to decide what was best for the company and that ministers should avoid further public comment. Although Heseltine reserved his right to answer factual questions, he seemed to acquiesce in the decision. However when the House was told of it, he showed visible dissent, and there followed a spate of leaks and press briefings by the two departments who were at odds. Matters reached a head over Heseltine's 'factual' replies to questions from the European bidders for Westland, whom he favoured, and the Attorney General's apparently critical letter on the subject was leaked to the Press Association. The rights and wrongs of this episode are not germane to this lecture. What needs to be emphasised is that there was no way to bring Heseltine's unruly behaviour to an end, short of seeking his resignation, other than by calling the cabinet together to insist that all statements should be cleared with the Cabinet Office. Heseltine's walk out followed his refusal to accept the unanimous decision of his colleagues that this should be done.
Textbooks often say that Cabinet Committees "undoubtedly improve the efficiency of the Cabinet machine, keeping the Cabinet agenda free from all but the most important and controversial issues." v It is surprising therefore to learn just how scathing former Ministers can be about the whole structure. Dalton for example wrote in his diaries QUOTE. Joel Barnett, when he was being polite about Cabinet Committees, described them as "just about the worst possible way of arriving at sensible decisions" about complex issues, while on other occasions he described them as a waste of time. The Conservative Machinery of Government Committee in 1965 concluded that all too often they did not search for the best or even a satisfying solution, but simply split the difference. Alternatively the most senior figure present, particularly if he occupied the chair, pulled rank. The concept of the giant department was first elaborated by that policy group, at least in part in the light of experience with the Ministry of Defence, to minimise departmental infighting by bringing more decisions within a department.
Two serious criticisms have been voiced about the effect of the Cabinet Committee system. The first has at least as much to do with the increasing bureaucratisation of the policy‑ making process. If policy is formulated increasingly by civil servants, then the process of predigestion at the official committee level can foreclose options and even determine decisions. This has been a persistent criticism from Labour ministers, but there have been echoes from the Conservative camp also, not least from Aubrey Jones and more recently from Patrick Jenkin. The Cabinet Office would deny that this is the case. Their view is that the official machinery simply processes decisio ns for ministers. It does not seek to take them nor does it wilfully foreclose options. That decisions are deliberately kept away from Cabinet is vehemently denied. The prime consideration is overload and the Cabinet Office does its best to see that decisions are taken well short of the Cabinet if at all possible. The press of business is such that if decisions can be taken elsewhere, officials argue they should be. The Cabinet is then freed for its proper task, that of reaching collective agreement on those issues which are still in dispute and discussing those major questions which are seen to be central to the Government's strategy. However, in this context the gatekeeping role of the Cabinet Office in determining whether an issue goes to committee and, if so, to which committee it is taken becomes something more than just the smooth processing of business. That is why the issue of the Prime Minister's control of the agenda has assumed such prominence in the arguments of those who believe that the Cabinet has ceased to have any real importance. Clearly the Prime Minister, even if he has not the time himself to take part in discussions on each issue, can nevertheless influence their outcome by deciding how they are to be handled and by whom and in such matters he would normally take the advice of the Cabinet Secretary.
It is probably best to deal with the strengths and weaknesses of what has been called the bureaucratic co‑ordination model when we come later in the course to consider the whole question of minister/ civil servant relations, but it is worth observing here that it is by no means the case that every Cabinet Committee has its official counterpart despite what is said in much of the literature.
Arguably the most serious criticism directed at the use of committees is that it fragments the process of decision taking. Indeed Colin Seymour‑Ure has argued that the net result is a process of disintegration. Decisions are taken by procedures and in groups which vary according to the constantly changing pattern of political personalities and events and the Cabinet is no longer central to the process. Seymour‑Ure's principal example is the decision in November 1967 to devalue the pound, but his most interesting example is the decision to accede to a request from the United States that Britain should close the London gold pool in order to facilitate attempts to stabilise the international financial situation. This was a decision effectively taken by the Prime Minister and Chancellor in conjunction with the deputy Governor of the Bank of England and of necessity announced to the House before it could be ratified by the Cabinet. Wilson, by his own account, had wanted to involve the Foreign Secretary also, but claims that he could not be found. Roy Jenkins offers some support for this in his recent memoirs, but by the very nature of the allegation, cannot confirm that it is not true. George Brown, who subsequently resigned over this display of Prime Ministerial government, did not accept the truth of Wilson's claim and has written of his efforts to convene a Cabinet to discuss the issue. In the end the group of ministers he had collected was summoned to No 10 where Brown recalls that he was charged with trying to engineer a palace revolution, and in his absence the Cabinet next morning not only endorsed the decision that had been made but agreed that it could not have been made in any other way.
Neither example involves the use of a Cabinet Committee, and both concern policy towards a highly vulnerable currency. They are not therefore altogether persuasive.
The case for giant departments was originally made in the context of remarks about the proliferation of time‑wasting committees that always went for compromises rather than the best solution. The real difficulty, however, is to see how the Cabinet could do without them.
i. Inside View p.76
ii. The British Cabinet 3rd edition p.541
iii. On all this see Pollitt passim
iv. This is made clear, albeit rather grudgingly, in Linklater and Leigh
v. This particular citation is from Greenwood and Wilson, but it is not atypical