Power Held in Layers
No single person or body holds all the power to govern the United Kingdom. It is split across layers, and each layer has a different job.
The layers are the monarch, the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Parliament, the civil service and the courts. No single written document sets them out. The arrangement comes from Acts of Parliament, court judgments and habits that governments have followed for so long that they now count as rules. Those habits are called conventions.
The Monarch: The Name on the Paper
Government in the UK acts in the name of “the Crown”, and the word has two meanings. One is the monarch as a person. The other is the state’s legal power to act. When a prosecution is brought “by the Crown”, it is brought by the state, not by the person on the throne.
The monarch still has formal roles and jobs to do. The monarch invites the person who can command a majority in the House of Commons to form a government, gives Royal Assent to turn a Bill into an Act, and opens each session of Parliament. In each case the monarch acts on the advice of ministers. The last refusal of Royal Assent was in 1708, when Queen Anne, who reigned from 1702 to 1714, declined to sign the Scottish Militia Bill.
Walter Bagehot, a Victorian journalist and editor of The Economist, wrote in 1867 that a monarch has three rights: to be consulted, to encourage and to warn. His list remains a common summary of the role.
The Prime Minister: The Head of the Government
Voters at a general election choose MPs, not a Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is the MP who can command a majority in the House of Commons, usually the leader of the largest party. Because parties can change their leader between elections, the UK has had Prime Ministers who took office without a general election.
The office grew by custom. Sir Robert Walpole, who led the government from 1721 to 1742, is usually counted as the first. An Act of Parliament did not recognise the office until 1937. The Prime Minister chairs the Cabinet, the group of senior ministers who head the government departments, and decides who sits in it.
One feature sets the arrangement apart from many other democracies. Ministers must sit in Parliament, in the Commons or the Lords. The government is drawn from the legislature, and so it depends on it. In the United States, by contrast, the president and the cabinet stand outside Congress. A UK government that cannot win votes in the Commons struggles to govern.
Parliament: The Permission
Parliament passes the laws and approves taxes and spending. A government that loses the confidence of the House of Commons is expected to resign or ask the voters to decide.
Parliament also checks the government between elections. Select committees are small groups of MPs that question ministers and officials, department by department. The National Audit Office examines how departments spend public money and reports to Parliament, and the Public Accounts Committee, by convention chaired by an opposition MP, questions officials about what it finds.
The Civil Service: Who Does the Work
Ministers come and go. Civil servants stay. They are recruited on merit through open competition, a rule now written into law, and are expected to serve governments of any party. Each department is run day to day by a Permanent Secretary, and the Cabinet Secretary is the most senior civil servant at the centre of government.
Civil servants are described in law as servants of the Crown. That means they serve the state, not a party. The minister sets the direction and answers to Parliament. Officials advise and carry it out. A Permanent Secretary is also the department’s Accounting Officer, answerable to Parliament for how its money is spent. If a minister insists on a spending decision that the official has objected to, the official can ask for the instruction in writing, and Parliament’s auditors are told.
The Courts: The Edge
Some government powers do not come from any Act. They descend from the old powers of the monarch and are called the royal prerogative. Making treaties and deploying the armed forces are examples. Judges decide where those powers end.
In 2019 the Supreme Court ruled that a five-week suspension of Parliament, advised by the Prime Minister, was unlawful. The court held that it stopped Parliament doing its job without good reason. The case showed that even a power exercised in the monarch’s name is open to challenge in court.
Why It Looks Like This
Nobody designed it. Each change moved power from one layer to another, and the old name stayed on the door.
In the 1530s Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII, broke with Rome by Act of Parliament rather than by royal order. In the 1640s a long dispute between Charles I and Parliament turned into civil war, and Charles I was executed in 1649. His son Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660. The Bill of Rights of 1689 then ended the Crown’s claimed power to suspend laws without Parliament’s consent. Since then, powers that began with the monarch have increasingly been used by ministers answerable to Parliament.
Flexible or Unclear
The arrangement can be read two ways, and both readings have defenders.
Read as flexible, the layers have absorbed a hereditary monarchy, a wider vote, two world wars and a change in the country’s links with Europe without a new founding document, with Acts of Parliament changing them step by step.
Read as unclear, no single document says who holds what, and the answer to many questions is “convention”, which only works while the people involved agree to follow it. Both readings use the same facts.
Topics: #InOtherWords #UKConstitution #ExecutivePower #Crown #PrimeMinister #CivilService
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