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Summary
We have previously published draft bills on the civil service and to legislate for other important ministerial powers—the 'prerogative powers'—which are currently exercised without parliamentary approval. The March 2008 government white paper on constitutional renewal and the accompanying draft bill contain proposals in most of these areas.
In this Report we make constructive suggestions for improving the Government's proposals, to ensure that when a bill is presented in Parliament it will be a landmark piece of legislation. Our aim is to open up the secret powers of the Executive to parliamentary approval and scrutiny.
We find much to welcome in the Government's proposals for the civil service. After four years of consultation, it is now time to move to legislation. It is more than 150 years since the idea of a Civil Service Act was first mooted. The core values of the service—integrity, honesty, objectivity, impartiality—and its key characteristics—recruitment on merit and the ability to serve governments from across the political spectrum—have stood the test of time. The purpose of legislation would be to protect these core values and key characteristics against the kind of government that might seek to undermine them, in an environment where the understandings that exist now between civil servants, Ministers, and the Civil Service Commissioners had broken down. We make a number of suggestions to strengthen the provisions in the draft bill with this aim in mind.
The Government's proposals on the other prerogative powers within our remit are disappointingly limited, especially given the Prime Minister's undertaking to entrust "more power to Parliament and the British people". What proposals there are would instead ask Parliament's permission to continue with something akin to the status quo, and they contain loopholes which would allow the Executive to bypass Parliament at their discretion. We acknowledge that it would be foolish to establish a parliamentary safeguard which imperilled the success of military operations, but we find that the Government's draft resolution on war-making powers leaves too much discretion in the hands of the Prime Minister. We describe the need to seek retrospective approval for urgent military operations as the price of democracy, and as a risk that Prime Ministers should have to weigh up before taking the extraordinary step of entering into a conflict without a prior mandate from the House of Commons. Treaties are not like wars, where the ability to take a decision instantaneously can make a real difference to success. Parliaments in other leading democracies have a decisive role to play in the making of treaties. Yet we find that the Government's proposed parliamentary safeguard could be ignored at will, and is therefore no safeguard at all. We urge swift progress on the Government's commitment to legislate on the procedures for issuing passports and we look forward to seeing the results soon of a wider review of the prerogative powers.
The Constitutional Renewal Bill, when it is finally presented to Parliament, should be a seminal piece of legislation, reshaping the relationship between Government, Parliament, the courts and the people. Our recommendations are designed to help ensure that this is the case. |
