The way our constitution operates in practice is inevitably more important than its theory.
The aim of a constitution is to provide good government, not as an end in itself. This makes the evidence given recently to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee by Darren Jones, who served Sir Keir Starmer as First Secretary to the Prime Minister, so important.
Select committees of the House of Commons vary in their quality. Some concentrate on grandstanding to little effect, some have so wide a remit that their search beam alights on a topic for a moment but then moves on, while some of the relatively unknown ones quietly get on with the detailed work of scrutinising, in a way that is genuinely informative and may lead to better government.
The rather dryly titled Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee is one of the latter, as it looks at how we are governed and watches the work of the Cabinet Office.
The Cabinet Office is the coordinating centre of government. It is the most important ministry after the Treasury, but far less well known. The Prime Minister is notionally the head of it, partly because of his role as Minister for the Civil Service, but it is run by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
It is the department in charge of the Constitution, a responsibility currently held by Hamish Falconer as Minister of State for Intergovernmental Relations and European Relations, and the depository of various tasks that no one else wants or that the Prime Minister does not know where else to place.
Unfortunately, it has to coordinate with no effective coordinating power. This is where Darren Jones’s evidence is so noteworthy. In his presentation to the Committee, he says, “Cross-departmental working is also just very hard. Constitutional norms and a tendency to protect the way the system works eventually stopped it being effective.”
He went on to say, “I would be told all the time that there were things I could not do because of the Constitution, and I would often reply with, ‘The Constitution is unwritten, so if I decide to do something, it changes; therefore, why can’t I do it?’” Not surprisingly, civil servants had no response to this, but still did not do what was asked of them.
This fits in with my own experience. When trying to get civil servants back into the office or to reduce their numbers, each department is separate, so no cross-government decision was made and some ministers were quite determined to protect their departments.
