REVIEWS
| Date | 01 December 1994 |
| Published date | 01 December 1994 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1994.tb00812.x |
REVIEWS
MINISTERS AND PARLIAMENT: ACCOUNTABILITY IN THEORY
AND PRACTICE
Diana
Woodhouse
Clarendon
Press,
Oxford,
1994.
312pp.
€35.00
The Scott inquiry and the investigation of the Pergau Dam affair make the publication of
Diana Woodhouse’s volume highly opportune. Both clearly illustrate the inadequacies of
governmental accountability which it
is
her purpose to examine. Scott in particular has
shown that the conventions upon which such accountability rests have become increasingly
unworkable. The most important of these conventions is that of individual ministerial
responsibility.
Ministers
and
Parliament
explores the operation of the convention and a
number of institutional changes affecting it. Special attention is paid to the range of factors
which have limited the convention’s effectiveness and created a situation in which it often
actually frustrates accountability.
Some
40
per cent of the book
is
devoted to a consideration of ministerial resignations.
There was an unusually high incidence of these during the period upon which the study
focuses (1979-1992). Several of these exemplify all too clearly the mismatch between
constitutional theory and practice. The resignations of Leon Brittan and Edwina Currie may
have entailed ’sacrificial responsibility’, but there was no ’explanatory responsibility’.
In
the
words of the Select Committee of Defence in 1986 ‘accountability involves accounting in
detail for actions as a minister’. Neither minister provided such an account. Nor was Lord
Carrington’s much vaunted ‘honourable sacrifice’ accompanied by full admission of fault.
The reform of the select committee system in 1979 was intended to improve the ability of
the Commons to scrutinize the executive and thereby to render it more accountable.
However, the limitations on the committees’ powers
has
inhibited their capacity to achieve
this.
The absence
of
an obligation to answer questions enabled the ex-ministers Brittan and
Currie to avoid explaining their actions. The application of the doctrine
of
individual
ministerial responsibility as it relates
to
civil servants acts as a check upon the information
committees can obtain for them, too. The Osmotherly Rules give practical expression to the
government’s rejection of direct accountability of civil servants to select committees whose
independence has been further undermined by political interference like Nicholas
Winterton’s exclusion from the Health Committee.
If
parliamentary reform has done little to improve accountability, some aspects of civil
service reform have exposed, indeed accentuated, weaknesses in the system
of
scrutiny. The
’managerialist’ thrust
of
such reform has been designed to improve internal accountability
to
the minister. But it has potentially undesirable consequences
for
accountability to Parlia-
ment. The Next Steps agencies are
a
case in point. Only with considerable difficulty was the
Public
Administration Vol.
72
Winter 1994 (611-619)
Q
Basil
Blackwell
Ltd. 1994,108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4
~JF,
UK
and
238
Main Street, Cambridge,
MA
02142,
USA.
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