Today the Unit published Monitor 89, providing an analysis of constitutional events over the last four months. This post by Alan Renwick and Meg Russell, which also serves as the issue’s lead article, highlights welcome action by the government on devolution, commitment to the rule of law and the removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords, but calls for stronger action on wider Lords reform, progress on the promised Ethics and Integrity Commission, and action on the pre-election pledge to strengthen parliamentary scrutiny of legislation. It warns that the governments of the UK must strive to maintain healthy checks and balances, avoid polarisation, and foster open political discourse at a time when events in the US are showing the dangers of not doing so.

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Today the Constitution Unit publishes a wide-ranging new report. The Constitutional Landscape: Options for Reform briefly summarises 31 areas of constitutional policy, describing the current state of affairs and the options for reform. In this post Lisa James, one of the report’s authors, explores its contents.

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Today the Unit published Monitor 84, providing analysis of constitutional events over the last four months. In this post, which also serves as the issue’s lead article, Meg Russell and Alan Renwick argue that while Rishi Sunak promised to place constitutional propriety at the forefront of his government, he has failed to meet the standards he set.

When Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister in October, he made a noble promise to head a government of ‘integrity, professionalism and accountability’. These were welcome words, and they defined standards that all governments should be held to. Sunak’s government is performing better against those standards than did its two immediate predecessors. Nevertheless, there are increasing concerns that it is still falling short, with potentially harmful consequences for the quality of governance and for public confidence.

Sunak inherited a difficult legacy from Boris Johnson (and Liz Truss, whose time in office was brief but eventful), and a difficult and divided governing party. Johnson has continued to cast a long shadow in the months since the last edition of Monitor. Conservative Party divisions have come, if anything, even more to the fore.

The most dramatic single constitutional event has been Johnson’s conflict with the House of Commons Privileges Committee. Its investigation into whether he deliberately misled parliament over partygate attracted significant attention, first through the former Prime Minister’s appearance in front of the committee, and subsequently through events around the publication of its report. Apprised of the committee’s conclusions, Johnson chose to resign his seat rather than contest his case in parliament (and possibly with the voters of Uxbridge and South Ruislip), and he and his supporters chose instead to rubbish the committee. The shock of a former Prime Minister facing parliamentary sanctions for such behaviour was only heightened by this undignified response – which triggered the committee to issue a further damning report.

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The government has now published its response to the Constitution Committee’s report on the role of the Lord Chancellor and government law officers, making clear it will take no action based on the committee’s recommendations. Will Knatchbull discusses the key findings of the report and argues that in some cases the committee has expressed clear policy preferences but then declined to recommend mechanisms to implement them.

The House of Lords Constitution Committee published its report on the role of the Lord Chancellor and the law officers (legal ministers as a collective) on 18 January. Since the changes made by the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, further reforms have been considered in reports from the Lords Constitution Committee and the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, a government consultation and a white paper. Ultimately, very little reform or reversal has occurred since the 2005 Act, and the government’s response to the report (published on 17 March), made clear that it will not review the existing arrangements.

The overall message of this latest report makes three important and related points: the value of the rule of law, the centrality of the legal ministers in being seen to uphold it within government, and the required character of the legal ministers to be able to do so. It is well summarised in this paragraph:

The thread running through this report is that the rule of law is vitally important to the health of our democracy. Whatever formal reforms might be contemplated, appointing those with the correct character, authority, intellect and independence is the best way to ensure that the Lord Chancellor and the Law Officers are able to defend it. [emphasis added]

This is an important statement and one that cannot easily be disputed. This blogpost will briefly examine three elements of the report: the engagement with the international rule of law, the nature of the role of Lord Chancellor and possibilities for reform of the role of the law officers. I will suggest the report is a step in the right direction. However, it may be too trusting of the political system and the politicians operating in it to produce and appoint individuals of the correct experience and calibre that would enable them to be the fierce guardians of the rule of law that the report envisages.

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