UK Constitution: Oversight and Responsibility (Report from the Constitution Committee)

Lord Norton of Louth Excerpts

Friday 4th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this report from the Constitution Committee. I have a particular interest in that I was the first chair of the committee and was responsible for the report Reviewing the Constitution, on which this report draws and builds. I fear, though, that the gist of my speech can be summarised as: here we go again.

We have an excellent report from the committee—I agree with everything in it—and we have a response from the Government in essence saying, “Thanks, but we aren’t going to do anything. Responsibilities for the constitution are spread across government and work; there are no grounds for vesting responsibility for the constitution in a senior Minister”. Some noble Lords have endorsed that view.

We have been here before. In July 2023, we debated in Grand Committee a report from the Constitution Committee on the roles of the Lord Chancellor and the law officers. The committee advanced similar recommendations to those made in this report, and the Government’s response was essentially the same as the one before us. Rereading my speech on that occasion, I realised that I could repeat it basically word for word today.

The current Government are making the mistake of the last one in not grasping the dangers of leaving responsibility for the constitution spread among Ministers and civil servants, with no imperative to engage with it. This Government, like the last one, remind us that the Prime Minister has ultimate responsibility for the constitution. However, as Pat McFadden told the committee, in the real world, the Prime Minister is a very busy person. Prime Ministers may not have the time to think seriously about the constitution as a constitution, and they may not have an interest or understanding. The last to give serious thought to it were John Major and Gordon Brown.

Under Tony Blair, there were major constitutional changes, but they were disparate and discrete. They were not grounded in any intellectually coherent approach to constitutional change, and the Prime Minister lacked any interest in it. I recall Charles Kennedy telling me that, whenever he tried to talk to the Prime Minister about parliamentary reform, his eyes glazed over. Boris Johnson clearly believed that, as Prime Minister, he was above the constitution rather than the other way round. He was thwarted by what the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, has termed the “good chaps” theory of government, but that term, as we have heard in this debate, diminishes the fundamental culture of constitutionalism that characterises British polity. As the noble Lord, Lord Beith, said, and as the noble Lord, Lord Pitkeathley, eloquently argued, it is not the form of the constitution that is crucial but the culture within which it is embedded.

Spreading responsibilities among Ministers means that there is no one with the capacity to oversee how our constitution is working as a constitution. The Prime Minister does not have the time and may lack the inclination to exercise constitutional stewardship, and the same applies to those who advise him. As the report draws out, components of the teams in the Cabinet Office who deal with constitutional issues have, particularly in recent years, moved between departments. There is also significant churn not only in these teams but in the senior Civil Service.

I moved an amendment to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill in 2010, which the Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, accepted, to his credit. It formed Section 3(6) of CRaG, requiring that

“the Minister for the Civil Service shall have regard to the need to ensure that civil servants who advise Ministers are aware of the constitutional significance of Parliament and of the conventions governing the relationship between Parliament and … Government”.

This, as the report mentions, is embodied in the Civil Service Code. I variously sought to test how effectively it is being applied, not least given the turnover of senior civil servants. It is not clear how well grounded even the most senior civil servants are in the constitutional position of Parliament and the Executive. As one former Permanent Secretary confided to me, they tend to see Parliament as an inconvenience.

I noticed that the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, told the committee that, when he was Cabinet Secretary and Boris Johnson went into intensive care, he consulted constitutional historians on what the implications would be if the Prime Minister died. My noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy referred to this. The noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, appeared unaware of recent scholarship and that one of his predecessors had commissioned research on the subject. I also noticed that, in his evidence to the committee, he said that the last Prime Minister to die in office was Spencer Perceval. The last Prime Minister to die in office was Palmerston in 1865.

We need to embed—I stress “embed”—within government, among both Ministers and civil servants, an understanding of our constitution, both its key components as laid out in the committee’s 2001 report and how it operates, not least the nature of conventions of the constitution. There needs to be a systematic means of inculcating that understanding, in effect generating the culture, and, crucially, as recommended by the committee at paragraph 38, a senior Minister with responsibility for advising the Prime Minister on discharging his constitutional responsibilities. We need the equivalent of a William Whitelaw.

The current situation remains, as it did under the previous Government, unsatisfactory and, given the need to embed constitutional stewardship, action needs to be taken quickly. I look forward to hearing from the Minister precisely what action the Government will now take in response to the committee’s report. I encourage her to respond substantively to the recommendation made by my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy. There is a powerful case for ensuring that citizenship is taught effectively in our schools. They need the resources to teach it effectively. Active citizenship is crucial to the health of the British polity.