Three answers to one question
Ask who runs the United Kingdom and three different answers are each partly right. In law, the Crown does. In public life, the Prime Minister does. In daily practice, a permanent body of officials does most of the running. None of the three answers is wrong, and they do not compete. They describe three layers of one arrangement, and each layer holds a different kind of power. Cabinet and ministers sit between the second layer and the third, and join them.
The United Kingdom has no single constitutional document that lays these layers out. The arrangement is assembled from Acts of Parliament, court judgments, and conventions: rules of conduct that are followed because the people involved accept them, without a court ordering it. Understanding who holds what means reading all three sources together.
This essay follows the national executive, the part of the state that proposes policy, administers the law and spends public money, from the Crown down to the officials who carry out its work. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have a devolved government with executive powers over devolved matters, and these appear where they bear on the national picture. Parliament and the courts appear where they check or shape the executive, and they are not the subject.
YFL has a shorter version of this section: In Other Words... Who Is Actually in Charge of the United Kingdom?
The Crown has two meanings
The word “Crown” is used for two different things, and much of the confusion about British government starts there.
The first meaning is the monarch as a person: the individual who holds the throne, takes part in ceremony and signs Acts into law.
The second meaning is the Crown as the legal form of the state’s executive power. When a prosecution is brought “by the Crown,” or a civil servant is described as a “servant of the Crown,” the reference is to the institution, not to the person on the throne. The legal historian F. W. Maitland, writing in 1901, observed how loosely English law used the idea and how little it had been defined (Maitland, 1901). That looseness has partly survived. It also explains how the executive can act in the monarch’s name while the monarch does not decide what it does.
In practice, the Crown in the first sense reigns, and the Crown in the second sense governs. Ministers and officials exercise the second kind of power. Almost all of it is exercised on their own judgement, within the limits of law.
What the monarch does, and what the monarch does not
The constitutional writer Walter Bagehot, a Victorian journalist and editor of The Economist, set out the classic description in 1867. He divided the constitution into “dignified” parts, which command public respect, and “efficient” parts, which do the work, and placed the monarchy mostly in the first. A sovereign, he wrote, has three rights: the right to be consulted, the right to encourage and the right to warn (Bagehot, 1867).
The practice Bagehot described had been shaped in the decades before by Prince Albert, who married Queen Victoria in 1840 and was given the title Prince Consort in 1857. Victoria began her reign as an open supporter of the Whigs, and the Bedchamber Crisis of 1839, a dispute with the Tory leader Robert Peel over her household appointments, showed what that cost. Albert, advised by Baron Stockmar, a German physician and his mentor in constitutional monarchy, worked to make the monarch an impartial figure who accepted the government the House of Commons supported. He read state papers, drafted memoranda and acted in practice as the Queen’s private secretary. In 1850 he and Victoria set down in writing that the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, must submit his despatches to the Queen before sending them. Historians differ on whether this was constitutional reform or a monarchy extending its own influence. Albert died in December 1861, and Victoria’s long withdrawal from public life that followed fed a republican movement around 1870.
The monarch’s remaining formal functions are still real:
Appointing a Prime Minister. The monarch invites the person best able to command the confidence of the House of Commons to form a government. Where one party holds a majority, that is usually clear. Where none does, it can be less so, and the Cabinet Manual, the Cabinet Office’s published guide to existing practice, sets out how the process is expected to run (Cabinet Office, 2011).
Royal Assent. A Bill becomes an Act only when the monarch assents. The last time a monarch refused was in 1708, when Queen Anne, who reigned from 1702 to 1714, declined assent to the Scottish Militia Bill. In the centuries since, assent has followed as a matter of course on ministers’ advice.
Opening and ending Parliament. The monarch opens each session, with a speech written by the government, and formally dissolves Parliament before a general election. The power of dissolution on the Prime Minister’s advice returned in 2022, when the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022 repealed the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011.
Regular audiences. The Prime Minister meets the monarch regularly and in private. What is said is not published.
Two shorter YFL pieces go further: Hey!, Want To Know... When Did a Monarch Last Refuse to Sign a Law? and Hey!, Want To Know... Who Was Prince Albert, and What Did He Do to the Monarchy?
How Parliament came to hold the Crown’s powers
Three episodes between the 1530s and 1660 explain why the Crown’s powers are now used through Parliament and ministers. Each has a short YFL piece of its own: Hey!, Want To Know... Who Was Thomas Cromwell, and How Did He Change the Way Laws Are Made?, Hey!, Want To Know... Why Did England Put King Charles I on Trial? and Hey!, Want To Know... Why Does the UK Have No Written Constitution?
Statute as the highest law, 1530s. Thomas Cromwell was chief minister to Henry VIII, who reigned from 1509 to 1547, and the organiser of the break with Rome. He carried it out by Act of Parliament rather than by royal order. The Act in Restraint of Appeals 1533 and the Act of Supremacy 1534 put the Church of England under the Crown, and Parliament’s statutes made that law. The lasting idea was that the highest law is the monarch acting with Parliament. The same instrument could also serve a strong monarch: the Statute of Proclamations 1539 gave royal proclamations the force of law, and it was repealed in 1547.
Crown against Parliament, 1629 to 1649. Charles I reigned from 1625 to 1649. He ruled from 1629 to 1640 without calling Parliament, raising money by means such as Ship Money, a levy on ports that was extended to inland counties. When Parliament met again in 1640 it passed the Triennial Act 1641, which required it to meet at least every three years. Civil war followed in 1642. Charles I was tried and executed in January 1649, and the monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished.
A written constitution, then a return, 1653 to 1660. Oliver Cromwell was a distant relative of Thomas Cromwell and was born about sixty years after Thomas Cromwell’s death. Thomas’s nephew, Richard Williams, took the Cromwell surname while serving his uncle, and Oliver was Richard’s great-grandson. Oliver was an MP and the Parliamentary army’s most successful commander. In 1653 he became Lord Protector under the Instrument of Government, a written constitution often described as the only one Britain has had. It did not outlast him. He died in 1658, and in 1660 Charles II, son of Charles I, was invited back. The monarchy and the House of Lords returned with him.
The Restoration brought back the monarch, the Lords and the Commons, but it did not settle which of them had the last word. That was decided by the events of 1688 and 1689, described below. Arguably, the one written attempt failing and the later settlement being built from statutes and practice help to explain why the constitution is uncodified.
The longer story has its own YFL piece, In Other Words... How Parliament Took Over the Monarch’s Powers.
The prerogative and the courts
Some executive powers do not come from any Act. They descend from the old powers of the monarch and are known as the royal prerogative. They include making treaties, deploying the armed forces, granting honours and issuing passports. Ministers exercise them in the Crown’s name.
A. V. Dicey, a Victorian professor of English law at Oxford whose work shaped how the constitution is taught, described the prerogative in 1885 as “the residue of discretionary or arbitrary authority, which at any given time is legally left in the hands of the Crown” (Dicey, 1885). The important word there is “residue.” Each time Parliament legislates on a subject, the prerogative on that subject gives way.
The courts have drawn the boundaries over several centuries. In the Case of Proclamations (1610), the judges held that the monarch could not create new offences by proclamation, and that the monarch had no prerogative beyond what the law allowed. The Bill of Rights 1689 then ended the Crown’s claimed power to suspend or dispense with laws without Parliament’s consent. In Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service (1985), usually called the GCHQ case, the House of Lords held that the use of a prerogative power could, in principle, be reviewed by the courts.
Two Supreme Court cases brought this into recent view. In R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (2017), the court held that ministers could not use the prerogative to begin the process of leaving the European Union, because doing so would change rights that Parliament had created by statute. In R (Miller) v The Prime Minister; Cherry v Advocate General for Scotland (2019), the court held that a five-week prorogation of Parliament advised by the Prime Minister was unlawful, because it prevented Parliament from carrying out its functions without reasonable justification. Both judgments are regularly discussed as examples of the courts defining what an executive may do alone.
The Prime Minister: an office that grew by convention
The Prime Minister has the most visible power in the system, and the office has less formal basis than might be expected. Sir Robert Walpole, who led the government under George I and George II between 1721 and 1742, is generally counted as the first holder, and the title was at first used as a criticism, not a description. The office appeared in an Act of Parliament only in 1937, when the Ministers of the Crown Act gave the Prime Minister a statutory salary.
Most of what the Prime Minister can do rests on convention and on the prerogative. The Prime Minister recommends the appointment and removal of ministers, chairs the Cabinet, sets its agenda, and answers to the Commons. The Prime Minister is also Minister for the Civil Service, which gives that office a statutory link to the permanent officials described below.
One feature sets the arrangement apart from many other democracies. Ministers must sit in Parliament, in the Commons or the Lords. The executive is drawn from the legislature, and so it depends on it. In the United States, by contrast, the president and the cabinet stand outside Congress. In the United Kingdom, a government continues only while it can command the confidence of the House of Commons, and the executive’s majority in the Commons is what allows it to pass its legislation. Much of what follows, including the way a Prime Minister is chosen, how the executive is questioned and audited, and how a government can fall, follows from this.
The consequence for how a Prime Minister is chosen is direct. No voter casts a ballot for the Prime Minister by name outside the Prime Minister’s own constituency. Voters elect Members of Parliament, and the leader of the party or group that can hold the Commons’ confidence becomes Prime Minister.
That means a change of Prime Minister does not require a general election. Theresa May, who became Conservative leader and Prime Minister in 2016 after David Cameron resigned, did so without one. So did Boris Johnson in 2019. In autumn 2022, Liz Truss and then Rishi Sunak each took office as Conservative leader and Prime Minister within weeks of each other, again without a general election. The mechanism is the same in each case: the governing party chooses a leader, and the monarch appoints the person who can hold the Commons’ confidence.
YFL has a shorter piece on this: In Other Words... What the Prime Minister Is, and Is Not.
Cabinet and ministers
Between the Prime Minister and the civil service sits a layer that is often left out of short accounts: Cabinet and the wider body of ministers.
The Cabinet is the group of senior ministers, most of whom head a government department as Secretary of State. Two conventions govern it. Under collective responsibility, ministers defend agreed decisions publicly and resign if they cannot. Under individual ministerial responsibility, each minister answers to Parliament for the department’s work. The Ministerial Code, issued by the Prime Minister, sets out the standards expected, and the Prime Minister is the final judge of whether a breach has occurred.
The minister is the link between the political and the permanent. Ministers arrive, are reshuffled or leave, and officials stay.
The civil service: permanent and politically neutral
The third layer takes its modern form from a report written in 1854 by Sir Stafford Northcote, a politician and later Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Sir Charles Trevelyan, the Treasury’s senior official. The Northcote–Trevelyan report proposed a permanent civil service, recruited by open competition on merit and not by patronage, and organised so that officials could serve any government without belonging to it (Northcote and Trevelyan, 1854).
Those principles are now partly in statute. Part 1 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 put the Civil Service Commission on a statutory footing and required recruitment on merit through fair and open competition. The Civil Service Code sets out the values expected of every official: integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. The head of the service is the Cabinet Secretary, and each department is run day to day by a Permanent Secretary, the senior official who is accountable for it.
What officials do is large in scale. They advise ministers on options and consequences, draft legislation, prepare for Parliament, manage budgets, and carry policy out. A decision announced by a minister is typically shaped, costed and implemented by officials, and many decisions never reach the minister at all.
YFL has a shorter piece on this: In Other Words... Who Employs the Civil Service?
Who employs the executive?
The people who hold executive power are employed, appointed or neither, depending on the layer.
The monarch is not employed. The monarchy is hereditary and the post is fixed by statute and the law of succession.
The Prime Minister and ministers hold offices. They are appointed by the monarch on the Prime Minister’s recommendation. Their salaries are paid under statute from public funds. They have no employer who can dismiss them in the ordinary sense. The Prime Minister can remove a minister, and the House of Commons can remove a government by withdrawing confidence, which leads either to resignation or to an election.
Civil servants are Crown servants. They are recruited under the Civil Service Commission’s rules, managed under the Civil Service Management Code, paid from taxation voted by Parliament, and serve the government of the day, not any one minister or party. A change of government does not change them.
The public therefore chooses the executive at one remove, through the House of Commons, and does not choose the permanent part of the executive at all.
Checking the executive: scrutiny and audit
Executive power in the United Kingdom is checked mainly by Parliament, and most of the regular checking is done by select committees. A select committee is a small group of Members of Parliament that investigates a subject, calls witnesses and asks for documents. Each main government department is shadowed by a House of Commons committee. Its members question ministers and senior officials in public, take written and spoken evidence, and publish reports to which the government is expected to reply, normally within two months. Since 2010 the chairs of these committees have been elected by the House as a whole, not chosen by the party whips. The Liaison Committee, which is made up of those chairs, questions the Prime Minister in public session several times a year.
Money is checked separately. The National Audit Office is led by the Comptroller and Auditor General, an officer of the House of Commons who is independent of government. The office audits departmental accounts and reports on whether public money has delivered value (Budget Responsibility and National Audit Act 2011). Its reports go to the Public Accounts Committee, which by convention is chaired by an opposition Member and which calls the officials responsible to explain what happened.
The official who attends is usually the Permanent Secretary, because each department’s Permanent Secretary is also its Accounting Officer. That role carries a personal duty to Parliament to see that the department’s spending is regular, proper and good value (HM Treasury, 2013). If a minister wants to go ahead with a spending decision that the Accounting Officer considers breaches those standards, the Accounting Officer can ask for a written ministerial direction. The minister can give it, and the Accounting Officer then complies. The direction goes to the Comptroller and Auditor General and becomes visible to Parliament. The Permanent Secretary therefore answers to the Secretary of State for the department’s work and to Parliament for how its money is spent, and the two lines can pull in different directions.
Complaints from the public have their own route. The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman investigates allegations that a public body has acted wrongly or unfairly, with cases referred through a Member of Parliament, and the courts can review executive decisions, as the earlier sections describe.
YFL has a shorter piece on this: In Other Words... Who Checks the Government?
Line management at the top of a large organisation
In most workplaces, a line manager provides two kinds of support. One covers the work: priorities, standards, decisions, and who has authority to take them. The other covers the person: supervision, workload, wellbeing, and somewhere to raise a concern. Both usually come from the same manager, and both pass up a chain. In a small team the chain is short. In a large organisation it lengthens and thins, and near the top it becomes unclear who, if anyone, performs the second role. Government shows this pattern, with some features of its own.
A civil servant in a department. Duties and wellbeing both come through the line management chain, with human resources and occupational health alongside. The Civil Service Code lets an official raise a concern within the department, up to the Permanent Secretary or a nominated officer, and then take it to the Civil Service Commission if it is not resolved (Cabinet Office, 2015).
A Permanent Secretary. For the department’s work, a Permanent Secretary answers to the Secretary of State. For performance and appointment the line runs to the Cabinet Secretary as Head of the Civil Service, and the Prime Minister approves the appointment after a competition run under the Civil Service Commission’s rules. For money, as above, the line runs to Parliament. No published role corresponds to a personal welfare check at this level. Each department also has a board that includes non-executive members from outside the civil service. Their role is to challenge the department’s direction and performance, and they are neither ministers nor officials. They are not a source of pastoral care.
A Secretary of State. The Prime Minister appoints and can remove a Secretary of State, and the Secretary of State answers to Parliament in public, through questions, debates and select committees. Day-to-day support comes from the minister’s private office, led by a Principal Private Secretary, and from party colleagues and whips. Nothing resembles a line manager’s wellbeing check.
The Prime Minister. No one is the Prime Minister’s line manager. The checks are structural and not personal: the confidence of the House of Commons, the Cabinet, the Liaison Committee, the party, and the regular audience with the monarch. An Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests can investigate possible breaches of the Ministerial Code, though only when the Prime Minister asks (Cabinet Office, latest edition).
The comparison with a company holds in two places. In both settings, authority passes down a chain and some people answer to two lines at once. It breaks in a third. A company’s top team answers to a board and owners, and the state has neither in that form. The nearest equivalent is Parliament, standing for the public who elect it, with the National Audit Office as external auditor, the Public Accounts Committee as the audit committee, and the select committees as scrutiny of the executive. A Permanent Secretary is therefore only a partial answer to who checks on whom. For the work of a department, the Permanent Secretary is the senior official. For the people in it, the Permanent Secretary is the top of a chain that most staff will never reach. For the person at the top of the whole system, the check is built into the structure, and nobody holds the role of a manager.
YFL has a shorter piece on this: In Other Words... Line Managers at the Top.
Where the chain stops
The executive described here is the national one. Much of what families experience is carried out elsewhere. Councils, which are elected locally and are not part of the Crown, run children’s services. The Department for Education sets national policy and statutory guidance, and each council decides how to deliver it within the law. A social worker is employed by a council, answerable to its elected members and its senior officers, and bound by duties set in Acts of Parliament.
Between a voter and a frontline practitioner there are therefore several links: the electorate, Parliament, ministers, a department, a council, and a practitioner. Each holds a portion of state power and answers to the one above it in a different way. The YFL essay How the Law Moved the Line shows the same layering from a different direction, tracing how age limits for work, marriage, school and voting were each set by separate Acts and amended at different times.
A test in practice: April 2020
In April 2020 the arrangement met an unplanned test. Boris Johnson, who had been Prime Minister since 2019, tested positive for COVID-19 in late March. He was admitted to St Thomas’ Hospital in London on 5 April and moved to intensive care the next day. He left intensive care on 9 April and returned to work on 27 April. The country was under its first national lockdown throughout.
No statute says who acts for a Prime Minister who cannot work. The role went to Dominic Raab, who was Foreign Secretary and also held the title First Secretary of State, a title a Prime Minister can give to a senior minister. Downing Street said Dominic Raab would deputise where necessary. The title carries no powers of its own, and no rule defined what Dominic Raab could decide. He acted by agreement with his Cabinet colleagues and on the convention that the government of the day continues.
Government continued in the other layers as well:
Cabinet and ministers. Cabinet continued to meet, and ministers ran their departments. The regulations imposing the lockdown required review at fixed intervals, and the review due in mid-April went ahead with Dominic Raab chairing and announcing the outcome.
The civil service. Departments, the Cabinet Secretary’s office and the government’s medical and scientific advisers carried on working, which is the purpose of a permanent service that does not change with the Prime Minister’s health.
Parliament and the courts. Parliament sat throughout, with arrangements for Members to take part remotely introduced from late April. The lockdown restrictions were made as regulations under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, a power Parliament had delegated decades earlier, and the Coronavirus Act 2020 passed through both Houses in days (Coronavirus Act 2020; Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020). The Court of Appeal later held in R (Dolan) v Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (2020) that the regulations were lawful.
Public health is a devolved matter, so there were four sets of rules and not one. The Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland governments each set their own regulations and timetable, and the rules described above applied in England.
Scrutiny followed. The National Audit Office reported on government procurement during the pandemic (National Audit Office, 2020), two House of Commons select committees published a joint review of the response (House of Commons Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committees, 2021), and an independent public inquiry was established to examine how decisions were made.
The episode shows two features of the arrangement. The first is its resilience: the loss of the central figure for a period did not stop government, because power was spread across layers that each had their own authority and continuity. The second is that this depended on convention and goodwill. The United States has a written procedure for a president who cannot serve, set out in the 25th Amendment to its constitution. No comparable written procedure appears to apply in the United Kingdom, and the arrangement in April 2020 was settled between the people in post. Defenders of the existing approach point to its flexibility. Critics point to the absence of a rule that could be consulted in advance.
The episode has its own YFL piece: In Other Words... What Happened When the Prime Minister Was in Intensive Care.
Power held in layers
The United Kingdom’s executive power is held, not owned. The Crown holds it as a legal form and has long ceased to use most of it personally. The Prime Minister holds it for as long as the Commons allows. The civil service holds it as a custodian across governments, with its own rules and its own limits. Parliament and the courts hold a share of the power to check each of the three, and the boundaries between them move when a statute or a judgment moves them.
That arrangement can be read as flexible or as unclear, and both readings have reasoned defenders. Flexible, because the layers have absorbed a hereditary monarchy, a widening franchise, two world wars and a change in the country’s membership of European bodies without a new founding document, with Acts of Parliament changing them step by step, including the Parliament Act 1911, the House of Lords Act 1999 and the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. Unclear, because no single document states who holds what, and the answer to many questions is “convention,” which depends on the people involved agreeing to follow it.
References
Bagehot, W. (1867). The English constitution. Chapman and Hall.
Act in Restraint of Appeals 1533.
Act of Supremacy 1534.
Bill of Rights 1689.
Budget Responsibility and National Audit Act 2011.
Cabinet Office. (2011). The Cabinet Manual: A guide to laws, conventions and rules on the operation of government (1st ed.). Cabinet Office.
Cabinet Office. (2015). Civil Service Code. Cabinet Office.
Cabinet Office. (latest edition). Ministerial Code. Cabinet Office.
Case of Proclamations (1610) 12 Co Rep 74.
Constitutional Reform Act 2005.
Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, Part 1.
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Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service [1985] AC 374 (HL).
Dicey, A. V. (1885). Introduction to the study of the law of the constitution. Macmillan.
Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022.
Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020, SI 2020/350.
HM Treasury. (2013, as updated). Managing public money. HM Treasury.
House of Commons Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committees. (2021). Coronavirus: Lessons learned to date (HC 92). House of Commons.
House of Lords Act 1999.
Instrument of Government 1653.
Maitland, F. W. (1901). The Crown as corporation. Law Quarterly Review, 17, 131–146.
Ministers of the Crown Act 1937.
National Audit Office. (2020). Investigation into government procurement during the COVID-19 pandemic. National Audit Office.
Northcote, S., & Trevelyan, C. (1854). Report on the organisation of the permanent civil service. House of Commons.
Parliament Act 1911.
R (Dolan) v Secretary of State for Health and Social Care [2020] EWCA Civ 1605.
R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union [2017] UKSC 5.
R (Miller) v The Prime Minister; Cherry v Advocate General for Scotland [2019] UKSC 41.
Statute of Proclamations 1539.
Triennial Act 1641.
Topics: #UKConstitution #ExecutivePower #Crown #PrimeMinister #CivilService #Governance