The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government was keen on constitutional reform, although not all reforms proved durable: the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is no more, voters roundly rejected the alternative vote system and local councils have been at best ambivalent to local council mayors. However, one reform which has yet to fall by the wayside is the Cabinet Manual.
The Cabinet Manual is an important document, as it “sets out the internal rules and procedures under which the Government operates.” It takes various conventions and traditions from our uncodified constitution and puts them into one easy-to-access PDF, available to any voter in the country with an internet connection robust enough to download a 1.2mb file (which unfortunately rules out anyone using train WiFi). It represents “a guide to the operation of the Government itself” and “the Government’s place in the UK’s Parliamentary democracy”, from the perspective of the executive.
For that reason, the Cabinet Manual is more than an administrative handbook. While it is not law, it is an authoritative account of how the executive sees the constitutional set-up. It outlines the relationship between government and the Sovereign, the judiciary, Parliament, devolved bodies, local government, and other bodies. Cabinet secretaries see it as a ‘highway code’ for the constitution.
Work on the Manual was initially announced by Gordon Brown in February 2010. At that time the Conservatives were projected to win the upcoming general election but, due to the electoral system, anything up to a 10% Conservative lead would have produced a minority or coalition government. As noted by the Institute for Government, a hung parliament was a real possibility and the then-status quo could lead to “a period of uncertainty and delay, with negative consequences for public confidence and government effectiveness”. The 2010 general election also saw Labour and the Liberal Democrats both promise electoral reform, which if delivered would result in an increased likelihood of hung parliaments after future elections.
The Cabinet Manual was thus to have a dual role: it was to be a description of how government operates, and a guide for future action. While it was useful insofar as it provided greater transparency to the formation and operation of government, at the time, some involved were concerned that the manual should be descriptive, not prescriptive, as it was drafted by civil servants and not endorsed by Parliament.
The Manual was ultimately published in 2011. Sir Gus O’Donnell, the then Cabinet Secretary, wrote that “If the Cabinet Manual is to continue to play a useful role as a guide to the operations and procedures of government, it will need to be updated periodically to reflect such developments.” And yet, it has not been updated since.
This is no mere proofreading exercise. If you visit GOV.UK to read the Cabinet Manual today, you are reading a guide to a country that no longer exists. The current document suffers from a mix of legal and constitutional obsolescence.
Legally, a lot has changed since 2011. In the intervening fifteen years, Britain has left the European Union, introduced new layers of subnational governance in metro mayors leading combined authorities, and scrapped the Fixed-term Parliaments Act (which appears 14 times in the document). The Senedd is still referred to as the National Assembly for Wales, and references abound to the Queen and Her Majesty.
Constitutionally, one of the biggest issues is the change in status of prorogation as a justiciable act. In the Cabinet Manual, prorogation is treated largely as a routine constitutional power. However, one of the constitutional consequences of Brexit and the 2019 Miller/Cherry Supreme Court judgment was that that advice to prorogue Parliament is justiciable, i.e. that such advice is subject to challenge in the courts, and unlawful if it frustrates or prevents Parliament from carrying out its constitutional functions without reasonable justification. If this does not meet O’Donnell’s criteria for updating the manual, it is unclear what actually would.
Why does it matter? One of the wonders of our uncodified constitution is that it relies on a shared set of understandings between political actors and binds their behaviour when a range of actions are open to them. The Cabinet Manual is part of what J. A. G. Griffith termed the ‘political constitution’, where the main restrictions on behaviour are political, not legal. These shared understandings shape the actions available to political actors. In unusual circumstances, when politicians and civil servants are deciding what to do, they will look to the guidance available to them. It is important that this guidance is up to date. The Cabinet Manual is not.
Indeed, an up-to-date Cabinet Manual would also reduce the scope for executive interpretation of the rules. Given the high likelihood of post-election coalition negotiations, perhaps with more than two parties (and some independents), and with key players – Reform UK and the Green Party – lacking institutional experience of this, ambiguity in the rules may be a significant issue in terms of executive oversight and accountability.
It is not as if updating the Cabinet Manual is impossible. The existing manual was partly inspired by the New Zealand equivalent, which has existed since 1979. The 2023 publication is the seventh edition in that country – an update roughly every six years. By that metric, the UK should be on its third edition. A new Manual would include the post-FTPA rules around calling an election, the impact of Miller/Cherry on prorogation, a review of Brexit-era language, the territorial constitution in a post-Windsor Framework context, and government formation in a more pluralistic party system.
We are in turbulent political times. Brexit took up a significant amount of the civil service’s bandwidth. Our system has shifted from a two-party system for most of the post-war era to a 5- or 6-party system; we have had more prime ministers in the 15 years since the manual was published than in the 36 years prior to it. A current Reform policy is to bring external figures into the Cabinet.
The likelihood of coalition or minority government at the next general election is similar to the time when Brown began work on the first draft of the Cabinet Manual, and the potential for unconventional governing arrangements has increased. Thus the value of clear, up-to-date guidance on how the executive is formed and its relation to other elements of the state is just as clear today as it was in 2010.
Despite numerous calls to update the Cabinet Manual, Sir Chris Wormald – Cabinet Secretary from December 2024 to February 2026 – was quite happy to see the Manual as akin to ‘any other historical document’ and showed little interest in updating it further despite numerous calls to do so. Wormald’s successor, Antonia Romeo, however, has shown a reforming zeal, publishing her personal objectives and her ambition to rewrite the civil service code. This zeal should be extended to an update of the Cabinet Manual.
In his first speech to the Civil Service as Prime Minister, Keir Starmer promised “a different way of working. One of openness, of collaboration and transparency in everything we do.” Updating the Cabinet Manual would be a modest reform. But in an uncodified constitution, clarity is itself a democratic good, and keeping the basic guide to executive government up-to-date is a simple test of whether constitutional stewardship is being taken seriously.
David Jeffery.
David Jeffery is a senior lecturer in British politics at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Whatever Happened to Tory Liverpool and has published widely on a range of topics relevant to British politics, both in an academic and journalistic context. David is also a convenor of the Political Studies Association’s Conservatism Studies Group and Politics and History specialist group.
The Constitution Society is committed to the promotion of informed debate and is politically impartial. Any views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and not those of The Constitution Society.