On 2 June 2025 the Prime Minister stood before journalists at a press conference in Glasgow to trumpet the Government’s Strategic Defence Review. As a result of the Review, up to 12 new nuclear-powered submarines will slip into the water from the early 2030s. £1.5 billion will see bricks laid and mortar repaired in army housing. £1 billion will be targeted at digital security. It’s serious stuff, and one can see why the Government was anxious to grab headlines with its announcement.
The Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, was anxious for another reason, though. He quickly summoned then-Leader of the House of Commons Lucy Powell to Parliament to account for why the Review had been briefed to journalists before it had been brought to the Commons. Visibly frustrated with Powell, Mr Speaker suggested the Government had shown “complete disregard for the House and for honourable Members”.
Mr Speaker’s ire stems from the fact that, under the Ministerial Code, announcements of policy should be made in the House of Commons first, before they are briefed elsewhere. Specifically, the Code states that when Parliament is “in session, the most important announcements of government policy should be made in the first instance in Parliament.”
By way of defence, Powell pointed to hundreds of occasions on which the Government had announced policy first in the House. In reply, Mr Speaker suggested rather forcefully that: “I do not care how many have been done in the House; it is those that have not been made here that we should be talking about.”
This was in fact the second time Powell had been summoned by Mr Speaker over the issue, the first occasion being less than a month before the Strategic Defence Review. The problem dates back through previous governments, though. In June of 2021, for example, then-PM Boris Johnson made Covid-related announcements which prompted Sir Lindsay to issue the warning that “I say now, Prime Minister, you are on my watch, and I want you to treat this House correctly” … and we all lived happily ever after.
Since then, Nadine Dorries, Jacob Rees Mogg, Kemi Badenoch, Rachel Reeves and a slew of other ministers have been called-out by the Speaker for the same crime. Quips aside, this is an issue which Mr Speaker has been perusing diligently over the last five years and across four governments. It is perhaps unsurprising that he appears to have run out of patience.
The problem stems from the fact that because the rules about these announcements are contained in the Ministerial Code, the Speaker has relatively little power to enforce them beyond rebuking ministers in the Chamber. It’s for this reason too that when calling on a select committee to inquire into the present state of affairs, he had to turn to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee rather than the Procedure Committee of the House.
At his invitation, PACAC has launched an inquiry and has so far taken oral evidence from Lucy Powell and Shadow Leader of the House, Jesse Norman. Invigorated by new members and under its new chair Simon Hoare, the Committee has succeeded recently in sweating various public officials to great effect, and Powell’s interview is worth reading in full. A relatively heated exchange between Hoare and Powell over whether the Government was taking Mr Speaker’s concerns seriously ensued, but aside from this, the members of the Committee did well to highlight the constitutional issue that, in words of the chair:
The Ministerial Code is authored and owned by No. 10, in the broader sense of the term; it is both author and invigilator. The Speaker of the House of Commons, every Opposition party and a large number of Government Back Benchers, including senior figures such as Dame Meg Hillier, Chair of the Treasury Committee, believe that the element of the Ministerial Code that we have under consideration this morning has not always been followed, and that there are no particularly compelling reasons to justify not following that element of the code.
It is a very perverse situation whereby the author, or the custodian, of the Ministerial Code says, “Well, I hear all that, but I don’t agree with you. I think you are all wrong. I think you’ve all got the wrong end of the stick, and I am the only one who has the right end of the stick.” We would not put up with that in terms of standards for Members of either House, and rightly so—we stopped marking our own homework a long time ago […] Is it a fair assessment to suggest that who guards the guards—who polices the implementation and the following of the Ministerial Code—might best be vested in a body or an individual other than the Prime Minister? That might just make everybody sharpen their pencils.
The former Leader of the House was reluctant to agree with Mr Hoare’s characterisation of the situation, and there would be significant issues with handing over enforcement of the Ministerial Code to an external body. The right of the Prime Minister to make the final call on what are essentially political matters within his Cabinet is important, and transferring this to an unelected body or one made up of Members of the Commons would mark a fairly radical departure in our constitution away from the political toward the legalistic. This said, there is clearly a problem with the status quo, and particularly with regard to announcements being made outside the House. With worrying pace, the role of the Commons in debating policy is diminishing as the power of government increases. Others have written on the same theme with regard to delegated legislation and Henry VIII powers.
Despite this, Lucy Powell’s testimony to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee doesn’t suggest the Government regards this as a significant problem. Indeed, it has all but denied that there is a problem to begin with. In spite of the best efforts of the Speaker of the House and the opportunity afforded by a new Leader of the House of Commons, then, it seems unlikely that things will improve in the short term.
Just as this problem stretches back decades, it seems likely that we will have to wait a long time to fix it. If we fix it at all. Governments and their defenders have begun arguing, discreetly, that the expectations of the Commons on this point are themselves out of date. Amid a 24-hour news cycle and the increasing ability of individuals to brief and leak with complete anonymity and near impunity, it has undoubtedly become more difficult for the Government to announce policy effectively. Consequently, they argue, the Government is forced to provide media briefings on policy outside the parliamentary timetable and often without enough notice for it to be raised first in the House.
This view in itself appears dated, though. Our media landscape may have changed much since the turn of the millennium, but then it’s changed in the last five years as well. What has not changed, is that the Government has the ability to dictate the news agenda when it does things properly and effectively. Would the occasional policy launch be spoiled by a leak if the Government delayed announcements by 48 hours or so? Perhaps. Is this a price worth paying to empower the legislature to meaningfully examine and challenge government policy in the first instance? Absolutely.
While taking the enforcement of the Ministerial Code out of the hands of the Prime Minister is undesirable, there are nonetheless other methods that might be usefully considered. These include investing specific powers over announcements of policy to parliament or parliamentary committees. Beyond this, laying out the expected consequences for breaching the existing Ministerial Code in the Code itself would also raise the stakes for the Prime Minister and ministers when the Code is ignored and policy announcements are made outside of Parliament.
Until a government is courageous or noble enough to sacrifice expediency and the optimal media window for the integrity of our legislative process, though, it seems the Speaker’s war on this issue is likely to continue. What remains to be seen is whether the resourceful Sir Lindsay Hoyle is able to find other ways holding the Government to account on this issue.
Dexter Govan.
Dexter Govan is Director of Research of the Constitution Society. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Edinburgh.
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.