Individual Ministerial Responsibility

Individual Ministerial Responsibility is a constitutional convention that makes Government

Ministers responsible for not only their own actions, but also for those of their department. It is
not to be confused with collective cabinet responsibility, which states that cabinet members must
approve publicly of its collective decisions or resign.

The doctrine of individual ministerial responsibility is part of the wider concept of responsible
government. It seeks to guarantee that an elected official is motivated to closely scrutinize all
activities within their department.

A practical implication of this is that each cabinet member answers for their own ministry during
Parliament’s question time. It also means if corruption, waste or other misbehaviour is found to
have occurred within a ministry, the minister is held responsible even if they had no knowledge
of the actions. The convention assumes that the minister approved the hiring and continued
employment of civil servants in their department. It goes as far as to say that the minister would
be expected to resign in the event of misdeed, and could even face criminal charges for
malfeasance during their watch.

In return, the government can claim credit for any of their departments’ successes, even if they
had nothing to do with them, and civil servants shouldn’t claim credit for them.

Under this convention, in 2004 The Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, had to explain
to the House why a soldier had died in Iraq. The soldier died because the MOD hadn’t supplied
enough body armour for the number of troops there. Meanwhile, in 2007, The Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Alistair Darling, had to explain the loss of computer disks containing the personal
details of millions of people receiving Child Benefit in 2007.

Whilst the doctrine of individual ministerial responsibility is a constitutional convention. There

is no formal mechanism for enforcing it, meaning that today ministers frequently use ignorance
of misbehaviour as an argument for lack of culpability. Opposition parties rarely accept this
argument, but it has been found that the electorate can be more accepting. Also, it is extremely
rare for such cases ever to be brought to trial