Who Governs Britain?

Who decided? It ought to be one of the easiest questions in politics. Yet consider how often a minister now answers it by pointing somewhere else. The scientists advised it. The regulator is independent. The Office for Budget Responsibility would not accept it. The Bank of England sets interest rates. The courts have ruled. A statutory committee has recommended it. An inquiry must first report.

Each answer may contain some truth. Taken together, however, they describe a constitutional problem. Britain has not formally abandoned parliamentary government. Parliament remains sovereign and ministers remain accountable to it. But practical authority has been dispersed across a growing collection of regulators, arm's-length bodies, expert committees and courts. Power is exercised in many places; responsibility is increasingly difficult to locate.

The historian Dr David Starkey CBE put the argument forcefully at a Popular Conservatism fringe event during the 2025 Reform UK Conference. His contention was that a future reforming government would discover that winning an election was only the beginning. It would confront institutions, laws and administrative habits built over decades to insulate decisions from ordinary politics.^[1]

That argument deserves to be taken seriously. It also needs to be stated precisely. The Supreme Court is not above Parliament. Expert committees do not secretly govern the country. Judges do not create Acts of Parliament. Most of the institutions Starkey criticises were deliberately created by elected politicians, usually for understandable reasons.

The real question is therefore more uncomfortable. Why did politicians give so much power away—and why do they so often pretend that the resulting decisions have nothing to do with them?

The Rise of Government at Arm's Length

Modern government is too large and technically demanding for every decision to be taken around the Cabinet table. Medicines require scientific assessment. Water companies require economic regulation. Environmental designations require specialist knowledge. Interest-rate decisions affect every mortgage, business and asset price in the country. Expertise is not an optional extra.

The response has been to create bodies at arm's length from ministers. They include executive agencies, non-departmental public bodies and non-ministerial departments. The label 'quango'—a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation—is used loosely, which is why confident claims about their number often disagree.

The Institute for Government counted 306 arm's-length bodies in March 2025. A narrower parliamentary answer counted 249 non-departmental public bodies. These are not directly comparable with older claims of 444 quangos, because definitions and dates differ.^[2] The larger point nevertheless survives: a very substantial part of the state operates beyond direct ministerial management.

The sums are striking. Arm's-length bodies accounted for £298.7 billion, or 57.7 per cent, of departments' day-to-day resource spending in 2023–24. Total government funding to them was £394.8 billion. But those figures require care. NHS England alone received £186.8 billion, much of which flowed through to front-line health services. It would be absurd to describe all of that as the cost of bureaucracy.^[2]

Scale is not the same as waste. Nor is independence necessarily evasion. The difficulty is that the public cannot easily distinguish between a body which advises, one which regulates, one which spends and one which genuinely decides. When responsibility is divided, each participant can explain why somebody else owns the outcome.

This criticism is no longer confined to constitutional conservatives. In March 2025, Sir Keir Starmer accused politicians themselves of hiding behind 'a vast array of quangos, arm's-length bodies and regulators'. He described democratic accountability as having been swept under a regulatory carpet and announced that NHS England would be brought back into the Department of Health and Social Care.^[3] The diagnosis is shared more widely than the proposed remedies.

When Advice Becomes Authority

The distinction between advice and decision is central. The Climate Change Committee (CCC) is an independent statutory body created by the Climate Change Act 2008. It advises governments on emissions targets and reports to Parliament on progress. It did not legislate the Net Zero target; Parliament did.^[4] Ministers may find its analysis politically difficult to reject, but the committee has not taken Parliament's place.

The same is true of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). It produces economic and fiscal forecasts, assesses performance against fiscal targets and scrutinises the costings of policy measures. It does not decide whether a policy is wise and it has no legal power to veto a Budget.^[5] Since 2024, significant fiscal announcements must normally be accompanied by an independent OBR assessment. That disciplines ministers. It does not relieve them of responsibility for the policies being assessed.

Yet political language regularly collapses this distinction. 'The OBR will not allow it' sounds very different from 'the government could do it, but the forecast would expose the cost and the markets might react badly'. The first statement transfers responsibility. The second describes a difficult political choice.

The Bank of England presents a stronger form of delegated authority. In 1997 the government gave it operational independence over monetary policy. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) sets Bank Rate in pursuit of an inflation target defined by the government. Its members explain their votes, publish minutes and appear before Parliament.^[6] Independence was intended to prevent short-term political manipulation of interest rates and to give monetary policy credibility.

There is a serious economic case for that arrangement. There is also a democratic tension. Higher interest rates can redistribute income on an extraordinary scale between borrowers and savers, depress investment and alter the government's own financing costs. The elected government sets the objective and the institutional framework; the MPC chooses the instrument. Ministers cannot plausibly claim no connection with the consequences of a system Parliament created and can change.

Covid and the Theatre of Compulsion

Covid exposed the problem in its most dramatic form. The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) supplied scientific and technical advice. Its official terms were clear: it was advisory, it did not make policy and the government was not obliged to follow its recommendations.^[7] Nevertheless, ministers repeatedly presented extraordinary restrictions through the language of scientific necessity.

The distinction matters because the consequences belonged to government. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimated the direct cost of pandemic-related support measures at about £311 billion. Economic output fell by 11 per cent in 2020, the largest annual contraction for more than three centuries, while the budget deficit approached £400 billion.^[8] Those facts do not prove that every restriction was wrong. They prove that decisions of such magnitude cannot be attributed to 'the science' as though science had weighed health, liberty, education, public finances and the distribution of risk and issued a single compulsory answer.

Scientists assessed evidence within their disciplines. Ministers decided what society should do with it. Parliament approved legislation and retrospective scrutiny. The problem was not that an expert committee seized power. It was that political leaders sometimes borrowed the authority of expertise while obscuring the judgement for which they remained accountable.

That pattern survives the emergency. An expert recommendation can narrow the range of respectable political debate long before it acquires legal force. A minister who rejects it must explain why. A minister who accepts it may announce that there was no alternative. Expertise rightly influences government; it should not be permitted to disguise government.

Is the Supreme Court Above Parliament?

Britain's Supreme Court opened in October 2009. It assumed the senior appellate functions previously exercised by the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords and acquired the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council's role in devolution cases. The change separated the highest court more visibly from the legislature; it did not create an American-style constitutional court with a general power to strike down Acts of Parliament.^[9]

Parliamentary sovereignty remains the legal foundation. Judges interpret legislation, develop the common law and review whether ministers and public authorities have acted within the powers Parliament gave them. They cannot invalidate primary legislation merely because they consider it unjust or unconstitutional.^[10] Under the Human Rights Act 1998, a senior court may declare an Act incompatible with a protected right, but the legislation remains valid unless Parliament changes it.

So why does the Court sometimes appear supreme? Because ministers do not govern through primary legislation alone. Much government action relies on delegated powers, regulations, prerogative authority and administrative discretion. Courts can—and should—ask whether those powers have been used lawfully. A government defeated in court is often not being told that Parliament lacks authority. It is being told that ministers have exceeded the authority Parliament actually granted.

This is an essential restraint on executive power. Without judicial review, a minister could interpret his own powers and become judge in his own cause. But judicial interpretation can still have major policy effects, especially where Parliament has legislated broadly or ambiguously. The proper response is not to pretend that courts possess legislative supremacy. It is for Parliament to legislate clearly, scrutinise delegated powers carefully and accept responsibility for the consequences of the words it enacts.

International Law, Common Law and Lord Bingham

Starkey attributes particular importance to the late Lord Bingham, one of Britain's most respected modern judges. Bingham strongly defended the rule of law and argued that a state should comply with its obligations in international law. He also regarded the Human Rights Act as a major constitutional achievement.^[11]

But the shorthand claim that international law and human-rights law simply became part of the common law goes too far. In the case of R v Jones, Bingham described customary international law not as a free-standing part of English law but as one of its sources, capable of being received only where the constitutional system permits it.^[12] Treaties do not normally rewrite domestic law without Parliament. Human-rights obligations have domestic force principally because Parliament enacted the Human Rights Act.

Nor did Bingham place judges above statute. Parliamentary scrutiny of the European Union Bill later quoted him as emphatic that the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament was not something judges had established and could not simply be undone by them.^[13]

This qualification does not eliminate Starkey's broader concern. Legal concepts can develop through interpretation, and international materials may influence that development. But it changes the target. The constitutional problem is not a judicial coup. It is Parliament's tendency to enact broad duties, delegate discretion and then complain when courts give practical meaning to the settlement Parliament chose.

Equality, Birmingham and the Cost of Careless Claims

Birmingham City Council illustrates why criticism must be exact. Its 2023 Section 114 notice identified a potential equal-pay liability then estimated at between £650 million and £760 million, alongside an immediate budget gap. The liability was plainly central to the crisis.^[14]

It is nevertheless misleading to say that the Equality Act alone bankrupted Birmingham or that judges arbitrarily decided what different jobs should be paid. The claims grew from longstanding pay practices and rights whose legislative ancestry included the Equal Pay Act 1970. The Supreme Court's 2012 decision in Abdulla concerned whether former employees could pursue claims in the civil courts; it did not invent equal pay.^[15] The government's own account also identified the disastrous Oracle computer-system implementation, unrealised savings and repeated failures of leadership and governance.^[16]

The sharper criticism is that Parliament created enforceable equality rights without ensuring that local government confronted the consequences early, transparently and competently. Courts applied the law. Councillors, officials and governments allowed liabilities and operational failures to accumulate. Once again, legal obligation became the language through which political and managerial responsibility disappeared.

The grooming-gang scandal raises a graver version of the same issue. Official inquiries found institutional denial, victim-blaming, leadership failure and a damaging reluctance to confront ethnic dimensions for fear of being seen as racist. At least 1,400 children were estimated to have been sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.^[17] That record justifies anger and sustained scrutiny.

It does not establish that the Human Rights Act protected the perpetrators or required authorities to ignore victims. Equality before the law required the police, councils and social services to investigate suspected offenders fairly, protect the victims and enforce the criminal law without fear or favour.

The authorities failed to do that. Some officials feared that investigating predominantly Pakistani-heritage perpetrators would provoke accusations of racism. Cultural sensitivity, institutional reputation and fear of causing offence were therefore allowed to take precedence over the protection of vulnerable girls.

The principle of equality was not the problem. The problem was that it was applied unequally. Officials were excessively concerned about appearing unfair to suspected perpetrators, while the victims—many of them poor, vulnerable and dismissed as troublesome—did not receive equal protection from the police, councils and safeguarding services. Equality before the law should have protected them. Instead, institutional cowardice denied them that protection.

Rules Cannot Replace Judgement

Modern public life has developed an unhealthy faith in compliance. If a donation was declared, a process followed or an adviser consulted, the underlying decision is treated as legitimate. Yet conduct can satisfy a rule and still be imprudent, unseemly or wrong.

This is the force of Starkey's criticism of political gifts. A minister should never accept expensive personal benefits from a wealthy political ally. Except for an ordinary gift from a close family member or genuine personal friend, the obvious question is why the gift has been offered. The presumption should be that a substantial gift from someone with political interests is not entirely disinterested: the giver may want access, influence, favourable consideration or some future return. Even where no explicit request is made, the recipient may feel gratitude or obligation. The appearance of influence is itself corrosive because the public cannot know whether a later decision was entirely unaffected.

A criminal allegation of bribery requires evidence of an intended exchange. The ethical standard for holding public office must be much higher than the evidential threshold for securing a criminal conviction. A politician should not ask merely whether a gift can technically be declared within the rules. He should ask why it is being offered, what the giver may reasonably expect and whether accepting it could compromise—or appear to compromise—his independence. In most circumstances, the only prudent answer is to refuse it.

Rules establish a minimum; they do not convert questionable judgement into acceptable conduct. Character and prudence determine whether a person should approach that minimum in the first place.

Government cannot be reduced to a rule book because rules cannot anticipate every circumstance. But discretion without accountability is equally dangerous. The constitutional task is to combine lawful limits with visible human responsibility—to know who exercised judgement and to permit Parliament and the electorate to assess it.

Restoration Is Harder Than Revolution

Starkey advocates restoration rather than revolution. That is an important distinction. A government committed to restoring parliamentary responsibility would need more than a bonfire of quangos. It would need to decide which functions genuinely require independence, which should return to ministers and how expertise can remain visible without becoming a shield.

Nor are the apparent shortcuts as simple as they sound. Orders in Council are formal legal instruments approved by the monarch on ministerial advice. Some exercise powers delegated by an Act of Parliament; others use prerogative powers. They cannot generally be used to override primary legislation, and prerogative Orders can themselves be reviewed by the courts.^[18] A government claiming to restore Parliament should be especially cautious about governing around it by executive decree.

The mass creation of life peers is constitutionally possible: there is no statutory numerical limit, and prime ministers recommend appointments. But using patronage to manufacture a legislative majority would provoke a constitutional crisis and further weaken confidence in the House of Lords. In most disputes, the Parliament Acts already allow the elected House of Commons eventually to prevail, although at the cost of delay.^[19]

The office of Patronage Secretary has not disappeared. It is another title for the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury—the government Chief Whip. Historically, patronage helped governments secure loyalty and parliamentary discipline.^[20] Reviving its harder-edged spirit may sound like a way to force Whitehall and Parliament to obey an electoral mandate. It would also concentrate power in Downing Street. Patronage can overcome institutional resistance; it can equally reward obedience and punish independent judgement.

The civil service presents the most difficult case. Officials must advise candidly and implement lawful ministerial decisions. Complaints of delay, risk aversion or 'consent and evasion' will sometimes be justified; others will reflect poor political direction or contradictory objectives. Reform requires clearer authority and consequences for persistent failure—not the assumption that every inconvenient warning is sabotage.

A Democratic Test for Delegated Power

The answer is not to abolish expertise or make every technical decision partisan. It is to impose a democratic test on every institution exercising public power.

What precisely has been delegated? Why does the function require independence? Is the body advising, regulating, spending or deciding? Who appoints its leaders? Who can remove them? What must it publish? When does Parliament review its mandate? And when a decision causes harm, which named minister must answer for the architecture that produced it?

Some bodies will pass that test. Monetary policy benefits from insulation against electoral manipulation, provided the target is democratically set and performance openly examined. Scientific committees should publish evidence and uncertainty, while ministers own the choices made from it. Regulators require clear statutory objectives and periodic political review. Courts must remain independent while Parliament leaves genuinely political choices to elected representatives.

Every delegation should also have a route back. Sunset clauses, statutory reviews and explicit powers of amendment can prevent temporary solutions becoming permanent constitutional furniture. Parliament should be able to identify not only what an organisation spends, but what decision it makes that a minister no longer makes.

This is not an argument for impulsive government. It is an argument against unaccountable permanence.

Parliament Must Govern Again

The failures discussed here are not isolated administrative mistakes. They have accumulated into a crisis of democratic confidence. Voters are told that Parliament is sovereign, yet they repeatedly watch elected governments behave as though the most important questions have already been decided somewhere else.

The small-boats crisis has become a particularly powerful symbol. People see migrants who entered the country without prior permission housed in hotels while some former servicemen are among those experiencing homelessness and rough sleeping. The circumstances and legal entitlements of the two groups are not identical, but the contrast creates an understandable sense that the state has lost control of both its borders and its moral priorities. At the end of 2025, 30,657 asylum seekers were being accommodated in hotels; in 2024–25, 2,180 veteran households in England were recorded as homeless or threatened with homelessness. Those figures do not establish that one group has displaced the other, but they explain why the contrast has acquired such political force. Ministers blame international obligations, human-rights law, the courts, France or the absence of documentation. The public sees the result—and asks why successive governments have been unable or unwilling to change it.^[21]

The grooming-gang scandal produced the same corrosive conclusion. Vulnerable girls were failed by institutions that possessed ample powers but lacked the courage to use them. Officials feared accusations of racism, organisations protected their reputations and responsibility dissolved across councils, police forces and safeguarding bodies. Equality before the law was invoked as an abstraction while the victims were denied its protection in practice.^[17]

Energy policy offers another example. Parliament converted Net Zero into a binding legal target, after which ministers increasingly presented its consequences as though they were imposed from outside politics. Britain needs cleaner energy and greater energy security. It also needs abundant, reliable and competitively priced power. If the existing statutory framework makes affordability, industrial competitiveness and security subordinate to a single legislated target, Parliament must be willing to amend that framework. The Climate Change Committee should advise; it should not become an excuse for elected government to abandon judgement.^[4]

Successive Conservative and Labour governments have presided over these failures. Both sides have blamed inherited legislation, judicial decisions, regulators, officials or international agreements. But legislation does not descend from the heavens. Parliament enacted it. Governments maintained it. If it now produces outcomes that no government is prepared to defend, democratic responsibility requires amendment or repeal—not another speech explaining why nothing can be done.

This does not require an attack on judicial independence. Courts must remain free to determine what the law means and whether ministers have acted within it. But courts apply the legal settlement Parliament has created. If Parliament legislates vaguely, delegates broadly or incorporates obligations without providing a workable democratic route for reconsideration, judges will inevitably acquire greater practical influence. The answer is clearer primary legislation, tighter delegation and a Parliament willing to state expressly when an earlier rule is being changed.

Nor does Parliament need to become legally 'more sovereign'. It already possesses the supreme domestic law-making authority. What Britain must recover is practical sovereignty: the confidence, institutional capacity and political will to use that authority. That may require amending or repealing statutes, reconsidering the Human Rights Act, revising the Climate Change Act, renegotiating treaties and returning important decisions from arm's-length bodies to accountable ministers. Each step would carry costs and consequences. Those consequences should be debated honestly rather than disguised as legal impossibility.

A programme of democratic restoration should begin with a systematic audit of delegated power. Every regulator, statutory committee and arm's-length body should have to justify what it decides, why the decision cannot be made by an elected minister, how Parliament can change its mandate and when its powers will next be reviewed. Major questions of borders, energy, taxation, public expenditure and fundamental rights should be settled through clear primary legislation rather than accumulated guidance, secondary rules and administrative discretion.

Ministers must then accept personal responsibility for delivery. Expert advice should be published, but accepting it remains a political choice. Civil servants should provide candid warnings, but once a lawful decision has been made they must implement it. Persistent obstruction or failure should have consequences. Regulators should operate independently within their remit, but the remit must belong visibly to Parliament. No institution should exercise substantial public power without a named democratic authority answering for the result.

The purpose is not government without restraint. It is government in which restraints have democratic legitimacy, remain open to reconsideration and cannot be used as alibis for political failure. Rights must be protected. Courts must be independent. Expertise must inform policy. International promises must be treated seriously. None of that requires the electorate to surrender the ability to change direction.

Britain's problem is therefore not that Parliament lacks sovereignty. It is that successive governments have lacked the determination to exercise it. Parliament must govern again: making the difficult choices, changing laws that no longer work and accepting responsibility for the consequences. Otherwise elections will continue to promise control while the machinery of government explains why control cannot be exercised. Sovereignty will survive in constitutional theory—and disappear from democratic life.