Earlier this month, John Major, the former prime minister, and Lord Hurd, the former foreign secretary, wrote an article in the Times that was ignored by almost everyone at Westminster but which contained a proposal that could transform our constitution radically. Major and Hurd, who were both seen as small-c conservatives when they were in office, said that non-parliamentarians – ie people who are not MPs or peers – ought to be allowed to serve as government ministers.
We would look for a way in which all ministers in the House of Lords could appear at the dispatch box to answer to the House of Commons as a whole, and not just to select committees. We would make a more adventurous experiment in the same direction: a prime minister could appoint a small number of unelected ministers of state, who would be answerable to parliament without being members of either house. This is, of course, a device borrowed from the United States, France and other democracies that practise the separation of powers. It could deepen the quality of ministerial government without undermining the principle of accountability to parliament.
Now the Commons public administration committee has launched an inquiry into "unelected ministers". It wants to find out whether there is merit in the Major-Hurd proposal and it has published a list of "key questions" to which it's inviting people to respond.
Gordon Brown seems to find the convention that most senior posts in the governments should be filled by MPs particularly frustrating. He's got peers heading two Whitehall departments (business and transport), a peer serving as the de facto deputy prime minister (Lord Mandelson), and a handful of peers (such as Lord Myners, Lord Davies of Abersoch, Lady Vadera, and Lord Malloch-Brown) doing other powerful jobs in government.
As you can see from this House of Commons library note, there have been far more peers in cabinet or attending cabinet since 2005 than in any government since 1970. Allowing non-parliamentarians to serve in government would just be an extension of this development (and one that would stop the Lords being cluttered up with people awarded a peerage just so they could serve as ministers).
But it would also start to prise apart the executive from the legislature in ways that could eventually take you towards the American or French system of government.
What do you think?
