Wrong kinds of accountability

We need to bear in mind that not all accountability mechanisms in the UK promote the public interest and public service principles: not all of the ‘accountees’ who seek to hold officials to account by criticizing them, demanding explanations or redress, and calling for their resignation if they consider that they are wrong, will be concerned to promote the public interest and public service; they may rather be preoccupied with their own personal interests, ideologies, or preferences.

Political parties and other unelected bodies may seek to impose their views of where the public interest lies on elected ministers and MPs or on local authorities. The cases on the public service principle discussed earlier illustrate this point: Osborne and Bromley were litigated because of concerns that MPs and elected councillors allowed themselves to be mandated by outside bodies; Padfield was litigated because of concern that a minister had been influenced by his personal interest in avoiding embarrassment if he were to refer the question of milk pricing to a committee; Fewings was litigated because of concerns that councillors considered themselves to enjoy the same freedom of action as private property owners, entitled therefore to impose their own moral opinions about stag hunting on others. Thus it is obvious that the principles of public service and public interest can conflict with the interests of MPs and councillors, and of government, or the wishes of many electors. That is inevitable. But if public bodies were so sensitive to pressures that conflict with their own honest judgements of where the public interest lies that they gained reputations for weakness, their very legitimacy would be undermined.

There follow some further illustrations of what are currently widely regarded as inappropriate elements in accountability webs. Public officials may feel impelled to respond positively to criticisms from partisan or sectional representative bodies so as to mollify them; they may even feel pressed to abandon policies they believe to be in the public interest because of partisan pressures.

For instance, if MPs act as consultants to bodies which are concerned with their own interests or those of their members, they are likely to be lobbied by them to promote their interests or to support their views. It is in order to prevent such relationships from undermining the ability of MPs to act in a spirit of public service and to pursue public interests that parliamentary rules require MPs not to accept mandates from their sponsors, and sponsors not to mandate MPs.^[1092] But these rules alone will not prevent MPs from being influenced by their relationships with their sponsors in what they do. It is in recognition of these problems that MPs are required to register their interests, to declare them, and not to act as paid advocates or to lobby for reward or consideration.^[1093]

Some—for instance, excessive—impositions of accountability on public officials can interfere with their proper exercise of public functions in the public interest. Derek Lewis, the Director of Prisons who resigned after a prison breakout in 1995, complained that the Home Secretary, Michael Howard MP, involved himself so much in the work of the service that it damaged his ability to do the job.^[1094] The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, set up by Act of Parliament in 2009 (as amended by the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, ch 3) in the wake of the 2009 scandals over MPs' expenses, has been greatly resented and criticized by individual MPs and others, including some members of the Speaker's Committee for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority ^[1095] in ways that may have made it difficult for it to cope with its remit. There are no doubt differences of interpretation of the facts of each of these examples, but they serve at least to show that accountabilities can operate counter-productively so as to frustrate the mandate of the accountor.

The history of Northern Ireland during the period from 1923 to 1972 is the strongest example close to home of the damage that can be done by the wrong kinds of accountability.^[1096] Direct rule was imposed in 1972 because of the Troubles there that were caused by permanent unionist majoritarian government at Stormont which promoted the interests of the unionists/protestants/loyalists over those of the nationalist/Catholic/republican populations—which in other words did not operate on the basis that there were shared interests in the province which it was the duty of the government at Stormont and the public service there to promote.

The Northern Ireland government and the majority parties in the Assembly were effectively accountable only to the majority population, not to the minority or to the population as a whole. This situation resulted in violent conflict between members of the two communities, and this in turn led to direct rule from Whitehall and Westminster; to the abandonment of jury trial; to judges being threatened and having to be placed under tight security protection; to lawyers and journalists being murdered—in other words not only were state institutions which failed to observe these two principles suspended, but the rule of law itself was under threat. The conflict could only be brought to an end through the laborious negotiation of an agreement to share power between the two communities, the Belfast Agreement 1998 and its endorsement in referendums held in the Province and in the Republic of Ireland, followed by the Northern Ireland Act 1998.

In sum, although accountability mechanisms in the UK will commonly operate positively to promote the public service and public interest principles, they may operate negatively. It is likely that the same is true of other liberal democracies.

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Source: Bamforth Nicholas, Leyland Peter (eds.). Accountability in the Contemporary Constitution. Oxford University Press,2014. — 425 p.. 2014

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Wrong kinds of accountability

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