Avoiding Another ‘Squatter in Downing Street’ Controversy: The Need to Improve the Caretaker Conventions before the 2015 General Election

Abstract

In the UK the rules governing caretaker situations have historically been underspecified. The UK's constitutional traditions, such as prime ministerial discretion to time elections and its two-party system, have in the past limited the frequency and duration of caretaker periods. However, the recently lengthened election timetable, new constraints on the executive introduced by the Fixed-term Parliaments Act (2011), and a decline in the dominance of the two largest parties are raising the risk that the UK will experience caretaker periods more often and for longer stretches of time. In this paper, we offer an analysis of the UK's current caretaker provisions and conclude that the existing conventions are insufficiently detailed and can render such periods problematic and controversy-prone. Important lessons, we suggest, can be learned from reforms in other Westminster systems, and from the caretaker rules of other countries.As the general election of 2010 approached, opinion polls generated strong expectations of a hung parliament. In preparation, Gordon Brown asked the Cabinet Secretary to lead efforts to consolidate the existing unwritten conventions that govern how central government operates into a single written document. The result was a first draft of the UK Cabinet Manual, of which the caretaker conventions were a part. Belated attention to the challenges of caretaker periods caused the government to operate, throughout the 2010 election and the subsequent government formation process, on the basis of these draft conventions, which had not yet been approved and were not well understood by the press or the public. As a result, there was disagreement and debate about the Prime Minister's decision to remain in office until the coalition talks were completed.The 2010 general election returned the UK's second hung parliament since the Second World War. Since Labour had lost its majority, the media and the public seemed to expect that Gordon Brown and his government would resign immediately. When Brown remained in office pending the completion of the coalition talks, he was widely decried as the 'squatter in Downing Street'. There seemed to be little understanding of the government's caretaker status.Moreover, in the midst of the economic crisis, decisions arose during the caretaker period, which could not be postponed. Two days after the general election, Mr Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, attended an extraordinary meeting of European finance ministers, which was set to adopt far-reaching new powers for the Commission and its fellow bodies. In the event, Mr Darling chose to consult with the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrats before the meeting, but there was at the time no constitutional convention preventing him from making substantial commitments that would have bound the incoming government, possibly in direct contradiction to its policy position.