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Decision-making within government
1.
This Section
addresses:
•
the roles
and responsibilities of key individuals and bodies;
and
•
the
machinery established in order to make decisions pre-conflict,
and
post‑conflict.
2.
This Section
does not address:
•
the
Inquiry’s conclusions in relation to the decision to join the
US-led invasion of
Iraq, which
can be read in Section 7.
3.
Under UK
constitutional conventions – in which the Prime Minister leads
the
Government
but is not personally vested with the powers of a Head of State –
Cabinet
is the main
mechanism by which senior members of the Government take
collective
responsibility
for decisions that are of critical importance to the public. The
decision to
deploy UK
Armed Forces to Iraq clearly falls into that category.
4.
Cabinet is
formally a Committee of the Privy Council, chaired by the Prime
Minister.
5.
In 2003,
the Ministerial
Code said:
“The
Cabinet is supported by Ministerial Committees (both standing and
ad hoc)
which have
a two-fold purpose. First, they relieve the pressure on the
Cabinet
itself by
settling as much business as possible at a lower level or, failing
that, by
clarifying
the issues and defining the points of disagreement. Second, they
support
the
principle of collective responsibility by ensuring that, even
though an important
question
may never reach the Cabinet itself, the decision will be fully
considered and
the final
judgement will be sufficiently authoritative to ensure that the
Government as
a whole can
properly be expected to accept responsibility for
it.”1
“The
business of the Cabinet and Ministerial Committees consists in the
main of:
a.
questions
which significantly engage the collective responsibility of
the
Government
because they raise major issues or policy or because they
are
of critical
importance to the public;
b.
questions on which there is an unresolved argument between
Departments.”
1
Cabinet
Office, Ministerial
Code, July
2001, page 3.
267