The Commons shouldn’t defend process for its own sake when it comes to Budget leaks

3 min read20 January

Until 1998, MPs raising points of order during a Commons vote were required to do so while wearing a collapsible opera hat.

This silk topper – kept at each end of the Chamber and passed from member to member – became such an embarrassment that the Select Committee on Modernisation concluded it had “almost certainly brought the House into greater ridicule than almost any other” practice. Parliament, sensibly, abolished it.

Yet while the Commons was happy to retire the opera hat, it clings to other conventions equally ill-suited to the modern age, including the insistence that governments must not brief the media on major policy announcements before telling Parliament first. In an era of 24-hour news and relentless social media speculation, this rigidity often leaves government losing control of the narrative before they have even had an opportunity to present and explain their case to the House.

This tension exploded to the fore during the recent Budget. Deputy speaker Nusrat Ghani rose before Rachel Reeves had even begun her statement to deliver a stern rebuke about the “extensive briefings to the media on the government’s fiscal policy and public finances”, describing a “disappointing trend… growing for a number of years under successive governments”.

These interventions were framed as a defence of Parliament’s right to be the first to hear of major policy changes. The ministerial code does state that when Parliament is in session the most important announcements of government policy should be made there first. But this rule has a peculiar effect on the Budget specifically. For most other legislation, Parliament consults, listens to lobbying, hears from constituents and expert witnesses and takes note of editorials in the press. All this goes on extensively before legislation comes before the House.

Uniquely, with the Budget, the opposite happens. The chancellor is supposed to pull a rabbit out of their hat without any of the engagement and exchange of ideas that would precede other legislation. In this context, insisting that Parliament must always hear first continues to look increasingly symbolic rather than functional. The idea that democratic accountability hinges on sequence – who hears first, rather than who can scrutinise most effectively – belongs to a pre-digital age.

Indeed, chancellors need look no further than the business world to see the benefits of trialling major budget policies in this way. If any FTSE 100 company were to announce a product overhaul, strategy change, or large-scale rebrand without first deploying some combination of stakeholder engagement, product testing, or focus group consultation, it would be met with ridicule, or worse, from shareholders and the press.

What’s more, it’s not as if this due diligence requirement is being disputed – there is a rational acceptance that baking in a robust level of analysis and consultation to seminal policymaking is beneficialfor businesses, stakeholders and consumers. Budget days have something to learn from this approach.

This is not an argument for sidelining Parliament. Quite the opposite. It is an argument that Parliament’s strength lies in scrutiny, challenge and consequence – not in being treated as a ceremonial starting point for the release of information.

When ministers are chastised for briefing journalists or international partners, the risk is that the Commons appears to be defending process for its own sake, rather than adapting its role to where political power actually operates today.

While the rules remain unchanged, it seems taking heat from the Speaker’s chair is a price politicians will be willing to pay for breaking with this convention.