Whitehall: Completing the reform of the Ethics and Integrity Commission

Ministerial submission

To: The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office

Issue

1. The Ethics and Integrity Commission, established in October 2025 to fulfil the manifesto commitment to a new independent body overseeing probity in government, has been widely assessed by independent commentators as falling well short of that commitment: it cannot investigate individual cases, the Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards it sits alongside still requires the Prime Minister’s consent to open an investigation, and the Prime Minister alone still determines whether the Ministerial Code has been breached. This submission concerns whether, and how far, the Government should now go further.

Background

2. The Committee on Standards in Public Life was established in 1994 following the Nolan inquiry into standards in public life, setting out the Seven Principles of Public Life and advising government on the standards system, without power to investigate individual complaints. The Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests, later the Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards, was created in 2006 to advise the Prime Minister on ministers’ registrable interests and, from 2012, on alleged breaches of the Ministerial Code; the Adviser could not open an investigation without the Prime Minister’s consent, and the Prime Minister alone determined whether a breach had occurred and what should follow. The Advisory Committee on Business Appointments advised, on a similarly non-binding basis, on the propriety of jobs taken by ministers and senior officials after leaving office.

3. This structure produced two high-profile resignations in protest at its central weakness. Sir Alex Allan resigned as Independent Adviser in November 2020 after the Prime Minister declined to accept his finding that the Home Secretary had breached the Code by bullying civil servants. Lord Geidt resigned in June 2022 amid the cumulative strain of being asked to give advice that appeared to compromise his independence, against the backdrop of the “partygate” affair. Both cases turned on the same feature: the Adviser could establish facts and offer a view, but the decision on breach and consequence rested with the Prime Minister, who was in each case assessing a minister of their own government.

4. The Government’s 2024 manifesto committed to remedy this: to “establish a new independent Ethics and Integrity Commission (EIC), with its own independent chair, to ensure probity in government”, to “give the independent adviser on ministerial interests the powers to start investigations into misconduct”, and to introduce “meaningful sanctions for breaching the rules” on post-government jobs. The EIC began operating on 13 October 2025, chaired by Doug Chalmers, the CSPL’s final chair, with a mixed membership of independent members appointed by the Prime Minister through open competition and political members nominated by the leaders of the three largest parties in the Commons. ACOBA was abolished the same day; its business-appointment functions passed to the Independent Adviser, for ministers, and to the Civil Service Commission, for the most senior civil servants and special advisers.

5. Independent assessment of the reform has been consistently critical of how much it actually changed. The EIC does not investigate specific cases, continuing the CSPL’s own limitation; its new duties are to report annually to the Prime Minister on the health of the standards system, to lead work on codes of ethical conduct across the public sector — linked to the forthcoming duty under the Public Office (Accountability) Bill for all public bodies to adopt one — and to convene a network of six standards bodies. The Independent Adviser retains no new investigatory power: the consent gate and the Prime Minister’s sole determination of breach are unchanged. The only sanction for a breach of the business-appointment rules remains a discretionary clawback of ministerial severance pay, at the Prime Minister’s own discretion. The EIC’s secretariat, inherited from the CSPL, numbers around five people against a substantially expanded remit; its own chair has said publicly that new commissioned work will begin once the Commission has the resources to do it. Lord Anderson’s Public Service (Ethics, Integrity and Independence) Bill, before Parliament as a means of giving the standards system statutory footing, offers an existing legislative vehicle for a fuller reform.

6. You have not yet been asked to take a position on further reform of this settlement specifically. The Prime Minister has, however, made restoring trust in government and ending a period of perceived instability a central theme of his premiership, and the gap between the manifesto commitment on ethics and integrity and what has so far been delivered is, on the independent commentary at paragraph 5, a specific and citable instance of that broader theme rather than a peripheral technical question.

The General Case

7. The case for going further than the October 2025 settlement rests on three grounds:

• (a) the manifesto commitment to an independent body with investigatory power and meaningful sanctions is, on the assessment of independent commentators, substantially undelivered, and the Government has an outstanding commitment to account for;
• (b) the specific structural flaw that produced the Allan and Geidt resignations — the Prime Minister as both consent-gate for investigation and sole judge of breach involving their own ministers — was not addressed by the October 2025 reforms and remains available to recur;
• (c) the EIC’s non-statutory status leaves the entire apparatus dependent on continued Prime Ministerial goodwill; the vulnerability this creates was illustrated when predecessor governments reportedly considered abolishing the Independent Adviser role altogether rather than reforming it.

8. The case against rests on three grounds:

• (a) the EIC is not yet a year old; a further structural reorganisation so soon risks a third disruptive change to the standards landscape within two years, working against the institutional stability that effective standards regulation itself depends on;
• (b) transferring the power to determine a breach, or to impose a binding sanction, away from the Prime Minister relocates part of the individual accountability ministers owe to the Prime Minister as the person who appoints and dismisses them, a genuine constitutional question and not merely a question of how much “teeth” the system should have;
• (c) any expanded remit competes for the same scarce Cabinet Office budget and specialist secretariat capacity as other current reform priorities, including civil service reform more broadly.

Options

Option A: Leave the October 2025 settlement to bed in

9. Under this option, no further structural reform is pursued. The EIC, the Independent Adviser, and the Civil Service Commission continue to operate on the current basis, with a formal review after a defined period, for example following the EIC’s first full Annual Report.

10. For:

• (a) avoids a third reorganisation of the standards landscape within two years, allowing the new coordination network of six bodies time to demonstrate whether voluntary coordination can resolve the fragmentation criticised at paragraph 5;
• (b) preserves the genuine, if partial, gains of the October 2025 reform — the annual reporting duty and the EIC’s codes-of-conduct leadership role — without further disruption while they are established;
• (c) allows the resourcing gap identified at paragraph 5 to be addressed on its own terms, through the normal Spending Review process, without being bundled into a larger and more contested structural reform.

11. Against:

• (a) leaves the central structural flaw identified at paragraph 7(b) untested by reform, despite a direct manifesto commitment to change it;
• (b) leaves the EIC non-statutory and, per paragraph 7(c), vulnerable to a future Prime Minister who is less supportive of it than the current Government;
• (c) risks the new codes-of-conduct duty being delivered poorly, or not at all, given the resourcing gap the Commission’s own chair has publicly acknowledged.

Option B: Statutory footing and investigatory independence, adopting or adapting Lord Anderson’s Bill

12. Under this option, the Government adopts, or introduces its own version of, the Public Service (Ethics, Integrity and Independence) Bill, giving the Independent Adviser a statutory basis protected from abolition without primary legislation, and removing the requirement for Prime Ministerial consent before an investigation may be opened. The Prime Minister would retain sole authority over what sanction, if any, follows a finding of breach.

13. For:

• (a) directly answers the vulnerability identified at paragraph 7(c), since abolition or curtailment of a statutory body requires primary legislation rather than an administrative decision;
• (b) removes the consent gate that was the proximate cause of both the Allan and Geidt resignations, without transferring the sanction decision itself away from the Prime Minister, a narrower change than Option C or D;
• (c) an existing Bill text is already before Parliament, reducing the drafting lead time that a wholly new legislative proposal would require.

14. Against:

• (a) does not resolve the “Prime Minister as final judge” objection at paragraph 7(b) in full, since the sanction decision remains with the Prime Minister even once the investigation trigger is reformed, which some critics may regard as a partial rather than complete fix;
• (b) Government adoption of a Bill that originated as a private member’s or crossbench measure carries its own presentational question — why the Government did not legislate to this effect itself when the EIC was established in October 2025 — that would need to be managed;
• (c) an Adviser empowered to investigate without Prime Ministerial consent could open investigations into matters a Prime Minister would prefer resolved informally, changing the political calculus around how quickly and publicly disputes involving ministers become public.

Option C: Consolidate further into the EIC, with a binding business-appointments sanction

15. Under this option, the Independent Adviser’s ministerial-conduct function and the business-appointment functions currently split between the Adviser and the Civil Service Commission would be folded into the EIC itself, and the EIC would be given power to prohibit or delay a business appointment, rather than the current model in which the only sanction is a discretionary clawback of severance pay.

16. For:

• (a) most directly answers the “six different bodies, confusing landscape” criticism at paragraph 5, moving closer to the single independent body the manifesto originally described;
• (b) a binding sanction on business appointments gives the regime a real enforcement mechanism for the first time, rather than a discretionary financial penalty that a former minister may in practice simply accept;
• (c) consolidating expertise in one body may improve consistency between how ministers’ and senior officials’ conduct is treated, which is currently split by role rather than by underlying principle.

17. Against:

• (a) the most operationally disruptive of the reform options, requiring a body not yet a year old to absorb entirely new functions before it has established its own working rhythm, compounding the concern at paragraph 8(a);
• (b) a binding power to prohibit or delay a business appointment is a significant, novel constraint on individuals’ post-government employment, likely to raise proportionality questions requiring careful legal design and, plausibly, litigation risk;
• (c) does not, on its own, resolve the Ministerial Code breach-and-sanction question addressed by Options B and D, since decisions on ministers’ conduct specifically would most likely remain a Prime Ministerial function even within a more consolidated EIC, given ministers serve at the Prime Minister’s pleasure.

Option D: Separate determination of breach from determination of sanction

18. Under this option, the EIC, or a reformed Independent Adviser function within it, would itself determine whether the Ministerial Code has been breached, formally separating that question from the decision on what sanction, if any, follows, which would remain solely a matter for the Prime Minister. This is the model the CSPL itself recommended in principle in 2021.

19. For:

• (a) most closely matches the standing independent recommendation on this question, and would have changed the shape of the Allan case specifically, where the dispute was precisely over who has the authority to decide that a breach occurred;
• (b) separates a genuinely investigatory and factual question — did conduct breach the Code — from a genuinely political one — what should happen to the minister — a cleaner conceptual structure than the present fused model;
• (c) preserves the constitutional principle that sanction, and therefore a minister’s tenure, remains a matter between the Prime Minister and their minister, addressing part of the objection at paragraph 8(b).

20. Against:

• (a) the most direct challenge of the four options to the principle that ministers are individually responsible to, and hold office at the pleasure of, the Prime Minister, since an external body determining breach narrows Prime Ministerial discretion even before the separate sanction question arises;
• (b) would very likely require primary legislation and, unlike Option B, has no existing Bill before Parliament to build on, extending the time before any benefit is realised;
• (c) the practical difference from Option B may in practice prove smaller than the conceptual distinction suggests, since a Prime Minister could still decline to act on an adverse determination in all but the most extreme cases, constrained only by the political cost of doing so rather than by law.

Resource and Cost Implications

21. None of the options carries substantial direct financial cost relative to departmental budgets, but the resourcing gap identified at paragraph 5 — a secretariat of around five people covering an expanded remit — is a live problem under every option, including Option A, and should be addressed through the normal Spending Review process regardless of which structural option is preferred. Option B requires legislative drafting and Parliamentary time, reduced by the existence of Lord Anderson’s Bill, and modest additional casework capacity for the Independent Adviser once the consent gate is removed. Option C requires the EIC to absorb staff and casework from two other bodies, together with a new legal and enforcement function for the binding business-appointments sanction, the most resource-intensive of the four options. Option D requires the development of a more formal, quasi-judicial process for determining breaches capable of withstanding judicial review, a different kind of cost from the others, being primarily one of process design rather than staff numbers.

Legal and Constitutional Considerations

22. The Ministerial Code itself is not a statutory document; it is issued and may be amended by the Prime Minister at their own discretion. Options B and D can be pursued without making the Code itself statutory: what would change under each is the institutional status and powers of the body assessing conduct against the Code, not the legal status of the Code as such, a distinction that is sometimes elided in public commentary and which officials should keep clear in any advice that follows this submission.

23. This submission is a further instance of the convention-versus-codification problem set out in the structural-problems digest, applied here to ministerial rather than prime ministerial accountability: the Ministerial Code and the Adviser’s remit currently rest on arrangements the Prime Minister may alter at will, and Options B and D both propose to give some part of that arrangement legal rather than purely conventional force. As with the mid-term succession question considered in the companion submission on that subject, the choice of route — Standing Order, where relevant, versus primary legislation — follows directly from which body’s discretion is being constrained; here, since the Prime Minister’s own personal prerogative over the Ministerial Code and the Adviser’s operation is the discretion in question, Standing Orders have no application, and only primary legislation (Options B and D) or continued reliance on convention (Options A and C, in respect of the Ministerial Code specifically) is available.

24. Devolved administrations operate separate standards regimes: the Scottish Ministerial Code and the Welsh Ministerial Code are enforced through each administration’s own independent adviser arrangements, established separately from the bodies considered in this submission. None of the options proposed here would apply to devolved ministers; any statutory reform under Option B or D would need to state its territorial extent clearly, addressing UK Government ministers and reserved matters only.

Requested direction

25. Ministers are invited to indicate whether the October 2025 settlement should be left to bed in and reviewed after a defined period (Option A); whether the Government should adopt or introduce its own version of statutory protection and investigatory independence along the lines of Lord Anderson’s Bill (Option B); whether functions should be further consolidated into the EIC, including a binding business-appointments sanction (Option C); or whether the more fundamental separation of breach-determination from sanction recommended by the CSPL in 2021 should be developed for further consideration (Option D); and, given that any of Options B to D would engage the rules governing the Prime Minister’s own ministers, whether the preferred option should be referred to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee for cross-party scrutiny before a final proposal is brought forward.