Cabinet of the United Kingdom

The Cabinet of the United Kingdom is the senior decision making body of the Government of the United Kingdom. A committee of the Privy Council, it is chaired by the Prime Minister and its members include Secretaries of State and other senior ministers.

The Ministerial Code says that the business of the Cabinet (and cabinet committees) is mainly: questions of major issues of policy, questions of critical importance to the public and questions on which there is an unresolved argument between departments.

## Composition

The Prime Minister decides the membership and attendees of the Cabinet. The total number of Cabinet ministers who are entitled to a salary is capped at 21, plus the Lord Chancellor, who is paid separately. Some ministers may be designated as also attending Cabinet, like the Attorney General, as "...it has been considered more appropriate, in recent times at any rate, that the independence and detachment of his office should not be blurred by his inclusion in a political body – that is to say the Cabinet – which may have to make policy decisions upon the basis of the legal advice the law officers have given."

The Cabinet is a committee of the Privy Council (though this interpretation has been challenged) and, as such, all Cabinet ministers must be privy counsellors. The Cabinet is now made up almost entirely of members of the House of Commons, with the Peel convention dictating that ministers may only be recruited from the House of Commons or the House of Lords (though this convention has been broken in the past, the case of Patrick Gordon Walker perhaps being the most notable exception). Sometimes, when a minister from neither House is appointed, they have been granted a customary peerage.

Civil servants from the Cabinet Secretariat and special advisors (on the approval of the Prime Minister) can also attend Cabinet meetings, but neither take part in discussions. It has been suggested that the modern Cabinet is too large, including by former Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill and scholars Robert Hazell and Rodney Brazier. Robert Hazell has suggested merging the offices of Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales into one Secretary of State for the Union, in a department into which Rodney Brazier has suggested adding a Minister of State for England with responsibility for English local government.

## Meetings of the Cabinet

Most cabinet meetings takes place in the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street; however, they have been known to take place in other places.

Despite the custom of meeting on a Thursday, after the appointment of Gordon Brown, the meeting day was switched to Tuesday. However, when David Cameron became prime minister, he held his cabinet meetings on Thursdays again. Upon Theresa May's ascension, she switched the cabinet meetings back to Tuesday.

The length of meetings varies according to the style of the prime minister and political conditions, but modern meetings can be as short as 30 minutes. Ministers are bound by the constitutional convention of collective ministerial responsibility.

## Current Cabinet

As of March 2020, the makeup of the Cabinet (in order of ministerial ranking) is: