Prime Minister written statement – made at on 17 May 2006.
Tony Blair
Prime Minister
I have placed an updated list of Cabinet Committees, and of who chairs them, in the Libraries of both Houses.
A full list, including membership and terms of reference will shortly be placed in the library of the House and on the Cabinet Office website.
Cabinet committees are established by the prime minister to enable the cabinet to deal more efficiently with the large volume of government business.
All cabinet committees are chaired by the prime minister or a senior cabinet minister and will have a number of cabinet ministers as members. Some are permanent committees while others are set up to deal with particular issues as they arise.
Cabinet committees carry out the bulk of cabinet work and the decisions they take have the authority of full cabinet. If a committee cannot agree on an issue it will be sent to the full cabinet for a final decision.
Some cabinet committees have sub-committees that do not usually taking final decisions on policy, but can enable important discussion of those issues which range across government departments.
This phrase is often used in written answers to indicate that a minister has deposited some relevant information in the House of Commons Library. Typical content includes research reports, letters, and tables of data not published elsewhere.
A list of such depositions can be found at http://deposits.parliament.uk/ along with some of the documents. The Library is not open to the public, but copies of documents can be requested if they are not on that website. For more information, see the House of Commons factsheet: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/P15.pdf
The cabinet is the group of twenty or so (and no more than 22) senior government ministers who are responsible for running the departments of state and deciding government policy.
It is chaired by the prime minister.
The cabinet is bound by collective responsibility, which means that all its members must abide by and defend the decisions it takes, despite any private doubts that they might have.
Cabinet ministers are appointed by the prime minister and chosen from MPs or peers of the governing party.
However, during periods of national emergency, or when no single party gains a large enough majority to govern alone, coalition governments have been formed with cabinets containing members from more than one political party.
War cabinets have sometimes been formed with a much smaller membership than the full cabinet.
From time to time the prime minister will reorganise the cabinet in order to bring in new members, or to move existing members around. This reorganisation is known as a cabinet re-shuffle.
The cabinet normally meets once a week in the cabinet room at Downing Street.
