Discuss the view that Parliament is an inefficient check on the Executive
The Executive is responsible for handling the day to day running of the country and provides leadership in terms of the direction of government policy and responses to events. It is led by the Prime Minister and includes Cabinet ministers, junior ministers, members of senior ranks of the Civil service and also specialist advisors. Ministers must be in Parliament but in some cases, outside experts can be brought in by being given peerage, an example being Peter Mandelson.
One of the main functions of Parliament is accountability, this means Parliament can hold the Executive accountable and scrutinise actions and decisions. In this essay I will be discuss whether or not Parliament is an inefficient check on the Executive.
Although during a coalition such as the current Conservative & Liberal Democrat Government causes accountability to become a harder function for Parliament to fulfil due to the merits and demerits of the Executive being more difficult to pin down…show more content… The first is that during Parliamentary Questions, an MP may only ask up to two oral questions and any amount of written questions a day, and only one per minister, this means that it can leave a number of unanswered questions the MP may have in order to scrutinise the Executive efficiently which creates a lack of freedom for MPs. Furthermore, supplementary question may be asked however must be at the discretion of the Speaker and examined whether or not they are in line with the rules. Another reason Parliamentary Questions is an inefficient check is due to the fact that all the questions must be given in advance so that ministers of the specific departments are able to draft or plan an answer which can weaken the effectiveness of Parliamentary Questions and could be seen as an inefficient check on the