Carltona doctrine

The Carltona doctrine (or Carltona principle) expresses the idea that, in United Kingdom law, the acts of government departmental officials are synonymous with the actions of the minister in charge of that department. The point was established in Carltona Ltd v. Commissioners of Works.

Faced with the requisition of their factory by the war-time government, the factory owners raised a judicial review action to challenge the legality of the requisition order. The order had been made under the auspices of the Defence (General) Regulations 1939, which authorised the Commissioners of Works to requisition such land as they deemed necessary in the national interest. The Regulations specified that the Commissioner's powers were exercisable by, inter alia the Minister of Works and Planning. The factory owners sought to argue that the requisition was invalid because the order had not in fact been signed by the minister, but by an official within the Ministry of Works and Planning. In rejecting this contention, the Master of the Rolls, Lord Greene, acknowledged the realities of government in the 20th century:

"In the administration of government in this country the functions which are given to ministers (and constitutionally properly given to ministers because they are constitutionally responsible) are functions so multifarious that no minister could ever personally attend to them...[therefore] The duties imposed upon ministers and the powers given to ministers are normally exercised under the authority of ministers by responsible officials of the department. Public business could not be carried on if that were not the case."

This statement of the way government operates has only become more true in recent decades as increased state interventionism and juridification have produced a rapid growth in the use of delegated legislation. Clearly, confronted with this reality, it would have been preposterous for the Court to construe the wording of the Regulations so narrowly that only the Minister, in person, could exercise the powers. Thus Lord Greene explained that:

"Constitutionally, the decision of such an official is, of course, the decision of the minister."

It should be emphasised that the essence of the Carltona doctrine therefore lies in the elision of the identity of departmental officials with the relevant Minister. It is emphatically not the case that the Minister has delegated his decision-making power to a subordinate and therefore the doctrine achieves consistency with the principle that Parliament's delegatees have, unless specifically provided by statute, no power to delegate (delegatus non potest delegare).

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