The monarch, Parliament and government

The monarch as head of state

The United Kingdom's head of state is the monarch, currently King Charles III, who took the throne when his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, died in September 2022. This makes the UK a constitutional monarchy: a king or queen sits at the top of public life, but the power to make and pass laws belongs to an elected Parliament rather than to the Crown. In practice this means the monarch reigns without ruling. Government decisions are taken by ministers, who are accountable to Parliament, and the monarch acts on their advice rather than according to personal preference.

A defining feature of the role is political neutrality. The monarch does not vote, cannot stand for election and is expected to stay above party politics at all times, never publicly favouring one party or policy over another. This neutrality lets the monarch act as a shared figurehead for the whole country, regardless of which party is in office or how people voted.

Alongside this constitutional position, the monarch carries out a wide range of ceremonial duties. These include representing the UK on state visits abroad and hosting visiting heads of state, presiding over royal ceremonies and honours, and acting as a symbol of national unity and continuity at events of national significance. Many of these duties are formal rather than political: the monarch performs them as head of state, while the real decisions behind them are made by the government of the day.

Opening Parliament and Royal Assent

Each parliamentary year begins with a ceremony called the State Opening of Parliament, held on the first day of a new session or shortly after a general election. It is the one regular occasion when the Sovereign, the House of Lords and the House of Commons come together, since together they form what is formally called the Crown in Parliament. At the ceremony the monarch reads a speech, known as the King's Speech (or Queen's Speech under a queen), from the throne in the House of Lords. Although the monarch delivers it, the speech is written by the government and sets out the policies and laws ministers plan to introduce in the coming session. The monarch reads it in a neutral tone, without showing any hint of personal or party opinion, in keeping with the strict political impartiality expected of the role.

Once a bill has completed its passage through both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, it needs one final step before it becomes law: Royal Assent, the monarch's formal agreement to the legislation. This is one of the monarch's duties as part of the Crown in Parliament. By long-standing convention, Royal Assent is never refused, so the step is a formality rather than a real check on what Parliament decides. Royal Assent has not been withheld by a monarch since the early eighteenth century, underlining how the power to legislate now rests with elected representatives rather than the Crown.

Appointing the prime minister

Appointing the prime minister is one of the few personal acts still carried out by the monarch in person, though it too is governed by firm convention rather than free choice. After a general election, the monarch invites the leader of the party that can command the confidence of the House of Commons, usually the party with the most seats, to form a government and become prime minister. If no single party wins a majority, the monarch waits while party leaders decide who can command that confidence, then invites the person best placed to do so.

The monarch also appoints a new prime minister when one resigns between elections, for example if a party changes its leader while in government. In every case the decision is treated as being dictated by the political arithmetic in the Commons rather than by royal preference, which keeps the monarch's role consistent with staying neutral in party politics. Beyond appointing the prime minister, the monarch holds regular private audiences with them to discuss government business; these meetings are confidential, and by convention the monarch may offer views and advice but always accepts the advice of ministers in the end.

The House of Commons and its members

The House of Commons is the more powerful of Parliament's two chambers and the one that decides who governs, since the party with the most seats there forms the government. The United Kingdom is divided into 650 parliamentary constituencies, each one represented by a single Member of Parliament, or MP, elected by the people who live there. Every adult in the country falls within one constituency, and that MP is expected to represent all of their constituents regardless of how they voted, taking up local problems and speaking for the area's interests in Parliament. MPs are elected using the first past the post system, where the candidate with the most votes in a constituency wins, and a general election is normally held every five years, though a by-election can happen at any time if a seat falls vacant.

Debates and votes inside the Commons chamber are chaired by the Speaker, an MP elected to the role by fellow MPs in a secret ballot at the start of a new Parliament, or whenever the position falls vacant. Once elected, the Speaker gives up membership of their political party and stays neutral on political questions for the rest of their time in office, even after leaving it, though they continue to serve and represent their own constituency like any other MP. The Speaker's main job is to keep order during debates, decide who gets to speak, and make sure the rules of the House are followed, acting as an impartial referee between government and opposition rather than taking sides.

The House of Lords and its peers

The House of Lords is Parliament's second chamber. Unlike the Commons, its members are not elected by the public; they are known as peers, and most of them are life peers, appointed in recognition of significant achievement in fields such as politics, business, law or the arts. A life peerage lasts only for the holder's lifetime and cannot be passed on to their children, which marks a deliberate break from the older tradition of hereditary peers, who inherited their titles and, before reforms in recent decades, made up the bulk of the chamber. A small number of hereditary peers still sit in the Lords today, alongside senior bishops of the Church of England known as the Lords Spiritual. The House of Lords revises and examines legislation sent to it from the Commons, and can suggest amendments or delay a bill, but it cannot block a bill indefinitely, since the elected Commons has the final say on most matters.

How Parliament examines issues and holds government to account

Much of Parliament's work happens through debate. MPs and peers discuss proposed new laws, government policy and current issues of public concern in their respective chambers, arguing for and against a position before a vote is taken where one is needed. These debates give the opposition a formal chance to challenge the government's decisions and force ministers to explain and defend their choices in public.

Alongside full debates in the chamber, both Houses rely on committees, smaller groups of MPs or peers who look at particular issues in much greater depth than time in the chamber would allow. Select committees, for example, examine the work of a government department or a specific policy area, questioning ministers and officials, gathering evidence and publishing reports with their conclusions and recommendations. Other committees examine the detailed wording of a bill line by line before it can become law, checking that it will work as intended and proposing changes where needed.

This combination of open debate and detailed committee work is how Parliament scrutinises the government, meaning it checks and questions what ministers are doing and holds them answerable for it. Government ministers must regularly appear before Parliament to answer questions, including at set times such as Prime Minister's Questions, and must justify their policies and spending to elected representatives. This scrutiny is a central part of the relationship between Parliament and government: Parliament is not the same body as the government, and one of its core functions is to hold the government of the day to account on behalf of the public.

How a bill becomes law

Before a new law even reaches Parliament, the government often tests the idea first. It may publish a green paper, a document that sets out a proposal in outline and invites comments from anyone interested, followed later by a white paper, which sets out firmer plans once that feedback has been considered. Neither step is compulsory, but they are common when a policy is complex or likely to prove controversial.

A proposed law is called a bill. Most bills are public bills, put forward by government ministers and affecting the whole country, though individual backbench MPs or peers can also introduce private members' bills, and a small number of private bills affect only a particular organisation or place. A bill can start its journey in either the Commons or the Lords, and it must pass through the same set of stages in both Houses before it can become law. First reading is a formality: the bill's title is simply announced, with no debate or vote. Second reading is where the real argument happens, as members debate the bill's main principles and then vote on whether it should continue. If it survives that vote, the bill moves to committee stage, where a smaller group of members examines its text line by line and can propose amendments. Report stage gives the whole House a chance to debate and vote on any further changes, and third reading is a final, usually brief, vote on the bill in its finished form.

Once a bill clears all these stages in the House where it started, it goes to the other House and repeats the same process. If the second House makes changes, the bill is sent back to the first so that both Houses can agree on identical wording, a back-and-forth exchange sometimes called ping pong. Only when the Commons and the Lords have agreed the exact text does the bill go for Royal Assent, after which it becomes an Act of Parliament and takes legal effect, sometimes immediately and sometimes from a later date set out in the Act itself.

The prime minister and Cabinet government

The prime minister leads the government and is also, in normal practice, the leader of the political party with the most support in the House of Commons. As well as directing government policy, the prime minister appoints the other ministers who run each government department and chairs Cabinet, the committee of the most senior ministers that meets regularly to agree government policy and coordinate the work of departments.

Cabinet decisions bind the whole government under a convention called collective responsibility. Once Cabinet has agreed a policy, every minister is expected to support it in public, even if they argued against it in private discussion. A minister who cannot accept a Cabinet decision is expected to resign rather than criticise it openly, which is why government statements usually present a single, unified position rather than a range of ministerial opinions.

Facing the prime minister and Cabinet across the Commons is the leader of the opposition, whose party forms a shadow cabinet: senior opposition MPs who each focus on scrutinising a matching government department and its minister, ready to form a government of their own if their party wins power.

Ministers, departments and the civil service

Government work is organised into departments, each responsible for a particular area of national life, such as health, defence or education. Each department is headed by a senior minister, often called a secretary of state, supported by junior ministers who take charge of specific parts of the department's work. Ministers are answerable to Parliament for their department's decisions and must explain and defend its policies in debates and committee hearings.

The day-to-day work of running departments, and turning ministers' policies into practical action, is carried out by civil servants. Civil servants are permanent officials rather than political appointees: they stay in post as governments change, serving whichever party is in power. This permanence depends on political neutrality, since civil servants are expected to carry out government policy loyally and professionally without letting their own political views influence their work or their advice to ministers.

The official opposition

The second largest party in the Commons, the one that did not win enough seats to form the government, takes on a formal job of its own: it becomes His Majesty's Official Opposition. This is not just a label for the losing side. It is a recognised constitutional role, and its leader has been called the Leader of the Opposition since a statute of 1937 put the position on a legal footing, complete with a salary paid on top of the normal pay of an MP. Kemi Badenoch has held the post since November 2024, after the Conservative Party took up the role following the 2024 general election.

The opposition's task is to challenge and test the government at every stage, in the hope of eventually replacing it, which is why commentators sometimes call it a government in waiting. The leader of the opposition builds a shadow cabinet, choosing senior MPs from their own party to shadow the work of individual government departments in something like the way the real cabinet mirrors those same departments. Each shadow minister studies the policies of their opposite number, questions them in the Commons and sets out an alternative approach, so that voters can compare the two teams before the next election. The shadow cabinet has no power to run departments, spend public money or direct civil servants: its job is scrutiny and challenge, not government.

Parliament and government are not the same thing

It helps to be clear about a distinction that the test expects: Parliament and government are not the same body, even though the same MPs and peers move between them. Parliament is made up of the Commons, the Lords and the Crown together, and its job is to make laws, approve taxation and check that ministers are doing their jobs properly. The government is the much smaller group of ministers, led by the prime minister, who run the country day to day and carry out policy through their departments and the civil service.

Every government minister sits in Parliament, usually as an MP and sometimes as a peer, but most MPs and peers are not ministers at all. Backbench MPs from the governing party, government MPs who hold no ministerial post, still have the job of scrutinising their own government alongside everyone else, not simply supporting it automatically. Parliament can, in principle, force a government to resign by passing a vote of no confidence, which shows that the two are separate powers rather than one and the same: the government depends on keeping the confidence of the Commons to stay in office.