Cabinet in confidence definition
Cabinet in confidence now means anything the government wants it to. You can put a document on a trolley and wheel it through a cabinet room, and suddenly it forms part of the deliberations of cabinet. It should only be those deliberations themselves — that is, the argument that went back and forth between the ministers — that should be kept in confidence for that very narrow but important purpose of maintaining working relationships within the cabinet. Vast quantities of material, including business cases and consultancy reports that were prepared externally — not just for cabinet but for government itself — cannot just be piled up and be said to form part of the deliberations of cabinet. That has to be dramatically cut back on, or we will start to see cabinet meetings held in a document storage facility with tonnes of paper all around members of cabinet so that the entire business of government becomes secret and no longer accessible to the public.