Nolan Principles & Public Service Ethics Frameworks

Story hook

In October 1994, a Sunday Times reporter posing as a businessman offered two Conservative MPs £1,000 each to table questions in the House of Commons. Both said yes. The "Cash-for-Questions" sting detonated across British public life — if MPs would rent out the floor of Parliament for the price of a weekend break, what else was for sale? Prime Minister John Major, cornered, did something rare under fire: instead of an inquiry into the two men, he set up a standing body to interrogate the ethics of the entire public realm.

He appointed a senior Law Lord, Lord Michael Nolan, to chair it. In May 1995 the Committee on Standards in Public Life delivered its first report. Buried in it was a list that would outlast every politician of the era: Seven Principles of Public Life — selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership. Written in plain English, they fit on a single postcard and demanded nothing any decent person would dispute. That was their genius — you could not argue against them, only fail to live them.

Three decades later those seven words are pinned to office walls from Whitehall to Wellington, quoted by India's 2nd Administrative Reforms Commission, and recited in UPSC interview rooms at Dholpur House. This unit traces how a British scandal produced the most-cited ethical checklist in modern governance — and what it means when an Indian officer, under a Constitution Lord Nolan never read, reaches for the same vocabulary.

Why this matters for UPSC

GS-IV (Ethics, Integrity & Aptitude) repeatedly tests public service values and codes of ethics/conduct — the Nolan Principles are the single most-cited international benchmark in topper answers across the 2015–2024 papers. Prelims touches them only rarely (current-affairs window), so the weight is medium-Prelims, high-Mains, high-Interview. Boards use them as a "name three values a civil servant must have" opener, and they double as a ready-made framework for any essay on probity, accountability or leadership.