Author: johnredwood

Officials will be welcoming to the new Minister. They will show him or her into a large office, introducing the private office  team that will look after them. They will then supply a large number of briefings, ask him or her to approve some difficult issues and present them  with the diary of Ministerial commitments.

How the Minister responds will determine how well he or she does. A Minister’s most precious possession is  time. It soon gets taken up and it is easy to waste it. So take control of the diary.

It’s a good idea to put all key dates for your family and private life in. Where these will clash with Cabinet or crucial Ministerial dates you should not avoid, explain early to the family and book out an alternative time as close as possible to the original for the family events.If it cant be the date or time they want make it a better occasion at a  different time.

Get the office to put in the essential and unavoidable. Departmental Questions once a month in Parliament, Cabinet and Cabinet Committees and big events in your subject area that Ministers always attend. Any statements or announcements you want to make come with some flex for you to influence the timing. Urgent Questions and Opposition debates are not in your  control and you just need to adjust when they happen. If it is really difficult a Ministerial colleague may substitute.

Then express your priorities and decline the meetings  and visits the officials propose that do not work with your priorities and needs. You do need to keep in touch with the interests and sectors you regulate and promote but have plenty of choice over how to do that and who to recognise with Ministerial contact.

You will probably get too many things to decide at the beginning. Request only the urgent ones and be sceptical about them. As you read and play yourself in you can respond to others or will see they are not necessary or desirable. Officials often serve up things to a new Minister a previous Minister rightly turned down.

Don’t assume all the advice is good. Government makes plenty of mistakes and is wallowing in poor productivity. You will be blamed if you accept bad advice. Expose yourself to as much external opinion as possible , without sharing secrets outside government. People who will be affected by your actions will take trouble to brief you well on their concerns, and they may be right.

Start from Day 1 to set out your agenda to the officials, especially if the PM has stressed a particular task or aim when he appointed you. Tell your officials the priority comes from No 10 where it does as that should sharpen their interest.

If you are a junior Minister request an early long conversation with the Secretary of State to find  out what delegated power you have and how you fit into the departmental aims.

Tell your officials how you wish to work. You do not have to accept their method. They are there to serve you. Ask for briefings and information where you lack basic knowledge. Ask what officials think your powers and responsibilities are. Tell them how you wish to handle errors and problems made by the department.Read the key Statutes that govern your powers.

Be courteous with officials and help them do their jobs by being clear and sensible with your requests. Do not accept sloppy work or bad advice by showing them what you want and by setting high standards for yourself.

You are there to make a difference. Always require focus on how your department serves the public. Be like a mystery shopper or consumer critic, as  the department should treat people well. Be a big voice for quality and efficiency, two sides of a common coin.

 

Yesterday  in France the Prime Minister lost  an important vote and had  to resign. It will be another blow to the idea that the French deficit can be reined in by a mixture of spending cuts and tax rises, with Parliament attacking the government from both right and left. The President drifts above the government with the right to stay in office but not in power until 2027.  The French split constitution has given the elected President a Parliament where he lacks a majority and where right and left both think they can get what they want by holding out against compromise.

Today in the UK a Prime Minister with a large majority acts as if he too cannot command the Parliament. Two bungled attempts at modest but obviously unpopular  public spending reductions were thrown out by his own party despite the apparent huge majority. Since then the PM and Chancellor have failed to come back with more sensible spending reductions, though there are many obvious ones they could select. We have free spending Ministers and runaway commitments like that to illegal migrants and to unemployed who say mental illness prevents them seeking work. So the deficit soars and there are no government answers on how to cut it.

Clearly the French problems should be much worse than the UK ones. In the UK there is a government that can govern, and it should be relatively easy for it to find the cuts needed and get them through. It is bizarre they find it so difficult. They are not even willing to require the Bank of England to stop losing tens of billions of pounds each year on needless bond sales. Judging by the markets, they currently see the problems in the UK as worse than the problems in  Paris, as the UK is having to pay more to borrow than France. Both countries are facing much higher rates than Germany or the other leading  advanced countries with better spending control.

In both countries democracy is on trial. I am an enthusiast for democracy. Technocracy is arrogant and often wrong. Dictatorship is often violent and repressive. The best thing about democracy is we the people can get rid of bad governments in elections, and  can influence between elections as they usually want to stay elected.  Democracies also require the political parties that lead them to be good judges of the public mood. It is best if they listen to us about the problems , lead with the solutions  and deliver.

The current UK government has let people down over tax, growth and migration. The current French government has failed to persuade the left and the right to compromise in the national interest. Both the French and UK governments are wallowing at very low levels in the opinion polls. Where  in France the government also lacks the Parliamentary votes to change course and win back support it is  doomed. In the UK with the votes the government should be able to pull through, but seems paralysed by rebel backbenchers from doing anything on tax, spend and migration that might make it more popular. The likelihood of a major disagreement over who to have as a Deputy Leader of Labour creates more opportunity for public exposure of the big rifts over policy and philosophy between the government wrestling with excessive debt and the left who want more taxes and borrowing which would damage growth and endanger the finances further.

There have been so many stories in the press that two Home Office Ministers as well as the Home Secretary had to be moved out of the department because they had failed that I assume this is coming from sources close to the PM.  We are told they had not implemented  one of the most popular and memorable promises of the Labour Manifesto, to smash the gangs, and had not made rapid progress with the rape gangs either. We also learn that the Environment Secretary  had not done a good job on farming, as we can all see, so he had to be moved. The Farming Minister under him was sacked.

I can understand the decision to sack the Farming Minister as the government has angered the farmers so much that many farms are closing and there are regular protests. However, the Farming Minister was mainly so unpopular thanks to the tax policy of the PM and Chancellor, which remains unaltered. It is difficult to see what the Environment Secretary has to offer in his new role as he  clearly lost any battle over farms policy and taxes in Cabinet. He now has  to try to rescue the government’s housebuilding target at his new Housing and Local Government post. The government fell way behind the target of 300,000 new homes a year in their first year under Angela Rayner, and it looks as if they will get nowhere near the target in their second year either.  What does the new Secretary of State have to offer to change that? He will need better relations with the Chancellor than he seemed to have at Environment/Agriculture.

The changes at the Home Office are even odder. The three senior Ministers who failed there to smash the gangs or handle crime and rape gang issues well have all been moved to new important posts. The Home Secretary has moved to Foreign Secretary. She had spent seven years as Shadow Home Secretary, chaired Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee and had Cabinet level experience in the previous Labour government. So how come a clever well educated woman with so much Home Office experience was unable to smash the gangs? How come the Prime Minister was unable to help and mentor her in a role she knew so  well? Why should she be better at Foreign secretary where her experience is much more limited? The Foreign Secretary needs to work closely with the PM, especially this one who gives so much time to foreign affairs.  Clearly some distrust has built up in the relationship with the PM as she failed to deliver on key Manifesto and government targets. That will not help as the new Foreign Secretary seeks to build up a contacts book with the US and our other leading allies.

Angela Eagle, fresh from failing to sort out immigration with the Home Secretary, is made Farming Minister. This is bizarre. Surely agriculture deep in protest deserves someone the PM supports and rates, and someone who knows how to right the wrongs this government has visited on farmers. I doubt Angela Eagle will even try to get changes to IHT and business taxes. Diana Johnson, also removed from the Home Office gets a key job promoting growth and jobs in  the new enhanced DWP and skills or Growth department. That’s a big change from trying to police the UK and its borders. What does she know and what can she contribute to that? Is she damaged by the sense of failure hanging over her Home Office service?

None of this is good personnel management. Government is bad at talent mapping, bad at selecting the right Ministers, then bad at backing and mentoring them as they take up their roles. Some of these Ministerial changes look set up to fail. I will write more about Ministers jobs and how good ones can get changes through Whitehall in later pieces.

The first full day in the job saw the new Home Secretary preside over large numbers of illegal migrants. According to press briefings the last Home Secretary was removed because she was failing to get a grip on migration. We read that the new one will take a tougher line and stem the numbers. So why no statement of intent? Why no announcement of how she will do this? You need to start as you mean to carry on. Facilitating the arrival of large numbers of people and scrambling around to find them hostels and HMOs as she did yesterday is not going to change things.

Some will say it is unfair to expect a new Home Secretary to hit the ground running. In normal circumstances you would give them a few days to read themselves into the job and to prepare something to tell Parliament. But this was not a normal appointment. The press reports say she was drafted in to replace the outgoing to be decisive and  to make a difference, to change the outcomes. As a senior member of the government involved in all the legal advice the new Home Secretary must already be up to speed on these most crucial of issues.

Some with strange old fashioned notions that being a Minister is a 9 to 5 office job five days a week will say yesterday was a Saturday. I can assure you as a Minister you are on call 7 days a week, you work weekends and if you have such a high profile key job as Home Secretary in a borders crisis you should visibly be in charge from Day 1.

Presumably the PM when he appointed her told her what was going wrong with the Home Office approach and told her what she had to mend. She would otherwise have asked diplomatically why the last Home Secretary was sent off with some  briefing against her . Surely she asked  what was expected of her. You would reckon  the two would  discuss briefly what to do next. You would expect the new Home Secretary to make an early statement to warn off the gangs and to tell the people thinking of coming why that would be a bad idea. Instead those planning their crossings and paying the gangs uninterrupted in France will have breathed a sigh of relief that nothing seems to have changed.

Let us hope she is behind the scenes preparing an early Statement to Parliament on how she will urgently change the law to deter the not so small boat brigades from coming.  Today would be a good day to get it agreed, ready for next week. It would also be a  good idea to tell the media that is happening.

She could start by apologising to the Conservative Opposition for voting down their well thought through amendments to Labour’s Immigration Bill, and bring this  forward as government proposals. She needs to explain why Labour repealed the belated measure legislated by the outgoing Conservative government to say no one coming by an illegal means could claim asylum on arrival. That was a necessary part of a deterrent, allied to somewhere like Rwanda  to send them to as soon as they arrived. That would have stopped the trade once up and running. The new government abolished both key parts of the policy. .

If you are running a big commercial enterprise and it is performing badly the CEO or chairman calls in the directors running underperforming  units and works with them on improvements. If a senior person fails to improve and results remain poor they might be fired and replaced with someone better. If the group’s policy and requirements of the underperforming unit turn out to be unrealistic or unhelpful they are changed. No one being called in to discuss performance would be surprised as there would be gentle escalation of concern about performance before tougher action was taken.

What a good chairman or CEO would not do is to decide to change half the top people around on the same day, giving them immediately different jobs they do not understand. It would not help to swap the International Sales Director with the Group Secretary, or the Commercial Director with the Head of IT. You would not normally send one to run a completely new unit or operation without some training and a hand over period. Promotions and demotions are best tied into the regular performance reviews and the career development work done by the Personnel or Human  Resources Department.

This recent government reshuffle changes too many people and was done in a rush. The PM had to replace his Deputy. This provided an opportunity for a good news limited reshuffle where a few got promoted and one new person could enter the government. Instead there also firings and moves that could look like demotions. Why reward someone the PM clearly thinks has failed at Home Secretary with the Foreign Office? How will her  replacement smash the gangs and prosecute the urban rapists?  Why remove the Business Secretary who has pledged big taxpayer support for steel but has not released his financial business plan for it? Shouldn’t he have been asked to complete the task? Why move the Justice Secretary who has so far failed to solve the prison shortage and who let a lot of criminals out early?

The PM says he wants delivery. He has just lost a Housing Secretary whose signal failure to boost housebuilding went unchallenged, a Home Secretary who watched as illegal boat migrant numbers soared, a Foreign Secretary who needlessly gave away Chagos and sacks of cash, a Business Secretary who presided over a devastating rate of industrial closures and a Work  and Pensions Secretary who failed to pass her welfare Bill and watched as benefit recipients and unemployment soared. What action during the year did the PM take to review their lack of  progress? What action to improve? What has he told their replacements to do differently? Why are the new people the same people that just failed in their old jobs?

Key areas where we need a change of approach are net zero policy and the interpretation of international law. The two key figures in charge of these remain in post.

The government claims to understand the public anger about rising  numbers of illegal migrants in hotels . It promises it will now reduce them, and will end their use by 2029. This is too late for its critics.

It is also emerging that instead they might move more illegals and asylum seekers into HMOs, flats and  houses that would otherwise be available for UK citizens. Contractors are bidding up rents and offering secure contracts to landlords on good terms with state paid rent to house these people. That is helping create greater scarcity and higher rents  for UK home  seekers. This is no improvement on hotels, dispersing the large numbers of young men coming by illegal routes into local communities.

The government make  much of saying they will clear backlogs of cases. If they do this by granting many of the applicants the right to stay that too imposes a big burden on the state to find the successful applicants homes, benefits and other support until they can find a job.

What the government’s many critics want is an end to small boats and illegal arrivals.Finding new ways to let them in, and different ways to house them is not solving the problem and not responding to the public mood.

 

The tension between PM and Chancellor matters and was on display the day she shed a tear at PM’s questions and he declined to comfort or support her. It looks as if it has got worse, with the appointment of a new and constitutionally awkward Chief Secretary to the PM in Downing Street who looks a bit like a substitute Chancellor/Deputy PM out to second guess or trump the true holders of those offices.

In accordance with my policy of not talking here of allegations of personal misconduct I have kept off the details of the living arrangements and tax affairs of the Deputy PM. Now she has confirmed that she paid too little Stamp Duty on her latest purchase and has referred herself for investigation I need to assess the implications of this serious set back for the government.

It means the two most important Cabinet members have lost authority, whilst No 10 has  strengthened its personnel as if to guide them or take over more of their jobs. It makes the government look very unstable. Some in the governing party  now think the Deputy PM should lose that job. Her future rests on a report on her conduct. The Chancellor now has to broker her budget with the Chief Secretary to the PM and the PM ‘s Economic Adviser as well as with the PM himself. It makes error from more compromises and from the unregulated clash of minds more likely.

It is disappointing that the new team did not hit the ground running. Where was the action needed to end the Bank’s destructive sale of bonds? Where is the surrogate package of spending reductions to replace the lost cuts that backbenchers destroyed? Where are the revised plans to curb excessive growth of welfare entitlements with no requirement to work? Where are the detailed plans to recapture some of the huge public sector productivity losses?

The spinners went out yesterday to reassure the markets with two soundbites. The old one was the PM and Chancellor are strongly committed to the Chancellor’s new laxer fiscal rules introduced at the budget. The new one was that the new advisers crowding   into Number 10 mean the PM and the Chancellor are now more united about the budget.

These lines stretched credulity too far. Few could see the establishment of powerful economic advisers  to the PM as anything other than an attempt to get a better set of options and advice than they are getting from the Chancellor who should be the PM’s main economic adviser, backed by Treasury support.  Nor are markets. much impressed that a narrow margin over the fiscal rule maximum borrowing has been swept away by  the loss of the planned welfare and pensioner fuel cuts and by the rise in government borrowing rates.

As Hemingway   remarked, bankruptcy  happens gradually  at first, then suddenly. It can be the same with bond and financial crises. They are not inevitable. The Chancellor could change the mood if she said she was about to announce a package of spending cuts or controls to replace the lost cuts and cover the interest bill. She needs to fight and win a few spending battles which could include reductions in the rate of increase in welfare and deferrals of some net zero expenditures.She should urgently agree no more loss making bond sales by the Bank of England.

Yesterday it was disturbing that rates rose and the pound fell. As UK government bond rates are so much better than other advanced country bonds you  would expect more foreign buying of the bonds and currency if there were no special and specific fears about UK economic policy. The Chancellor should not leave  it to a late autumn budget with no stated date if she wants to get back to affordable debt and to within her fiscal rules.Just parroting that the government is dedicated to its rules is not believed  by markets who increasingly ask how and when will borrowing be controlled? Trying to  do it by tax rises could well make things worse, hitting growth again.

1.   Importing oil and gas to burn increases world CO 2. Importing LNG is particularly stupid, given the amount of fossil fuel consumed to convert the gas to liquid, to keep it cold, to transport it by diesel ship and to convert it back again. The climate zealots are undermining their own purpose.
2. Importing oil and gas means we have to pay high taxes to foreign countries and companies, instead of the UK Treasury collecting large sums from UK production.
3. Importing oil and gas exports the often well paid jobs in the oil and gas industry. We lose the jobs here, they gain the jobs abroad to make up our lost supply.
4. Importing oil and gas makes us more dependent on the goodwill of foreigners. Oil and gas trades are often disrupted by world politics, with blocks to Suez, Panama and other key shipping routes, with diversions of energy under sanctions regimes, and with vulnerability to tariffs.
5. Cancelling our own oil and gas industry writes off all the investment made in the gas network offshore and onshore well before the end of its useful life
6. With our own oil and gas supplies we can keep or expand our petrochemical industry. We are currently seeing its collapse thanks to sky high UK energy prices and need to import feedstock.
7. The oil and gas industry if kept at home stimulates and creates important oil and gas service industries which we lose when we rely on foreign product.
8.  Changing policy would be well received by NATO which is very worried about the security implications of leading NATO members needing to depend on unreliable foreign imports.
9. Seeking a mass transfer from gas heating to electric requires a massive investment in additional power generation and a huge expansion of grid capacity and storage. This is bound to increase costs and prices.
10. Keeping the lights on and everything working on cold windless days and evenings will be much more difficult without gas generators on stand by.

The government claims to be promoting growth yet its actions are all about levelling down. They follow an old socialist agenda of tracking down any and every way the better off half of the country make money, increase incomes, save, invest, own property and buy nice things and set about raising taxes on them all. This is a great way to lower growth, lose talent and create misery.

Its first effect as we saw last autumn with all the speculation about higher taxes is to undermine confidence. People cancel purchases, defer investments, put off transactions.

Then the actual tax rises hit. The big NI rise was a tax on jobs so vacancies plunged and unemployment rose. The family farms and small business taxes led to closures and sales. The gathering attack on wealth drove many rich  people out of the UK, meaning they will no longer pay any tax . Many younger people who want to work hard and get on have left to get a job or set up a business abroad.

This year the result of the last budget is likely to mean lower OBR forecasts requiring more spending cuts or tax rises to hit deficit targets. The government seems focused on tax rises, so we will go round the  same vicious circle. First comes less confidence on tax rise stories, then the further damage from the actual tax increases.

Levelling down cuts jobs, tax revenue, confidence and growth. It increases public spending as more need benefits and are out of work.