How to recruit and retain better, more effective Ministers

This is my speech on the government’s bill to increase the number of Ministers who can be paid a salary. I have taken the Hansard record of my remarks and  have added to the speech, as I was kept to a short time limit.

This Bill is an opportunity for the Government to think more widely about how the tasks of Ministers can be made a bit easier, how the chances of success can be enhanced and how the public can feel that they are getting more out of their Ministers who are  being paid for the jobs that they are doing. There is plenty of scope to improve the clarity about what the Ministers are meant to be doing, how well they are doing it and how they are mentored and supported in their jobs.

When I was the executive chairman of a large quoted company, it would never have occurred to me that it would be good practice to go into the office one day, without having alerted any of my senior colleagues, and tell them that I had decided to swap them all around just for the sake of it. I did propose  that I was going to make the sales director the finance director and the engineering director the sales director, and that I was going to sack somebody else, all on the same day. I would not think that that would have a happy result. Even more obviously  I would not  have sent out the newly appointed senior executives to talk to the press and customers about what they were going to do in their new jobs before I had talked to them at length  about the changes that were needed, and before they had talked to their new staff and got on top of the issues.

Successive Prime Ministers have been quite wrong to have these big clear-out days as some assertion of power, Those whom they sack will never like them again and quite a lot of those whom they appoint are given jobs that they do not want or understand, so they also harbour a grudge about the experience of the reshuffle. We need something better than that. The newly appointed are expected by Parliament and the media to be instant experts in their new roles.,

We need senior Ministers mentoring and looking, in private, at the performance of more junior Ministers. Leading Cabinet members should be mentored and their performance reviewed by the Prime Minister and other Cabinet members perhaps by the Deputy Prime Minister. All other Ministers should be mentored by their departmental ministerial heads.

Aims should be few in n umber, challenging to achieve, and linked to the main goals of the government. The Home Secretary for example should be expected to smash the gangs, and have as one of her targets big reductions in numbers of illegals entering the country. The Health Secretary should have targets to boost NHS numbers of  treatments and consultations and get waiting lists down.

I wonder if it is not time to be a little bolder and change the language. Why do we call most of our Ministers junior Ministers? People think it a privilege, necessity or requirement to see a Minister, so we do not need negative language  to undermine the Minister’s authority before the meeting begins. Surely each is either a Minister or a Cabinet Minister. A Cabinet Minister is a super-Minister with strategic obligations and ultimate responsibility for the departments in which the other Ministers are working. That could be extremely helpful from the point of view of working out the structure.

I think that we need only two main types of Minister: heads of department or Cabinet Ministers paid a higher salary; and other Ministers paid the Minister of State salary. I think the Parliamentary Secretary salary is still quite low given the magnitude of many of these jobs and the responsibilities that they entail. Some Parliamentary Secretary jobs do not amount to much and can be absorbed b y the Minister of State  supervising or working with them.  Each Ministerial job needs to  be a defined area of powers, duties and expertise, with clear targets to assess achievement. The way to decide how many Ministers are needed is to map the powers and duties  the government wishes to exercise first, to see what is the right number of Ministerial commands.

I would strongly recommend that we consider some kind of performance review system. One of the things that made reshuffles so particularly difficult for many of my ministerial colleagues when we were undergoing them was that they had absolutely no idea whether the Prime Minister and the Whips thought they were doing well or badly and whether they were going to be promoted, demoted or shuffled sideways. Sometimes, they were sitting there with their phone for a day or so while the reshuffle agonisingly went on and were not even rung up and told that they were just going to stay put—which might have been good news, a relief or a disappointment. On performance, therefore, we need a system where they are mentored, assessed and allowed to say that they need better resources or more support.

As a general rule, it would be much better if we did not change Ministers so often. Looking at the Governments of the last 25 years—Labour, Coalition or Conservative—there has been an in-and-out far too frequently. I would have thought the norm should be that you appoint somebody for a four to five-year Parliament as a Minister. If they then do very well and you want to promote them, that is a bonus; if you have to manage them out because they are so dreadful, you do so only after giving them  chances to improve and trying to help them do a better job, and then you do it in an orderly and sensible way. There would be a bit of movement but you would not have these blow-up days when everybody is put at risk. Knowing a Minister’s past, wishes and expertise would enable more suitable appointments to be made, to reduce the unacceptably high loss rate most governments have experienced through loss of  Ministers for past or recent conduct.

This might start to work rather better. It takes four years for a Minister to read their way in, get used to working with their officials, and put in place the laws and the budget programmes they want to and then see the results of their labour—whereas most of us were never allowed to see the results of our labour because we were moved on to some other crisis point or difficulty before we had seen the whole thing through. You would not normally do that in a business.

I make these modest suggestions to the Leader. I hope she will pass them on to the Prime Minister, because I think government would be much better if Ministers were looked after and mentored but also expected to perform, and if we had a more orderly process for appointing and removing. It does seem that, with the current system, in all too many government cases, too many people are still selected who have bad histories that come to revisit  them in an unfortunate way as soon as they become Ministers. It would be much better if more time were given to the selection, once you had set up an initial Government, and there were more conversations with people to find out what they were good at and wanted to do, and a bit about their background, to avoid embarrassment.

I have always found it crucial to success in a organisation to appoint people to posts they want to do, where they already have the expertise or where they will give freely of their energy and time to acquire the skills they need. The parties in my experience have often not done a good job at getting to know the people they have as MPs so they have failed to put  more round pegs into round slots. Being a Minister is demanding and not a regular job. You are on call 7 x 24 every week, you work weekends and evenings as needed, you have to go the extra distance to get things done and to ensure the public’s wishes  and interests are upheld. In response  Ministers should not be prey to instant dismissal for no good reason, should  not be left in the dark about what they  is meant to achieve, and  not be ignorant of how well or badly they are doing or are thought to be doing.