Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 59)
THURSDAY 15 OCTOBER 2009
PROFESSOR ANTHONY
KING, MR
JONATHAN POWELL
AND LORD
TURNBULL KCB, CVO
Q40 Mr Prentice:
We should be told?
Professor King: Yes.
Mr Prentice: Yes, because I have asked
the Prime Minister and he would not tell me.
Q41 Chairman:
I thought there was agreement that we do not think these people
need to become lords.
Professor King: Indeed.
Q42 Chairman:
But part of the problem then is that—we had better not say
the names but some of these people quite like the idea of becoming
lords, and that could be part of the attraction.
Professor King: That is their
problem.
Lord Turnbull: Another personal
theory is that there are a number of people in the House of Lords
who have been very successful ministers and I would say the women
in the House of Lords have a better record in this sense than
the men. Maybe this is because being in the House of Commons is
a bit more macho, alpha male. You have to project your voice in
that chamber with all you guys bellowing at you. The style of
operating in the House of Lords suits women better. A lot of the
women have done remarkably well, in my opinion. I think the real
answer to Gordon Prentice's question is, if they are not really
going to continue in the work of the House of Lords, it should
be possible for people to resign. I do not know whether the new
corporate constitutional governance Bill now has some clauses
about that.
Q43 Chairman:
It does.
Lord Turnbull: I think that is
helpful. What do you do about the title? That is too difficult
at the moment. Really, it is because we are using the House of
Lords for a purpose for which it was not really designed because
we do not have the right system in place.
Q44 Julie Morgan:
I wanted to go back to government being too big and the growing
number of unpaid ministerial posts. Do you feel there is any problem
with having ministers who are unpaid?
Lord Turnbull: They are not costless
to the taxpayer. If you give a minister three private secretaries,
a press officer, a driver, a car, there is not much change from
half a million pounds.
Q45 Julie Morgan:
But no salary.
Lord Turnbull: No salary, no,
but still tying down a lot of civil service resources.
Q46 Julie Morgan:
Soon after 1997, when ministers were appointed, there was a minister
for Women appointed who was not paid. There was a lot of concern,
particularly amongst the women Members of Parliament, that this
signalled the value of the job. So I think there are implications
myself but I would be interested to know your views about that.
Mr Powell: Actually, what it signalled
was that the provisions of the Ministerial Salaries Act and its
various limits are incredibly complicated and need lawyers to
look at them. Sometimes you get to the end of the reshuffle and
discover you have appointed more ministers than there are salaries.
So you are left with a choice of either dismissing that minister
or having them as an unpaid minister. There is certainly a case
for a couple of unpaid ministers but I think there are too many
ministers altogether anyway.
Q47 Julie Morgan:
What do you think would be an ideal number of ministers?
Lord Turnbull: I think most departments
should probably run with three.
Professor King: How many departments
are there?
Lord Turnbull: There do not need
to be as many as there are actually. I do not quite understand
why Climate Change has been taken away from Environment when what
we worry about with climate change is not that it is warmer but
that it damages the environment in various ways. It damages the
oceans, the coral, the fish stocks or whatever. Slicing that into
two departments—I am not quite sure of the logic. You could
certainly quite easily construct a cabinet with four or five fewer
ministers. I used to do a lecture on the Department of Environment,
Transport and the Regions—which was "Joined up governmental
sprawling monster?" It clearly was a sprawling monster in
the end but all this has been divided up into about three different
bits now.
Q48 Julie Morgan:
The growth that we have already mentioned of the regional ministers,
assistant regional ministers and the envoys, and I think Jonathan
was saying that is a way of binding people into the government
and extending the range of the Prime Minister. What relationship
do they have with the Civil Service? Are there any difficulties
with having this range of people where they are not free to scrutinise
the Government, which I think is the point Anthony was making?
Lord Turnbull: I think if you
are in an over-ministered department, I do not think it can be
a very happy job. You get a very small slice to deal with. I do
not think this makes for very satisfying posts actually. I am
sure a lot of what they do could be done by officials. If you
are receiving a delegation from such and such, who would you rather
talk to? An official who really knows their stuff or the minister,
who has only been there since July? I think it could work better.
Apart from the fact that people will accept these jobs because
it is a step on the ladder to where they want to get to, otherwise
the junior ministerial existence I do not think is a very happy
one.
Professor King: Could I just add
to that that it seems to me that some of the jobs that junior
ministers are doing probably should not be done at all. There
is a real problem of making work. Also, for what it is worth,
the people I talk to who deal with junior ministers say what Andrew
Turnbull has just said, that they would really much rather be
dealing with people who actually knew what they were doing than
with junior ministers who may have been there for weeks or months.
Q49 Mr Walker:
Can I just make one point? We have a list here of unpaid members
of the government and there is a really nice chap here who has
been in the Cabinet. He has been in the Cabinet! He is now Parliamentary
Under-Secretary of State Digital Britain, unpaid. What on earth
is going on here? Someone who has been in the Cabinet ends up
at the tail end of a government as Parliamentary Under-Secretary
of State, unpaid.
Lord Turnbull: Does the Data Protection
Act apply.
Mr Walker: It is the Rt Hon Stephen Timms.
His career has just gone to ... Why would you do it? Why would
you offer it? Do you have any thoughts on that, following on from
Julie's line of questioning?
Q50 Mr Prentice:
You will think I have a fixation about Digby Jones but I asked
Digby Jones if there was an exit interview, if when he left the
Government he saw the Prime Minister and he said, "I am leaving
the Government because it is just like pond life being a junior
minister and I am bigger and better than a tadpole" or something
like that. I just wonder, Jonathan, when Tony Blair was Prime
Minister and all these reshuffles were happening over the years,
whether he did this, these exit interviews. He brought people
in and he said, "You have got to leave the Government. I
have to make space for rising talent but let me have your take
on things." Was that ever done? Was it done systematically?
Mr Powell: Systematically would
be an exaggeration but certainly every minister who was leaving
the Government would speak to the Prime Minister and react in
different ways to the news that they were leaving. Some would
tell the Prime Minister what they thought of the way government
was run, some would react in more emotional ways, but there was
not a systematic way of surveying them on what they thought.
Q51 Mr Prentice:
Why not? Mark Fisher—I am not telling tales out of school;
this is on the public record—I think his telephone call
with the Prime Minister lasted about 15 seconds when he lost his
Culture job. How can the organisation learn if the Prime Minister
does not have any sense of what ministers feel about the job they
are doing?
Mr Powell: Quite a lot of emotion
was packed into that 15-second phone call, as I recall. You would
expect a junior minister who had some views on this to express
them before he was actually leaving the Government. You would
have thought if he really had some views, he would have come and
made them clear before. As we have all said, there is a problem
that there are too many junior ministers. Again, talking about
Chris Mullin's book, that illustrates exactly the problem, that
there is an awful lot of make-work in junior ministerial jobs.
Lord Turnbull: I think you are
applying managerial principles to something that is inherently
non-managerial. In a big organisation—it could be the Civil
Service or BP—you have things called career development
interviews. Every year you have an annual report and then there
is a discussion about where you should be going from now on, what
you might be doing next and exit interviews all fit into that
kind of world. Reshuffles are not about developing talent and
saying, "I can't move this person because they've only just
got there. They need to do at least another year, and I'm moving
this person into that post because they have not had exposure
to that kind of work and that would really build them up."
Q52 Mr Prentice:
So it is all capricious.
Lord Turnbull: Things that are
absolutely standard in big organisations, public and private,
do not happen, because this is all about political reward and
competition. That is how the political system works, and it is
very difficult to bring this other philosophy into it.
Q53 Paul Flynn:
Do you disagree with Charles's line that backbenchers are failed
frontbenchers or never will be frontbenchers? Would you agree
that there is a serious role for backbenchers, certainly in history,
people like Leo Abse and so on, have pursued an independent line,
and that there is a good record of independent MPs and independent
MPs who masquerade under party labels?
Lord Turnbull: Are you saying
that those independent members stay as parliamentarians?
Q54 Paul Flynn:
They have no ambition to be members of the government at all and
would find their lives inhibited if they were?
Lord Turnbull: Absolutely what
I am saying is the Chairs of Select Committees and the members
of Select Committees should see that as important work that they
want to become good at and specialise in, but many of them, particularly
the newer ones, are thinking "I am doing this while I'm waiting
to get the call from Number 10."
Q55 Paul Flynn:
I do not know if I have misunderstood you but you seemed to say
at one point that you agreed with the line that MPs of a certain
age should not become ministers.
Lord Turnbull: No, I am saying
they should become ministers but the system makes it increasingly
difficult for them to.
Q56 Mr Walker:
Going back to patronage, it is not just the title of minister,
obviously. I think all three of you touched on the salary discrepancy.
As a Member of Parliament you are on £64,000. As soon as
you become a minister, even the most junior minister, you are
on £90,000. How would we address that to make the gap less
pronounced? I am not suggesting you raise the salaries of Members
of Parliament but perhaps reducing the salaries of ministers—is
that something that is worth considering—or removing the
trappings, removing the cars, for example, shrinking the private
offices? Have you had any thoughts on that?
Lord Turnbull: I am not against
establishing some kind of parity between a Select Committee Chair
and a Minister of State.
Chairman: Nor am I!
Q57 Mr Walker:
What about people who chair Standing Committees, for example?
Would you see that as part of this parliamentary career path,
being a very good Chairman of Standing Committees? After all,
that is where most parliamentary business takes place on the legislative
front.
Lord Turnbull: Yes, that should
be recognised. That is important work and the people who do that
well at that are the people who get asked to do the next bill
when it comes along. It should be recognised. You stigmatise backbenchers
when say you are the people who are left behind when better people
have been taken off. It is not a good metaphor at all.
Mr Walker: I think some colleagues' ambition
probably outstrips their ability though and, as one of my colleagues
said, if you thought promotion in this place was based on ability,
you could drive yourself mad because, as we know, in many cases
it is not based on ability. It is based on balancing the party
structure within government: do we need to have this chap on board
to stop this fraction over here misbehaving? Look at Tony Wright.
Tony should be a Cabinet Minister. I say that as a Conservative
Member of Parliament. Perhaps because his face did not fit or
his views were seen as a little too independent, he never got
a sniff of it and that is another part of the problem of the way
we structure our Parliament at the moment.
Chairman: You do not have to reply!
Q58 Paul Flynn:
Do you expect Alan Sugar and Arlene Phillips to make a major contribution
to the running of the country in the next few years?
Lord Turnbull: I do not understand
the relevance of Arlene Phillips.
Q59 Paul Flynn:
She is the dance tzar.
Lord Turnbull: All I am saying
is that, as a Spurs supporter, I hope he makes a better job of
this than he did in the years he was Chairman of Spurs. They were
not our greatest years.
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