Ministerial Salaries (Amendment) Bill

Lord Redwood Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & Report stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 14th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the excellent speeches by the Leader of the House and the Leader of the Opposition. I think there needs to be a Lords Minister in every main department. Those jobs can be extremely demanding, and it is the right principle that money should be paid for good work done.

However, 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, rightly, being paid for the jobs that they are doing.

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; and 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. Successive Prime Ministers have been quite wrong to have these big clear-out days as some assertion of power, because 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.

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; and obviously all Ministers should be mentored by their departmental ministerial heads.

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 need then to undermine the Minister’s authority before the meeting begins. Surely each is either a Minister or a Cabinet Minister, who 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, so I think that we need only two main types of Minister: heads of department or Cabinet Ministers paid a higher salary; and 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.

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 plenty of chances 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.

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 meet 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.