Ministerial Salaries (Amendment) Bill

Lord Norton of Louth Excerpts

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

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, in so far as this Bill rectifies an anomaly, it is to be welcomed. I very much endorse what others have said: of course Ministers should be paid. It has been a disgrace that Ministers, particularly in the Lords, have given sterling service without remuneration. I take that as given and I endorse what everybody has said about Ministers in this House.

What I wish to question is the premise of the Bill that the number of Ministers is appropriate. I refer especially to Ministers in the other place. The Explanatory Notes list the number of Ministers in recent Parliaments. The notes do not go further back. Over time, the number of Ministers has grown. Ministers will doubtless concede that this is a consequence of the growth of government responsibilities. There is another explanation, which is more plausible, given that the responsibilities of Governments in times of world war and running an empire were substantial. It is that the growth in the number of Ministers is a consequence of creeping prime ministerial power.

Ministerial posts are an important tool of prime ministerial patronage. The more Ministers, the greater the grip of the Executive through an expanding payroll vote. The term “payroll vote” is demonstrably a misnomer in that it encompasses not only Ministers who are not paid but Parliamentary Private Secretaries who, through a tightening of the language of the Ministerial Code, are now expected to vote loyally with the Government, even though they are neither being paid nor are formally part of the Government.

The subject was addressed in 2011 by the Public Administration Committee in the House of Commons in a report entitled Smaller Government: What Do Ministers Do? I gave evidence to the committee. When asked how many Ministers there should be, I argued that one should start by identifying the responsibilities of government and then determining how many Ministers are necessary to fulfil them. Instead, Ministers are appointed to tighten the Prime Minister’s grip on power, to reward loyalty and, on occasion, to ensure that critics are inside the tent rather than outside. Jonathan Powell told the committee on an earlier occasion:

“If the Prime Minister had his way, he would appoint every single backbencher in his party to a ministerial job to ensure their vote”.


A previous report by the committee, Too Many Ministers?, found that the United Kingdom was an outlier in the number of Ministers appointed, and that the ratio of Ministers to MPs was 1:8, compared with 1:14 in Spain and Germany, 1:16 in Italy, and 1:29 in France. It also noted the growth in the number of Ministers since 1900, with the increase marked in Ministers below Cabinet level. The earlier report concluded that this trend had several detrimental effects, not least placing a burden on the public purse and harming the interests of good government due to too many Ministers clogging up the decision-making process and blurring lines of responsibility.

In short, the appointment power is wielded for political benefit and not for the purpose of good—and certainly not for the purposes of efficient—government. As the 2011 report noted,

“activity needs to be distinguished from achievement. Effectiveness … needs to be distinguished from efficiency”.

It goes on to say:

“The accounts we have received give the impression that ministers are too involved in the day-to-day running of their departments; take too many relatively minor decisions; and engage in numerous activities that could be delegated to others. This draws their focus and energy away from their primary objective, providing leadership and setting the overall policy of their departments … Having fewer ministers, who gave priority to their core responsibilities, could help bring about this change in culture”.


We need government characterised by leadership and not management. Related to that, we need not only fewer but better trained Ministers. This is a subject that I have pursued for some years.

This Bill is necessary, but it is not sufficient. It ignores the wider and more serious issue of the quantity, and indeed the quality, of Ministers. It should, following a review of government responsibilities, be replaced by a Bill that repeals the current measures dealing with numbers and salaries, caps the number of Ministers below the current maximum, and provides that no one may be appointed to a ministerial post, paid or unpaid, above that cap. That is but one step; another is ramping up the training of Ministers. We are promised a national school of government, but we have been here before. In September 2021, I initiated a debate on the case for introducing training in core leadership skills for Ministers and civil servants, but there is still some way to go.

It is in the interests of good government to make the changes that I have outlined, but it would take a brave Prime Minister to implement them. That, I fear, is why we are left with the tidying-up Bill that is before us. It is a lost opportunity.