Government: Leadership Training

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, is it not serendipitous that we are having this debate at the time of a reshuffle? The Institute for Government paper, Professional Development for Ministers, states:

“New ministers have to pick up their duties almost immediately and have a limited time to make a mark. From 1997 to 2015, secretaries of state stayed in post for an average of two years and two months, with junior ministers only getting one year and eight months in the job.”


George Freeman, a former Minister, is quoted as saying:

“There’s no training, no guidebook, no manual, no induction! You leave the Cabinet room with promotion ringing in your ears … and walk straight into the department and start doing the job.”


In fact, in a survey carried out by the institute, the most frequently mentioned negative factors determining ministerial effectiveness were “Rapid turnover of Ministers” and

“Lack of adequate preparation, induction or development”.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Norton, for initiating this timely debate. He said that Ministers matter. He said that Cabinet Ministers are the CEOs of their departmental empires. The noble Lord, Lord Maude, with all his experience, spoke about the tens of billions of pounds of expenditure and hundreds of thousands—millions, in the case of the Department of Health and Social Care—of employees that many Ministers have.

Yet it is a revolving door. The average tenure of a FTSE 100 chief executive is five and a half years. I am proud to be the chancellor of the University of Birmingham. Our vice-chancellor, Professor Sir David Eastwood, is about to retire after 13 years. Birmingham is among the top 100 universities in the world. He did not achieve that overnight; you need time to be able to do it. I served as the senior independent director of Booker. Charles Wilson, the chief executive, took Booker—including its board and its team—from being a £300-million, AIM-listed company, as it was when I joined in 2007, to merging with Tesco nine or 10 years later, with a value of £4 billion. It was not overnight; he needed the time to do it.

How many Ministers have genuine business experience? Look at people such as Nadhim Zahawi, who did such a fantastic job with the vaccination programme, or Sajid Javid, with his global experience working for American and German banks in east Asia, America and Europe. How many of them attended business school? The noble Lord, Lord Maude, talked about that. I have a degree from India and a law degree from Cambridge. I am a qualified chartered accountant. When I started Cobra Beer, I thought, “That’s it, I’ve done enough education for generations”. Then I realised the value of lifelong learning. I am now a proud alumnus of three business schools: the Cranfield School of Management, the London Business School and the Harvard Business School.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, of which I am proud to be a fellow, says that the concept of continual professional development is embedded in you from the time you start as a trainee accountant right through to now, when I have to certify to that. In 2019, the CBI, of which I am president, produced the report Great Job: Solving the Productivity Puzzle Through the Power of People. It states:

“Great people practices make business sense. A business’s most important source of value is its people … firms that attract and retain people by improving leadership and management, and the practices that develop and engage staff, do better. Even small improvements in firms’ people practices are associated with sizable productivity increases … UK businesses primarily invest in staff development through training”.


It makes sense to do this.

The Commission for Smart Government had a piece about learning from the pandemic’s successes. I was very privileged to learn so much from my late father, Lieutenant General Bilimoria, who was commander-in-chief of the central Indian army, with 350,000 troops. One of the things he always said was that the true test of leadership is not in the good times but in adversity—and, wow, have we had the chance to learn about leadership from adversity. The report quotes Dame Kate Bingham:

“The instruction I was given by the Prime Minister was to save lives as soon as possible, so we had a very clear goal.”


And she did it, thanks to that empowerment. In eight months, she created what we have had: one of the best, most impressive vaccination programmes. So, we have had great lessons over here, and I have learned as well about the collaboration with business that we have carried out with the CBI.

This document—the Declaration on Government Reform—co-signed by the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary is excellent news. The recommendation it makes about people, performance and partnership is fantastic. That is just what we need to do. Michael Gove spoke at the Ditchley Foundation, where I am proud to be a governor, last year. He made a speech on the Declaration on Government Reform and called for more training for both Ministers and officials to meet present and future challenges. He was absolutely right on that. On this document that both the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, signed, it says:

“We have superb people at every level of public service”,


which I could not endorse more, but that:

“We will invest in training for civil servants and for Ministers”.


Could the Minister update us on that?

The document also said:

“We will set a new standard for diversity and inclusion”.


I am proud to have launched Change the Race Ratio at the CBI to promote diversity across all business. I give full credit to this Government for diversity: just look at the Cabinet table and the diversity around it. I have always said that we will have a member of the ethnic minorities as a Prime Minister of this country. I have been saying that for years, and that day is imminent.

We should be sending our Ministers to the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford, the Saïd Business School at Oxford, the Cambridge Judge Business School and the London Business School.

To conclude, I attended a virtual session with my fellow Harvard Business School alumnus, Prime Minister Mitsotakis of Greece. In this meeting last year, when Greece was doing very well with the pandemic, he said, “I am accused by my opponents of treating Greece like a company—and I take that as a compliment”.