Government: Leadership Training

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I think that, like the noble Lord, Lord Norton, every Member of this House would be in favour of better training for Ministers, though I must say it would be a bit of a challenge to train Gavin Williamson. I have been involved in one or two attempts, and it is not always easy to get Ministers or people who expect to be Ministers to accept training. Tony Blair was very superstitious about it, because he thought that if he allowed his shadow Ministers, as they then were, to be trained, that would somehow put a jinx on the election and the gods would take their revenge on him. There are of course also some politicians —I certainly do not say many, but there are some—who think that they are omnicompetent without any training at all.

There are some difficult issues in training; it is not altogether straightforward. I want to draw attention to just one which is part of my experience—and, as it happens, of that of the Minister who is responding today. The appointment and use of special advisers is quite contentious. Some of the contention has revolved around appointments, most famously when the Government lost a very competent Chancellor because Dominic Cummings insisted that he, Cummings, should control the special advisers. What the role of special advisers should be relative to other advisers to Ministers is also contentious. I can say with complete confidence that there is no comparison between the job I was brought in to do for Tony Crosland in 1974 as a special adviser and the jobs that special advisers do today. They are much more powerful, and in Cummings’s sad case, he was for a brief period the second-most powerful person in the land.

Good special advisers still work with civil servants, but when you are training Ministers what doctrine are you to teach as to the role of special advisers? Who decides what is to be taught? It really is not easy, though I am sure there are ways forward.

I hope I am not being too frivolous in saying that there is one essential difference between training civil servants and training Ministers. Civil servants can be incentivised to do the right thing by training—the noble Lord, Lord Maude, has just told us some of the things he did to try to do it: they get promoted better and they get performance bonuses and so on. However, much of this does not apply to Ministers. They are paid by grade rather than performance; there is no scope for awarding them for good performance by giving them more cash. As for incentives for civil servants, number one in most Ministers’ lists is not making sure that the public get maximum value for money out of some big spending programme. Most Ministers want to rise, and the incentive on them is to do what helps them to rise: perform well in the House of Commons or the House of Lords, appeal to powerful factions in their parliamentary parties by saying what they think will please them, look good on TV, and, above all—we saw an example of that yesterday—please the Prime Minister. I do not want to be too pompous about all this—this is what Ministers do; it is part of politics, and I do not expect it just to go away—but we must remember that these are not incentives that lead to better government.