In the late 1980s, one successful minister wrote
The untrained minister can remain untrained. Men and women in middle life, on whom the favour of the voters and of the party leader has fallen for a season of uncertain length, have neither the time nor inclination to take induction courses.
Well, it’s a point of view. Former ministers interviewed by the institute for Government for its Ministers Reflect series often comment that being a minister carries no job description, there is no manual, no preparation or induction. They may be appointed for their prior political activity, but they rely on their prior career experience to make sense of their new duties. There is no question in my own mind that the best preparation for my job as a minister was my time working in the BBC in the mid-1990s: a large organization can help you with both in-house analytical and leadership training, and help you to understand how bureaucracies work. Former ministers in general reflect on the relatively sketchy preparation that has been offered in recent decades to shadow ministerial times on both the Labour and Conservative sides. But most seem to think that more could be done.
This post will consider the building pressure for training of ministers; the kind of training that might be relevant; examples of training overseas; how previous training programmes for Labour and the Conservatives have been received; and what former ministers themselves say.
Pressure for training of Ministers
Recent years have seen a variety of reports suggesting more could be done – indeed, should be done. 2021 seemed to be the high point of these suggestions. The 2021 Cabinet Office Declaration on Government Reform, signed by both the Prime Minister (Boris Johnson) and the Cabinet Secretary, said that Ministers would receive training in how to assess evidence, monitor delivery, and work effectively with Civil Service colleagues. Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister who was responsible for the declaration at the time, indicated that ministers ‘will commit to a training programme, so that we ourselves have a better understanding of project management and policy delivery’.
Michael Gove’s speech was delivered at a conference of the Commission for Smart Government, whose report, also in 2021, noted that many Ministers begin their roles unprepared and have little access to training or professional development. The report noted previous work on induction, such as Labour’s Templeton College preparations in 1997 and the Institute for Government programme for Conservative shadow ministers, as well as professional development sessions on financial and risk management put on for junior Labour Ministers at the former National School of Government, closed by the Coalition in 2012, which offered advice, information, the Handbook for Ministers written by the Head of its Ministerial and Private Office Programme and 360’ assessments for ministers and the Cabinet Office ran some sessions for and the Cabinet Office ran some sessions for junior ministers. I am grateful to Professor Jean Hartley of the Open University for some of the information on the National School of Government and its work.
Again in 2021, the Policy Exchange report Government Reimagined identified the need for training that orientated to policy and delivery, including procurement, digital delivery and legal and constitutional issues, statistics and data, and practical training in decision making and chairing meetings.
Both these reports argue for a wider training pool, including backbench MPs in both the governing party or parties and the Opposition, as well as strengthened advisory services and changes in culture, including relationships between civil servants and ministers, and a more pragmatic approach to the question of ministerial accountability.
At the ministerial reshuffle in 2021, there had been a degree of induction training for ministers on issues such as time management coordinated by the UK Government’s Government Skills and Curriculum Unit. The unit had already conducted a training conference on ‘supporting ministers to lead’ for civil servants in private offices which had featured contributions from senior ministers. But the Government Campus training courses focus on training for those who support ministers rather than ministers themselves.
When I was Minister for Public Services in Wales, the Welsh Government’s public service leadership development agency, Academi Wales, reported to me. They ran a number of conferences and schools for public service leaders across Wales, including local government and the health service, and organised a two day summit for the top 200 public service leaders in Wales, including the police and fire service as well as Welsh Government, local government and the sponsored bodies. I think more ministers would have benefitted from attending this or joining in sessions run by Academi.
What areas of training might be usefully addressed?
Former Head of the Prime Minister’s Policy and Strategy Units, Professor Sir Geoff Mulgan, has recently written a think piece on training in government. He distinguishes between areas relevant to the 20th Century and those more relevant to the 21st Century:
Geoff places great emphasis on understanding of data in his suggestions on the intelligence function within government. He reviews various training programmes across different institutions around the world, including in higher education, and warns that some of the training can be quite technocratic, failing to pay attention to the relationship between citizens and states.
Separately there have been bolder calls for the injection of systems thinking - or whole of government thinking, into government, as I say in my recent book. This has been endorsed by a wide range of former Number Ten advisers. As well as Geoff, these include Dominic Cummings, and Matthew Taylor, and others. It’s fair to sy that Geoff Mulgan and Matthew Taylor at the optimistic end of this thinking, and Dominic Cummings at the pessimistic end. In an earlier reflection on Cummings’ thoughts, Mulgan said he was favourable to many of them ‘not least because all of them were used or explored in the past’:
Systems thinking enjoyed a brief prominence in government thinking on public service reform prior to 2010 and a toolkit for ‘Government as a system’ was produced by the UK Government’s Policy Lab in 2020 - on the eve of the first Covid lockdown.
Examples of training overseas
Some other countries prepare ministers more thoroughly, particularly in China, as Geoff points out. Courses for ministers from a variety of countries are also run at Harvard University and by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. Geoff mentions a number of others, including Australia’s McKinnon Institute which provides training for ministers. He also mentions the work of the excellent Australia New Zealand School of Government, which I’m pleased to say carried an explainer on one of the chapters from my book recently.
McKinnon’s Advanced Political Leadership Programme is designed for potential ministers. It addresses a range of aspects of ministerial leadership”
How previous training programmes for Labour and the Conservatives have been received
Former ministers themselves have reflected on the preparation they had – notably for New Labour shadow ministers at Templeton College, Oxford, prior to 1997, and for Conservative shadow ministers, prior to 2010. Memoirs and interviews show that
Labour recollections of Templeton College are mixed, to say the least. The late Alastair Darling remembered:
Just before the 1997 elections, all the frontbench were sent on a weekend seminar at Oxford University to train to be a minister and it was interesting. But there were two problems with it. One is it didn’t seem real because most of us thought ‘Well, we’ve been out of power so long, we won’t count our chickens’ and secondly they took you through mock situations, but they were mock situations and everybody knew they were mock situations. So it was nice to do I suppose, but the fact is I don’t think it’s ever been repeated, which probably tells you the value of it.
Margaret Beckett recalled:
to be completely fair, a lot of the work that was done before we went into government was actually very good, I thought. I mean, I remember I went to a seminar that Andrew Adonis [now Labour politician] and others ran, at Templeton College [at the University of Oxford]. It was very amusing actually, because I was shadowing DTI and I had a big team, I had a team of about six, some of whom were very free sprits in the sense of firing off press releases and stuff all over the place, and to see literally the almost physical shock on their faces when it was explained to them that when you were a minister, you know your departmental head and probably Number 10 had to sign off potentially on the content of any speech, or any press release. You didn’t just go firing things off and making publicity for yourself. Everything had to go through the machine and everything had to be agreed across government, cleared with other departments and so on. I mean the sheer stunned horror on their faces I thought was quite funny actually!
The late Tessa Jowell said:
In the run-up to 1997 we went through various induction programmes at Templeton College in Oxford and there are two things that conspire against pre-election training being very helpful. One is just raw superstition:" I can’t engage with this too much because (a) we might not win the election and (b) if we win the election, I might not be a minister at all and therefore I will have invested so much in this and it will come to nothing." That was slightly the experience in 2015 when I’d worked with a lot of ministers to prepare them for government then (Jowell, 2016: 3).
Patricia Hewitt had a very clear memory:
I was there for the two days at Templeton and it was very interesting, but what was depressing was most of the Shadow Cabinet really didn’t feel they needed any training or development. In particular, one of the best sessions we set up was a couple of very senior private sector guys talking about managing large-scale change. And I remember a couple of our Shadow Cabinet people saying, ‘What’s this got to do with us?’ [laughter] And I just thought, ‘Oh dear, this isn’t really very good!’ And there was another session where we took them through how long it would take to get from policy decision to implementation – and they simply couldn’t believe it, it was kind of, ‘This is nonsense, we’re going to be able to do it faster.’ Keith and the Andersen team were just very carefully taking them through [the process]: consultation, policy decision, brief Parliamentary Counsel, get the bill into Parliament, then you’ve got secondary legislation and somewhere along the line probably a bit more consultation and then you’ve got to establish the new agency, you know, and and and... frankly, you’re lucky if you haven’t hit another election by the time you’ve done all of that! And of course it’s true. But they didn’t really like it (Hewitt, 2016: 3).
Conservative recollections reflect on the somewhat sporadic nature of the training. Alastair Burt recalled
there were induction meetings prior to 2010, I think the Institute put those on, as the election was close, for people who might become ministers. I am
pretty sure I spoke at one, as someone who had been a previous minister. That was there in a way that was never there before ’92. I don’t remember anything like that before ’92.
Lord Young (formerly Sir George Young) said there was minimal preparation or training when he became a minister in 1979. But in 2010 he had attended a session with the Institute for Government and believed
my fellow colleagues benefitted enormously from what the IfG were doing in terms of training and induction and all the rest and were much better prepared than I ever was in ’79’ .
Francis Maude had been very involved in the planning:
We had done preparation sessions with the IfG and Michael Bichard, who was then running it, basically said ‘We think it is totally in the national interest for you guys to be as well prepared as you can be and we will do anything to help. Tell us what you want us to do and we will do it.’ So that was very, very good and I think so much better than anything that had happened before – but it was still thin and not everyone, by any means, attended those sessions. Of course, you also had a Prime Minister and a Chancellor who had never been ministers, although they had been in government as special advisers, which does give you a big advantage because you know a bit about the dynamics, the structure and how things work.
Would-be ministers generally want to hear from those who have been there before them as ministers. Ministerial folklore plays its part, and a number cited Gerald Kaufman’s 1980 book How to be a Minister.
Alan Johnson said:
I’d be very loath to rewrite Gerald Kaufman’s book. In fact I did read his ‘How to be a Minister’, I mean it was very useful, but it was depending on Gerald’s experience.
Andrew Mitchell reckoned:
I think it’s quite a good idea to read Gerald Kaufman’s book on how to be a minister for a bit of entertainment; take advice from predecessors; listen with care to civil servants, win their respect; and be very clear about what you want to achieve.
Lib Dem minister Jim (Lord) Wallace also rated it
I did read Gerald Kaufman’s book [How to be a Minister, 1980], which I found very good. I think I read it probably after I’d been in office for a short while, and I could see what he was saying. I mean it is, it’s the same in Westminster, it’s a tremendously paper-driven system.
Former Welsh Deputy First Minister Ieuan Wyn Jones (Plaid Cymru) was given a copy by a civil servant:
I had been in the job probably about six weeks when a civil servant just slipped me a book and said: “Read that.” It was a book by Gerald Kaufman, How To Be A Minister. And this civil servant wanted me to read it because, he was saying, all the civil service tricks were in there. And I read the book... Kaufman was such a humorous writer, and I found that the tricks he highlighted came true in my experience. I found it extremely helpful.
Last Thoughts
What of the 1980s Minister quoted at the beginning of this piece who rather loftily dismissed the idea of ministerial induction courses?
It was Michael Heseltine.
By 2010 Michael Heseltine himself was helping with induction sessions for UK coalition ministers with the Institute for Government and he told a Commons Select Committee in 2012: ‘there should be induction courses for Ministers’.
Coalition ministers from both parties took his advice to heart. Liberal Democrat Lynne Featherstone remembered:
Michael Heseltine basically said – I mean, he put a lot more round it – you are going to be swamped, you are going to have a tsunami of work cover you, you will run round, you will do orals, you will do speeches, you will do all the duties of government, read all your papers. Five years will go and you will be a good little minister and you will have done nothing you ever wanted to do in politics.
Conservative Nick Boles said:
There’s no substitute for learning and hearing from other people who’ve done it. I remember there were sessions where various former ministers, Heseltine or whoever, gave a talk to newly appointed ministers. Those sorts of things are helpful. There’s nothing like the fresh personal experience of somebody who you know has been successful and asking how did they do it.
As I say in my book, when New Labour planned training sessions for shadow minsters on the arts of government prior to 1997, there were cries of ridicule from some old hands, who thought they would be better off reading the diaries of former Cabinet Ministers such as Barbara Castle, Richard Crossman and Tony Benn or learning directly from former ministers. Yet prior to the 2024 General Election, moves by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer to ensure government-readiness for future ministers barely raised an eyebrow.
Today, there is no question that there is a degree of consensus between former ministers from all parties on the need for training. The Institute for Government archive contains many comments on the absence of preparation, induction or training for the ministerial role, or for in-service development. Several former ministers contrast this unfavourably with professional or business environments where they have worked. So, will it happen? Watch this space.