How Ministers Manage their Time

It's possibly their most precious resource

New Ministers settling into their offices this week will notice a deluge of documents and decisions coming towards them. They will immediately be thinking about how to find the time to do the job properly. The best short guide might be this article by the late Malcolm Wicks, a minister during the Blair Years.

But Ministerial use of time, and the capacity of the Whitehall system to fill it, has been a subject of political and academic commentary since at least the publication of Crossman’s diaries fifty years ago. The sense of time ‘capture’ by officials was at the heart of the conspiratorial analysis of minister-civil service relationships in the accounts of some former Labour Ministers after 1979. But even ministers who rejected the idea that civil servants were conspiring against them, such as Gerald Kaufman, gave great emphasis to the need to control the diary. The importance of managing time has been part of ministerial folklore for some decades, and has been absorbed within the ministerial mindset irrespective of party affiliation. John Major’s Education Secretary Gillian Shephard recalled in her 2000 memoir that she ‘took control’ of her diary. Former Conservative Chancellor Philip Hammond told the Institute for Government ‘It’s well-rehearsed that you have to take immediate control of the diary, or civil servants will fill it with rubbish’.

In my recent book on Ministerial Leadership, I devote an entire chapter to how time or timing impacts on ministers and how they seek to manage their time. It’s not only Labour Ministers who have had suspicions about how civil servants use time politically. John Penrose said:

Just be aware that time is on their side. If they wish you weren’t doing something, the temptation for them to play it long will be quite high, if they don’t want it to happen, on the grounds that the chances are that the ministerial half-life means you may have gone before it is finished, whereupon they have got a chance to not do it. So bear that in mind and move briskly, once you’ve decided to do something.

Former BT chief executive and then minister Lord Livingston also found that ministerial decisions became compressed while civil servants often seemed to act in a more leisurely fashion:

the approach which – that wouldn’t have happened in business, it certainly didn’t happen in BT – was if you had a month to do something it would be done at official level for 30 days and then overnight by the minister. Rather than actually give the minister time, everything was an overnight.

In this post I am going to look at ministers’ time management, with a focus on:

• workload

• the infrastructure of time management

• attention

• policy inheritance (here I will briefly consider the timing of a Minister’s appointment, at the beginning of a parliament or midway through).

Workload.

Ministers work hard. There is no dispute about that. Writing in 1989, Peter Hennessy drew attention to material in the National Archives relating to a committee of privy councillors chaired by Lord Attlee, appointed on the advice of Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook by Prime Minister Harold MacMillan. This reported on ‘The Burden on Ministers’, making recommendations for greater use of junior ministers and cabinet committees. Briefing to ministers should be terser and ministers should not have too much reading. Ministers themselves should be sparing in acceptance of dinners and social engagements. Interestingly from today’s perspective, it suggested that Parliamentary scrutiny should be focused and not general, and declared its opposition to ‘congressional style’ committees (select committees as we know them today). A separate letter from one committee member, the former Liberal leader Clement Davies, suggested this might be an opportunity for devolution of power away from Westminster, which would reduce the burden on ministers. An extract from a memo to the Prime Minister on the report (Crown Copyright) is below:

75 years later, we have devolution, select committees, more junior ministers, widespread use of cabinet committees and additionally other structures to drive delivery and implementation. But there is still a ‘burden’ on ministers. Evidence from those who have worked in business as well as politics suggests that the time burden on ministers is more acute. Lord Davies of Abersoch (Mervyn Davies) has said ‘I worked 24 hours a day. There is more pressure on political leaders than I ever saw in the corporate world’. This may be because political leaders take decisions at a much ‘lower level of importance’ as the late Lord Myners suggested or because they have a less direct role in management and therefore are limited in how they can make decision-making more time-efficient. Technological advances of themselves can help reduce burdens but also bring new ones, as anyone cc’d into irrelevant mass emails can testify.

The ministerial infrastructure of time management

There are essentially three elements of infrastructure which have traditionally been used to enable ministers to impose some discipline over the time pressures they face – the private office and the diary secretary; the meeting cycle; and the ministerial ‘box’ containing submissions, briefings and correspondence, either physical or increasingly electronic. The ministerial diary team of course manage the entire diary, slotting in constituency, parliamentary and political engagements. 

Ministers take agency in order to impose some order, creating routines and adapting to, or seeking to shape, the rhythm of demands from the department, the centre of government, the legislature, party colleagues in the legislature, and the wider party. On becoming a minister, the calendar of the minister’s life is organised by the Diary Secretary. All events, including constituency, parliamentary, and family occasions, need to be in the formal ministerial diary. There is built in role conflict in the life of ministers. Most, except for those in the Lords, are elected politicians with constituencies – or possibly, in the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, regions – to serve. Many ministers complained of the lack of understanding of the time pressure on ministers by civil servants, particularly in respect of parliament and the constituency but also family life.  In the private office, Nick Hurd insisted

the most important person in the room is the diary manager because management of your time as a minister is absolutely critical, I think’. He emphasises ‘the discipline of managing your time. You may be in a post – as I sometimes was – for less than a year. Do not waste that time. Do not waste that time.

If there is one constant in a minister’s day, it is meetings. Some ministers made a particular focus on the organization of meetings. For productivity purposes, meetings could sometimes be more valuable than simply reading submissions. Philip Hammond limited the number of officials who could attend a meeting, and consolidated meetings into specific ‘blocks of time’ within the week. Only the private office respects that a minister’s time is limited, thought Lord Livingston: departmental policy leads will always want the minister’s time. However, Lord O’Neill said ‘This natural tendency in the private office to try and have your day filled up anyhow’. Lord Freud said: ‘I remember my diary secretary once telling me, ‘I’ve got you 16 meetings today’.

The final element of the infrastructure of time management is the ministerial ‘box’. Christopher Jary’s 2015 guide for civil servants on working with ministers suggests that a typical box for a Secretary of State may include 25 letters to sign, 15 submissions, 10 draft replies to PQs, five invitations to consider, two draft press releases, one draft speech to approve, one Question and Answer briefing, one parliamentary statement, 110 press cuttings, 20 briefings, 15 letters from Cabinet colleagues, eight papers and attachments for tomorrow, and a folder of papers from Special Advisers.Longevity in a post could help with time management. David Gauke noted

certainly as time went on, when I knew the subject matter well, it actually reduces your workload very considerably, because you can re-direct your efforts more efficiently, as you’re not having to get on top of a subject every time….I was able to get through my red box much more quickly, because nearly everything was familiar.

Others said the same.

Some made the private office find time during the day for them to work on their boxes. Jeremy Hunt boasted that he ‘never took a box home’, learning from Michael Heseltine’s advice that if the private office is told to find time in the diary to do the paperwork in the day, they have an incentive to reduce the paperwork. There are plenty of others who operated the same way. On the other hand, Ken Clarke claimed he would always do red boxes ‘in the middle of the night with a large cigar and a brandy’. Caroline Spelman would normally begin her box about ten o’clock at night and would be lucky if she was in bed before midnight. She would often end up balancing her folder for the day’s events ‘’on the handlebars of the exercise bike in the gym at seven o’clock in the morning’.

Attention.

Focus is essential to enabling ministers delivering their agenda. Finding time to think is therefore essential to them being able to devote sufficient attention to the issues that matter to them, which of course means that they de-prioritise attention to other issues. Attention itself has to be considered a ‘scarce resource’ in ministerial decision-taking.

Hazel Blears urged prospective ministers to ‘just find some time to reflect properly on the big decisions that you’re going to make’. Nick Hurd said that one of the pieces of advice he had received from his father, former Home and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, ‘was to make sure they give you time to think’. Ben Bradshaw found it difficult ‘in timing in thinking time, brainstorming time, discussion time, sitting back and taking a strategic view time’. Tom McNally recalled advice from former Conservative Cabinet Minister, Peter Brooke: ‘Dental appointments’. I said ‘pardon?’ and he said ‘stick dental appointments in your diary, they can’t touch ‘em! They don’t know where you are!’

Douglas Alexander believed that Blair and Brown, as Prime Minister and Chancellor, had ‘the most unallocated time in their diaries’ amongst ministers because they were determined ‘to think and to strategise’ . Hilary Benn said:

if I had my time again, setting aside time to think [is what I’d do]. Because if you’re in the moment, going from engagement to engagement, box to box, you don’t always get the time to think and you need to do that. One bit of advice I was given, which I am sure is given to all ministers: you need to focus on a small number of things, because they will take a lot of effort to get them through.

Patricia Hewitt recalled ‘I use a time management tool, which is really about priorities and goals, where you do a two-by-two matrix – one axis is Urgent/Not Urgent, the other is Important/Not Important. Most of us, and certainly most Ministers, live in quadrant A – Urgent and Important’. Sir David Hanson was clear: ‘Ministerial life is trying to decide as well what’s important, what’s urgent? And what is more long-term and dealing with that according to priority. If I didn’t respond to a particular problem today, in the paper, it might be going to be worse tomorrow’.

Flexibility, however, is important. Nicky Morgan said ‘Everything you do is subject to something happening’. Hugh Robertson emphasised the need to ‘build some slack into your daily diary’.

Policy Inheritance.

It is comparatively rare for ministers to see a policy all the way through. As the late Tessa Jowell said, ‘it is so rare in public life to be able to see through policies from start to finish’. Jo Johnson echoed that in respect of higher education legislation; ‘such a rare thing for a minister to do the whole journey: policy development, green paper’ then on to legislation.

It can take three years to put a new policy through, given preparatory work, the passage of legislation, and the subsequent administrative guidance to ensure delivery. Consequently, one of the constant time factors for ministers relates to the timing of their appointment. Arriving in post halfway through a parliament is a different proposition than being in post at the beginning of a parliamentary term.

Jacqui Smith felt

you either had to decide if you wanted to deliver your predecessor’s initiative which I sometimes did, or you had to decide whether or not you were going to dump that and move on to what you really wanted to do.

Damian Hinds recalled:

you get to pick up a lot of existing programmes and see them through and deliver them, so in a sense it’s your name on the thing when it comes out but you didn’t initiate it because it’s been in progress for some time. And there are other things which you get to start that you don’t actually get to see all the way through.

Sometimes, however, you inherit a disaster waiting to happen, as Alastair Burt recalled on inheriting the Child Support Agency from Michael Jack in 1992.

Incoming Labour ministers in 1997 had been warned of the time it took to implement policy, said Patricia Hewitt. The late Alastair Darling, one of the longest-serving Labour ministers, reflectedL

I always say that when you go into a department, it takes you about a year to understand it. And then if you want to do anything, it takes you a year to get that established and then probably to get the legislation or make the changes.

We can assume, I think, that incoming ministers in Keir Starmer’s government will have been well-briefed by former ministers advising them, and by his chief of staff Sue Gray, about the time factors in delivering policies into action. This may be one of the best-prepared governments the UK has had. We shall soon see. Time management as a minister is critical, as it is in many other leadership roles.