Ministerial Salaries (Amendment) Bill

Second Reading (and remaining stages)

Moved by

That the Bill be now read a second time.

My Lords, the Ministerial Salaries (Amendment) Bill is a short but important piece of legislation, which has come to us unamended from the other place. It seeks to amend the statutory limit on the number of ministerial salaries available, currently capped at 109, to 120. The proposed change to 120 reflects the average size of Governments since 2010 and would largely end the practice of unpaid Ministers, which I know has been a source of concern for noble Lords in recent years. It will ensure that the Prime Minister of the day has the flexibility needed to appoint enough paid Ministers to meet modern government demands.

For noble Lords who are not familiar with the current position, it might be helpful to shed some light on it and why the change is required. As noble Lords will be aware, under our constitution, the monarch appoints the Prime Minister as the person most able to command the confidence of the other place and all ministerial appointments thereafter are made by the monarch on the sole advice of the Prime Minister. There is a statutory limit on how many ministerial salaries are available, as set out in the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975. The current limit is 109 salaries. It has not changed since the 1975 Act was introduced over half a century ago.

In addition, there is a separate statutory limit on the number of Ministers who can sit and vote in the other place, whether paid or unpaid, under the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975. That limit is 95. There is no equivalent limit on the number of your Lordships who are able to serve as Ministers.

The Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975 also sets out salaries that should be paid to eight other officeholders: the Speakers of both Houses, the Leader of the Opposition in both Houses, the Opposition Chief Whip in both Houses and two assistant Opposition Whips in the other place. The Bill does not seek to amend those salaries.

Within the current limit of 109 Ministers, there are 83 salaries that can be allocated at the Secretary of State, Minister of State and Parliamentary Secretary ranks. A further four salaries are allocated to the Lord Chancellor, the Attorney-General, the Solicitor-General and the Advocate-General for Scotland, and 22 salaries are allocated to Government Whips. I ask noble Lords to bear with me with all these numbers. I just want to give absolute clarity to the House.

The Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975 sets cumulative limits on the salaries allocated to Secretaries of State, Ministers of State and Parliamentary Secretaries. Within the overall limit of 83, the cumulative limits under the Act are 21 Secretary of State-rank salaries; 50 Secretary of State-rank and Minister of State-rank salaries; and 83 Secretary of State-, Minister of State- and Parliamentary Secretary-rank salaries. These limits were set in 1975, which is over 50 years ago.

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness the Leader of the House for her introduction to this Bill and for her very clear explanation of it; I can confirm that I support it and I can therefore be brief.

As most of the House who have followed this will know—the noble Baroness alluded to this—I have form on the matter. When I became Leader of the House in 2022, I found it absolutely astonishing that in the 21st century we had a statutory position where, practically, in one of our Houses of Parliament in many circumstances people had to have private means to become a Minister. There have always been wealthy people who have been willing to do this signal public service for nothing. They still exist, and I of course salute them for their public spirit in doing that. Some on my side, when I was Leader, made great personal sacrifices, for which I once told the House I was ashamed to ask them, and for which I was beyond appreciation when I saw them ready to make those sacrifices.

However, the converse of that appreciation is that it cannot ever be right that those who do not have the means cannot serve this country as a Minister because a post is unpaid. I said from the Front Bench, both in office and in opposition, that I believe this matter must be addressed. Whenever we discussed it, there was widespread support for the principle, and I think that was found when my predecessors also tried to address the matter. But there was always a reason not to act, and not only in my time but before.

I think I have told the House that, when I tried to get something in a Bill such as this when I was Leader in the 2023-24 Session, I was told by my own very senior colleagues that it would “cause comment”—perhaps we were approaching an election or something. When I tried to address the matter by different means, ensuring at least that senior unpaid figures on both the Government and Opposition Front Benches, such as a Foreign Office Minister and leading shadow spokesman, might be allowed deemed attendance when they were out of London, perhaps on related business, this was disagreed to by senior figures then in the Labour Party on the basis, as I was told, that Labour would have fewer Ministers and so it would not be necessary. It has not quite worked out that way and it was never really going to. As the noble Baroness explained, this position has grown and persisted for decades.

My Lords, as someone relatively new to the House I am very struck by how hard Ministers work in this House, as we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord True. Having spent 20 or more years working with Governments of different persuasions and seeing Ministers in the Lords, I always think that the Lords Ministers often work harder and get less credit for the work that they do.

I will make three further points in support of this Bill. First, I am honoured to follow both the noble Lord, Lord True, and my noble friend Lady Smith. I congratulate them on the speeches they have made but also on the collaborative approach they have taken to this issue. As a result, I am confident that, should we pass the Bill—I hope we will—it will bring benefits both to this House and to the Government long into the future.

On a previous occasion, the noble Lord, Lord True, set out three principles, which I will repeat because each is important. There should be a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work—and this fits with how hard Ministers in the Lords work. There should be equal treatment of Ministers in both Houses, which is also an important point. Perhaps most importantly, nobody should be prevented by lack of means from taking on the role of a Minister. My noble friend Lady Smith totally supported those three principles and I do too.

Secondly, I emphasise the last of those three points as particularly important. If, regardless of means, we want the younger Members of this House to be able to take on ministerial responsibility, this Bill is essential. Those of us who are—how should I put it?—later in a career are more likely to have a pension or other retirement income than our younger colleagues. I look at the cohort of young noble friends with whom I was privileged to join the Government Benches in January, and see evident competence, commitment, passion and talent. I would not want either the Government or the country to be deprived of the contribution that any one of them might make as Ministers simply because the role was unremunerated. A similar case no doubt has been made in the past, and the noble Lord, Lord True, says he might have made it in relation to all sides of the House in the past and the future.

My Lords, like my noble friend Lord True, I add my support to this Bill. It seeks to rectify situations that, as Leader, I too sought to address but unfortunately did not succeed in doing so. Namely, it amends the law to ensure that Ministers, whether they are here or in the other place, are paid for the work that they do. That may seem common sense and unarguable but, for too long, legislative restrictions on the number of Ministers have led to a situation where Ministers in the other place have taken the bulk of the paid positions, leaving too many Lords Ministers to perform their duties without salaries.

In my time as Leader, I was involved in numerous reshuffles with the infamous whiteboard and Post-it notes that came with it. When it came to deciding Lords ministerial positions, the Chief Whip and I were given considerable discretion about the appointments, but we too often had to argue for paid positions for our Front Bench rather than see them allocated to Members of the other place. Although we managed that with varying degrees of success, there were simply not enough salaries available, so we invariably had to ask some Lords Ministers to take on their roles unpaid. On occasion, as we have heard, this meant that excellent colleagues either were unable to take a job in the first place or, if they could, found themselves unable to continue in unpaid roles indefinitely, depriving the Government of talented individuals. This wholly unsatisfactory situation is what the Bill aims to tackle.

As has already been recognised in the speeches we have heard, noble Lords across the House are well aware of how hard our Ministers work. We see daily the breadth of responsibilities that Lords Ministers have in not just their specific departmental policy areas but their much broader role representing the Government in this House. The challenges of not having a salary are a particular issue for Ministers, as a key part of their role is the requirement to travel frequently to represent our nation, so they cannot attend the House regularly. To expect people to do their jobs for free due to outdated legislation is entirely unreasonable.

My Lords, I welcome the excellent speeches by the Leader of the House and the Leader of the Opposition. I think there needs to be a Lords Minister in every main department. Those jobs can be extremely demanding, and it is the right principle that money should be paid for good work done.

However, this Bill is an opportunity for the Government to think more widely about how the tasks of Ministers can be made a bit easier, how the chances of success can be enhanced and how the public can feel that they are getting more out of their Ministers who are, rightly, being paid for the jobs that they are doing.

When I was the executive chairman of a large quoted company, it would never have occurred to me that it would be good practice to go into the office one day, without having alerted any of my senior colleagues, and tell them that I had decided to swap them all around just for the sake of it; and that I was going to make the sales director the finance director and the engineering director the sales director, and that I was going to sack somebody else, all on the same day. I would not think that that would have a happy result. Successive Prime Ministers have been quite wrong to have these big clear-out days as some assertion of power, because those whom they sack will never like them again and quite a lot of those whom they appoint are given jobs that they do not want or understand, so they also harbour a grudge about the experience of the reshuffle. We need something better than that.

We need senior Ministers mentoring and looking, in private, at the performance of more junior Ministers. Leading Cabinet members should be mentored and their performance reviewed by the Prime Minister and other Cabinet members perhaps by the Deputy Prime Minister; and obviously all Ministers should be mentored by their departmental ministerial heads.

I wonder if it is not time to be a little bolder and change the language. Why do we call most of our Ministers junior Ministers? People think it a privilege, necessity or requirement to see a Minister, so we do need then to undermine the Minister’s authority before the meeting begins. Surely each is either a Minister or a Cabinet Minister, who is a super-Minister with strategic obligations and ultimate responsibility for the departments in which the other Ministers are working. That could be extremely helpful from the point of view of working out the structure, so I think that we need only two main types of Minister: heads of department or Cabinet Ministers paid a higher salary; and Ministers paid the Minister of State salary. I think the Parliamentary Secretary salary is still quite low given the magnitude of many of these jobs and the responsibilities that they entail.

My Lords, I am delighted to add my support to this Bill. As with all new arrivals, I have had to learn a great deal from scratch about the workings of this House—right from the first day, when, on the occasion of my introduction, I very nearly forgot to shake the Lord Speaker’s hand on my way out of the Chamber and learned that the way noble Lords help their colleagues from making mistakes is by a sort of insistent murmuring from all sides. Some noble Lords this evening might suggest that I still have not quite got the hang of sitting down quickly enough from time to time. However, I quickly learned just how hard Ministers work.

In my first week, back in March 2024, I had many opportunities to listen to Ministers in the then Conservative Government—and I do mean many. It might be considered invidious to pick individuals out, but I would like to give some real examples to bring the subject to life—with apologies to the noble Lord, Lord True, because some of my examples might be similar to his.

I start with the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, whose expertise and courtesy from the Dispatch Box immediately impressed me. Upon checking parliamentary records while thinking about this speech, I saw that she gave no fewer than 48 spoken answers that week—on the earnings of mothers and fathers, independent schools, special needs, school meals and free childcare—and a speech on gender recognition abroad. The previous week, she gave five speeches, including one on International Women’s Day, in which she said:

“I started with an 1,100-word speech and have finished with 5,000 words of notes and no speech. So I will do my best, but I fear that I will have to write to many of your Lordships at the end of the debate”,—[Official Report, 8/3/24; col. 1794.]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the Bill. I do not think it is acceptable that we ask Ministers to do their work unpaid, a burden that has fallen disproportionately on Members of this House. As we have heard, former Leaders on these Benches have worked hard to change that, but, sadly, without success. The noble Baroness the Leader is to be congratulated on the Bill we have before us.

I focus my remarks on another aspect of ministerial salaries: the absence of any provision for paternity leave, shared parental leave or adoption leave. Ministers, as officeholders, are not employees and so do not qualify for any of the normal provisions. For many years, the system for taking maternity and other parental leave was managed informally, with a period of leave agreed with the Prime Minister and cover normally provided by other Ministers within a department or a Whip stepping up. Given the limit we have on ministerial salaries, covering a colleague’s maternity leave was normally in addition to someone’s existing duties, as there were not any spare salaries to appoint a replacement.

I was particularly aware of this when I was pregnant with my daughter in 2021 and was also a Government Whip. I worried that any leave I would take would either put a heavy burden on my other colleagues in the Whips’ Office, who were all already covering at least three or four departments each, or involve asking someone to provide cover for me unpaid.

Happily, the problem was solved before Margot was born, as the inadequacies of the previous system were exposed even more clearly when the then Attorney-General, Suella Braverman, needed to take maternity leave. Because the role of Attorney-General comes with specific constitutional responsibilities that can be fulfilled only by the specific officeholder, staying in post while cover was provided by another colleague was not an option. Because of the limit to ministerial salaries, it meant that Suella faced having to resign in order to take maternity leave, which was not a very satisfactory position at all. The Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Bill was hastily written and passed to create the position of Minister on leave for Ministers who wished to take a period of maternity leave, the salary for which did not count towards the formal cap for salaries, freeing up the ability to appoint a replacement for that period of leave.

My Lords, I have been struck by the cross-party tone of this debate. I continue this tone with a short intervention on the closely related matter of how ministerial pay is determined.

In January, Peter Kyle, the Business Secretary, proposed a change to IPSA’s pay setting, with which I heartily agree; I think it very worthy of consideration. He told the Financial Times that he

“would really love for IPSA to peg MPs and ministerial pay to our growth rates as a country, as opposed to what it is at the moment, which is a slightly byzantine formula”.

His thinking was that such a move would help the Government, and other parties in Parliament, to prioritise economic growth at every level. I am pleased to say that the Business Secretary’s excellent proposal was received positively by other MPs.

There are few MPs more on the pulse of public opinion than Chris Curtis, the Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North and co-chair of the Labour Growth Group. As the former head of political polling at Opinium, Curtis has a strong handle on what the public are thinking. He argued:

“It’s the right thing to restore trust in politics for the public to see MPs linking their pay to the improvements in the economy we are aiming to deliver”.

The Business Secretary’s proposal to peg the pay of MPs and Ministers to economic growth has international precedent. Singapore has used various forms of this model for the past 20 years. Between 2000 and 2011, Ministers and MPs in Singapore received a “GDP bonus”, which was explicitly tied to economic growth. No bonus was awarded if real GDP growth was under 2%, with the potential for an extra eight months of pay if it exceeded 10%. In 2012, the scheme developed into a slightly more flexible “national bonus”, which bundled four elements together, giving each equal weighting: the real GDP growth rate, the real median income growth rate, the unemployment rate and the real growth rate for the bottom 20% of Singaporean citizens. This seems a very sensible approach as it makes the link far more explicitly to GDP per capita rather than GDP—a far closer reflection of people’s everyday living standards. It should be noted that, in the years since the scheme was introduced, the average growth rate in Singapore has been 4.6% as opposed to the average growth rate in the UK of 1.7%. These growth figures suggest that the scheme is a useful tool to boost economic growth.