Government Ministers

There are over a hundred ministers in the UK government. Ministers are allocated positions I government departments. Senior ministers hold the rank of secretary of state, sit in the cabinet and head government departments. Below them in the hierarchy come the posts of minister of state and parliamentary under-secretary. These junior ministers are given specific policy roles in a department. In the Home Office there are three ministers of state (responsible for crime reduction and policing, criminal justice and citizenship and immigration) and four parliamentary under-secretaries.

The main roles performed by ministers are:

• Policy leadership
  A minister does not have the time or knowledge to play a hands on role in all detailed policy, but plays an important role in initiation and section. Only a small number of ministers, such as former home secretaries Michael Howard and David Blunkett, have changed their department’s policy framework dramatically.
• Representing departmental interests
  Ministers represent the interests of their department in the cabinet and negotiate for funding increases. They represent both the government and their department in meetings of the Council of Ministers of the European Union.
• Departmental management
  Ministers play a strategic role in managing the work of their department, setting objectives and shaping the internal distribution of resources.
• Relations with parliament
  Ministers perform two main roles in parliament. First, they steer a department’s legislative proposals (government bills) through parliament. Second, they are accountable to parliament for decisions taken in their department, answering questions on the floor of the House and appearing before select committees.

Accountability to parliament

Ministers have a duty to give parliament ‘as full information as possible’ and ‘not to deceive or mislead parliament and the public’. Ministers have not always lived up to these principles. The 1996 Scott Report on the sales of arms to Iraq chronicled a number of occasions on which ministers misled parliament about changes in government policy. However, no minister resigned as the government argued that ministers are only culpable if they ‘knowingly’ misled parliament; they cannot be held accountable for things that happen in their departments that they do not know about.

Beverley Hughes and David Blunkett resigned in 2004 after failing to provide full information to parliament and the media. Immigration minister Hughes stood down after admitting that she unwittingly gave a ‘misleading impression’ to MPs on checks on migrants from eastern Europe. Blunkett was alleged to have requested that a visa application by a nanny employed by his ex-lover be fast-tracked. Blunkett denied that he had acted improperly and an independent enquiry found no conclusive evidence. But Blunkett resigned when the head of the enquiry, Sir Alan Budd, indicated that he had discovered a ‘chain of events’ linking the Home Secretary to the speeding up of the application.