🏋🏻‍♀️ The weight of ministerial responsibility

Policy Unstuck readers will likely be familiar with the Institute for Government’s Ministers Reflect series. If you aren’t, do take a look. It is a veritable goldmine of information. Today’s newsletter is a series of edited excerpts from the Institute for Government’s interview with Nicola Sturgeon, the former first minister of Scotland (2014-2023). You can read the interview in full here.

Be kind to them: ministers are always on

One of the things that vividly sticks in my mind is that Sir John Elvidge–the permanent secretary of the Scottish government at the time–said something that was really obvious but made me really sit up. He said that 'when you're a minister, you're never off duty. You might be on holiday, you might be having an evening off, but you're never not a minister.' So that responsibility is with you literally 24/7, which is quite a sobering moment even if it's quite an obvious thing.

Civil service prejudice

Very quickly–probably on the first day and certainly within the first couple of days–I changed what I would describe as my prejudice about the civil service. I think when you're in opposition, particularly, perhaps, representing a party like mine, you have a sense that the civil service is there to frustrate government, to stop you doing things and to make it difficult for you to make real change. I realised very quickly that wasn't the case. There are good and less good officials, but generally as an institution the civil service is there to help government deliver and to help ministers do their jobs.

I used the word prejudice and that probably is the correct word. It wasn’t based really on any actual experience. I suppose if you ask most people what civil servants are there to do, they will say that they are bureaucrats who are there to slow things down, keep things pretty much as they are and make it difficult. I had that perception. I suppose for a party like mine that wants to effectively break up the British state they serve, there was a sense that they would be particularly obstructive towards us. But that was not borne out at all.

Know who holds power, and over what

You very quickly have to get to grips with every aspect of government and how it works structurally. As the health secretary, I was taken into a room with about 20 people who were the directors within the health department of the Scottish government. You have to work out who everybody is, where they sit in the hierarchy, how they relate to you, what they're responsible for and how you can use them to deliver the things you want to do.

A lesson for Westminster, perhaps

There is a difference in the Scottish government in that individual ministers don't have their own special advisers. All special advisers are special advisers to the first minister and then they're given portfolio responsibilities. In practice they do work with individual ministers, but they are all accountable to the first minister. So I think that, coupled with the fact that it's a smaller administration, probably has helped avoid some of the turf wars between special advisers that you see in Whitehall.

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Cast from Iron?

When you're the proponents of change and you’re trying to paint a picture of a future that is very different to the status quo, there are certain questions you can never answer definitively. That is true of life in general, but that’s really magnified in a process like the [Scottish] independence referendum. 

I look at currency for example. It would be great if we'd had a more definitive answer to the “But what if your plan A doesn't work?” question. But in reality, if we had come up with plan B, the attack would have been, “What if that doesn’t work? What’s your plan C?”

In some circumstances, no matter how hard you try, you're never going to satisfy that desire for cast iron certainty. I suppose that that’s the kind of thing I'm talking about. The things I’m saying that it would have been nice to have are things that it would have been impossible to have in cast iron certainty about the future.

The weight of responsibility

In theory every decision a minister takes… you can describe as a life or death decision in some kind of way. But [during Coronavirus] suddenly you're taking decisions that are literally life and death, where whatever decision you take will have a bad outcome. There are no good decisions to be taken. They are of a significance and an order that is just way beyond anything you could ever have imagined before. 

So there is a weight of personal responsibility because of the magnitude of these decisions and the unprecedented nature of what you're asking people to do. Boris talks about this in his book, I just didn’t see any sign of him feeling it at the time. Of course you've got cabinet government, but ultimately the buck stops with you. So the weight of all of that over such an extended period of time, knowing that if you lock down there is untold harm to kids losing schooling, people potentially losing their jobs and people becoming isolated, but if you don’t lock down more people will die or get seriously ill. The weight of those decisions over an extended period of time was pretty horrendous.

Remember your function, minister

Firstly, remember that you're the decision maker, so listen, take advice, but don't outsource your decisions to officials or political advisers. You're the boss. I don't say that as an ego thing, but you're accountable, you're elected, you're the one that has to stand or fall on your decisions. 

Give yourself space to think. If you allow it, the system will consume you with paperwork and your packed diary, not out of any malice but just because of how it works. Make sure you've got time to think because that will lead to better decision making. 

Don't forget to look at the bigger picture. Don't sweat the small stuff. Don't get caught in the weeds. Always take a step back and think about why you're doing something, not just what it is you're doing.

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