Ministers Reflect Nick Boles 28 November 2017 Biographical details Parliamentary history 2010–present: Member of Parliament for Grantham and Stamford Government career 2014–16: Minister of State for Skills (Jointly with the Department for Education and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) 2012–14: Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Planning (Department for Communities and Local Government) Nick Boles was interviewed by Daniel Thornton and Tess Kidney Bishop on 28 November 2017 for the Institute for Government’s Ministers Reflect project. Nick Boles recalls dealing with opposition to his planning reforms, working as a joint minister, and developing the apprenticeship levy. Beyond being a minister, he reflects on taking time away from Westminster due to illness and being flattered by a parody Twitter account. Daniel Thornton (DT): Could you tell us about your first appointment as a minister and how that happened? Nick Boles (NB): It was 2012 and I was appointed as part of a big reshuffle. David Cameron didn’t do very many reshuffles, in fact it was his first big reshuffle since the 2010 election. I had been elected in 2010. I had been PPS [Parliamentary Private Secretary] to the Schools Minister Nick Gibb, who is one of the great survivors – I think now the longest-serving Schools Minister ever. There are certain people, and certain kinds of minister, where actually the longer that they can last the better and I think Nick would be a great example of that. Anyway, I’d been his PPS and then I was appointed as Planning Minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government [DCLG]. Some appointments in a sense are political, as in maybe you need a balance of the wings of the party, or you need a balance of intakes. And some of them are policy- driven. I think that my appointment to that specific job at that specific time was definitely a policy choice. For two reasons: first, I had done quite a lot of thinking about planning reform when I was running Policy Exchange [a think tank], and also to a lesser extent when I was thinking about implementation for David Cameron in the immediate run up to the 2010 election. But secondly, there was frustration in the centre. I think specifically and particularly in the Treasury and in the Chancellor’s office, George Osborne’s office at the time, with what they perceived as the reluctance of DCLG, both the ministers and officials, to actually do anything at all radical to liberalise planning. The revision of the NPPF [National Planning Policy Framework] had happened under Greg Clark as Planning Minister, and I think was a successful reform. But it was not a dramatic liberalisation. It was gradual, gentle liberalisation. There were some other measures, particularly in relation to permitted development rights, where the Treasury and the Chancellor were trying to get some major change through for a long time and kept on being blocked and frustrated. And I think they thought, partly fairly, that Eric Pickles [Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, 2012–15] was the main block, at the time, on those reforms. So they thought they’d put me in there to sort of ‘put a bomb under it’, which in hindsight, is not an ideal set of circumstances; particularly given that they’d briefed the papers at the time of my appointment, that I’d been sent by the Treasury to do the Chancellor’s bidding. That didn’t entirely endear me to Mr Pickles, who was going to be my new boss, and who’s a formidable figure in his own right and a very wily operator. 3 MINISTERS REFLECT So that was the backdrop. That, I think, definitely classifies it as an appointment with a political and policy objective rather than just a sort of deck chair arrangement. DT: And did the Prime Minister set you objectives or say, “This is what I’d like you to do”, or just brief the papers? NB: Much less than had been given to the newspapers. Indeed, the worst of it was the newspapers had been briefed before I was appointed, like a day before. I was the last person to get the call. The newspapers had all been told that I was being put into DCLG to shake up planning, but I had not yet received the call. I think it was that he [Cameron] ran out of time on the day he was appointing people and he was then doing it by phone the next day. I was the last phone call, I was in a lunch, I missed it… Anyway, it created a slightly awkward moment. I’m broadly speaking a huge fan of David Cameron, but in my view, he did not give people clear enough instructions. You got a very broad sense of, in one sentence, “I want you to go in there and get some houses built”, or something like that. But what you didn’t have was, “These are your top three objectives and these are the time scales that I’m looking at,” or anything like that. I don’t think I was unique in that – I don’t think anybody ever did and I didn’t get it the next time either. DT: Presumably it would have been helpful if he’d said something to Eric Pickles as well… NB: I suspect the first time Eric heard was reading it in whichever paper Treasury had briefed. Frankly it was surprising how welcoming he was to me given the backdrop. DT: How did Eric Pickles run the ministerial team? Did you have weekly meetings? NB: I witnessed four different Secretaries of State in four different departments: Michael Gove at Education when I was PPS, Eric at DCLG, Sajid [Javid] at BIS [Department for Business, Innovation and Skills] as it was, and Nicky Morgan at Education. By a country mile, Eric uses the weekly meeting to run the show more effectively than anybody else. As a deliverer of change and reform, Michael is streets ahead of the other three, and indeed pretty much of anybody in government. But as a chief executive of a department, and a policy agenda and a political agenda, Eric was peerless and he did it through the weekly meeting. It was extraordinary. Weekly meetings with Michael tended to be random walks through his mind while he ate his lunch. With Eric, all of the senior civil servants were there as well as special advisers [Spads], as well as the ministers, as well as the PPSs. There was a very strict agenda. There were these huge Gantt charts: mine was the planning update and then there was a housing update and a local government update. And literally, specific tasks, timetables, what’s happened here, what’s going on here. There was a section on the media. There was a brief political session at the end. It may have been very slightly over-structured, but 4 MINISTERS REFLECT nevertheless it was flipping impressive. He might project a sort of jovial, relaxed approach, but it meant that everybody knew that actually, his fingers were on every single set of reins. With a little twitch of the reins in that meeting, you knew that by the next week you needed to have a much better answer than you had that week as to why you were slipping on that milestone. DT: So he was actively chairing it. NB: Yes, and it was totally him. It wasn’t the Perm Sec. It was the Secretary of State driving through his agenda. DT: And the other Secretaries of State you worked with weren’t chairing so actively? NB: No. As I say, Michael’s was run as a walk through Michael’s mind. Sajid was assertive, but used it more as a catch up for the politicians with the Perm Sec, very few other senior officials. Nicky the same really. Nobody else used it as a management tool for a political agenda. DT: Were there separate meetings of ministers without officials? NB: Not really, except at the end. As I say, the officials would be chucked out for the last ten minutes, and the Spads, the PPSs and the ministers would remain. Very few meetings of just ministers in DCLG. Every now and then, he did a sort of bilateral – me and Eric – but not often. DT: You’d worked in local government, you’d run a think tank, you’d been a PPS; you were more prepared than many who come into government. What struck you once you became a minister about the civil service? Did it take time to learn about working with the civil service? NB: I’ve had a generally very positive experience in the three departments – because my second job was across two departments – in that I basically found a bunch of very bright people who were willing to engage and do the work and, in both cases, really wanted to deliver my ideas of reform. I’m aware that there are lots of people who would not say that that was their experience. I have often asked myself, and continue to ask myself, “Was I just lucky?” Because all you need is six or eight people to be pretty good, pretty switched on, pretty willing. Was I just lucky that in both jobs I had that? Or was there something about the way I was doing things that meant that I was able to get more out of civil servants than perhaps other ministers have with other civil servants? I suspect that the answer is probably a combination of the two, but what I don’t know is whether it’s 50-50.