Ministers reflect Jim Knight May 2016 2 Jim Knight – biographical details Electoral History 2010-present: Labour Member of the House of Lords 2001-2010: Member of Parliament for South Dorset Parliamentary Career 2011-2014: Shadow Spokesperson (Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) 2010-2011: Shadow Spokesperson (Work and Pensions) 2009-2010: Minister of State for Employment and Welfare Reform 2009-2010: Minister of State for the South West 2006-2009: Minister of State for Schools and Learners 2005-2006: Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) 3 Jim Knight Jim Knight was interviewed by Nicola Hughes and Catherine Haddon on 28th April 2016 for the Institute for Government’s Ministers Reflect Project. Nicola Hughes (NH): So if we can start back when you very first started as a minister, do you remember much of what your experience of coming into government was like? Jim Knight (JK): Yeah, well I remember things. I haven’t wiped it completely clean! So I was appointed to Defra [Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] and as then subsequently was the way, when I was appointed to [the Department for] Education, the first thing I found out about was that I had a bill straight away. I had a Secretary of State in the form of Margaret Beckett who was quite hands off, was clear about what she wanted, and regular and effective and very inclusive ministerial meetings, but I think I only had one one-to-one with her in the whole year that I was working with her, which I took as an endorsement of trust and so on. But that first experience was getting a call from the Perm Sec [Permanent Secretary], closely followed by a call from my private secretary and a box arriving the next day with a certain amount of introduction to the department and anything urgent that they wanted me to see for the following week. And then just being swept into this whole… thing, where your diary is taken over and pretty much your life is taken over, where you’re just very rapidly trying to catch up with a bunch of stuff. I knew my brief then was landscape, biodiversity and rural affairs, that’s what the really memorable title was. And I had a reasonable relationship with pretty much all of that – national parks, forestry commission, canals, horses, wildlife, and all that. Rural development crucially, but sort of tacked on to it was having to answer in the [House of] Commons on agriculture, was having to sit in the UK seat on the Fisheries Council, and a whole bunch of things that were relatively technical, which I wasn’t that interested in and just had to do. So that’s where the hard work was. NH: So how did you get your head around both the policy brief and the technical bit of it, but also the role itself and being a minister? Was it just time and getting used to those things? JK: Yeah it was really. The special advisers [spads] were important. We had, I think, good special advisers that Margaret appointed. I have a view that’s about the most important decision the Secretary of State makes, is the spads. So they were good, guiding me and hand-holding and making sure I knew what was important. I had a good, well-staffed private office, and Mike in particular who was my PPS [Principal Private Secretary] was really, really helpful in running the office and sort of guiding me through and we got on well and developed a reasonable rapport relatively quickly. But working out how the Civil Service worked and how to manage the throughput of work, how to get the confidence in the chamber, particularly when mostly I was answering on things I wasn’t responsible for. That just took a fair amount of operating outside your comfort zone and getting used to it. There was a certain amount of comparing notes with my mates who had also just been made ministers. It was just after the general election, there was a first wave that came in. I had a very brief handover from Alun Michael who was my predecessor in that role, but as a minister of state dealing with hunting and all the high profile of that and my job more or less was to calm everyone down and for everything to be nice. So I just did ‘nice’ quite well! NH: You then went to Education from Defra. A couple of questions about reshuffles. Firstly what was that like going to a new department? Did you have to go through a new learning process there? And also was there a big difference between the under-secretary role and then the minister of state role that you went in to? JK: Yeah there was. I mean the reshuffle itself, on that occasion, it was really straightforward. Tony [Blair] rang me up, I had a job I was really enjoying but wasn’t political, so I knew that I could very happily stay there and be very happy, but I wasn’t going to get anywhere politically. Because in the end 4 Ministers reflect people didn’t care that much about what the Parliamentary Under-Secretary in Defra was doing, unless it was something stupid. So it was a big promotion, so I was bound to say yes. At the time it was also in the spotlight, we had the Education Inspections Bill in committee, when I was appointed, that I then became the bill minister for. It was off the back of a highly controversial education white paper where the government backbenchers were revolting at the idea of taking schools away from local authorities, in the form of trust schools on that occasion. It all seems fairly familiar. The department also had the small task of the tuition fees issues that were still rolling around and Alan [Johnson, then Education] was very good at dealing with, but principally I had to worry about this trust schools bill. And trying to keep rebellious Labour backbenchers like Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell at bay. The call came on a Friday night, Tuesday at 9.30 am I was up in committee being scrutinised on what was possibly the most controversial bill of that session. So it felt like a big leap. And where the workload was – just in terms of answering parliamentary questions, dealing with correspondence as well as a major piece of legislation – it was pretty intense. By then I’d done two bills at Defra, one was quite a big bill, one was a very, very nerdy, techy bill reforming the law relating to common land. So that meant that I was relatively familiar and comfortable in the committee but I’d not read the white paper. I knew a bit about the issue because it was controversial and what Jacqui Smith [who had been Schools Minister] had been doing. I had a call with Jacqui, she was then the Chief Whip, she didn’t have much time to do any handover, and I just had to spend two days reading and prepping. But I knew a little bit more about how to deal with civil servants and get the most out of them to get better prepped, but that’s the familiarity with having done two bills by then. And everyone in that circumstance knows that you are kind of flying by the seat of your pants and people are fairly generous, and Nick Gibb, my opposite number is fairly generous about all that. And we sort of got away with it and just built confidence. Yeah, schools at another level feel familiar to everyone, even though it’s quite technical in some aspects and people aren’t as familiar as they think they are but a constituency MP who normally, and I certainly did, would visit a fair number of schools in the course of what they do. So in that respect, maybe it’s a softer landing than if you’d landed in the middle of a highly controversial pensions bill or something like that. Catherine Haddon (CH): And how did you find the support from the civil service in the two departments then? You said you were more familiar with one. JK: Well people who were around at Defra at the time might not thank me for saying so, but it still felt a slightly dysfunctional department. It had merged MAFF [former Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food] and DETR [former Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions] within recent history there and so you had two very different departments culturally, different rates of pay. One was very old, one was very new, one had attracted new bright young talent, one had established talent, let’s put it that way, and it was pretty apparent when you dealt with officials in Defra whether they were ex- MAFF or ex-DETR. It was a very scientific, very technical department, whereas Education was much more a single culture, there is a lot of very motivated civil servants there who really just wanted it all to work, wanted everything to be really successful and wanted to work really hard. There were very, very few ‘special’ officials as I used to describe them to my private office when I was being indiscreet, and generally if there were officials that I knew that [I] wasn’t going to work that well with, I would quietly let it be known that there might be a problem. NH: Did that work? JK: Normally.