How to use the database

There are four ways to explore the database:

1. Look up a minister – details of all ministerial roles held by an individual

If someone changed their name (either due to marital status, or entering the House of Lords), it will display their most recent name, but it is also possible to search by other names a minister has been known by (e.g. ‘David Cameron’ and ‘Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton’).

This search also generates a timeline to illustrate a ministers’ experience since they first entered parliament (or since 1979; whichever is later), including the rank they held in each post. Roles without significant departmental  responsibilities – such as the ceremonial titles of lord privy seal or lord president of the council – are excluded from ministers’ timelines but included in the data table that follows it. 

2. Look up a ministerial role – details of all ministers who have done a specific role between two dates.

The default time period is between 2 May 1997 (when Tony Blair became prime minister) and the present day. It generates a timeline to illustrate all those who have done the role in that time period, which you can view either by the political party or the gender of each office-holder.

There is an option to ‘include related roles’. These include roles with similar words in the role title – e.g. ‘minister for housing and planning’ is linked with ‘minister for housing’. Secretary  of state roles are not linked to more junior roles, and vice-versa.

3. View entire government – details of all ministers in government on a specific date.

The default date is the present day.

Ministers who left their role on the day in question are not included in search results.

4. View ministerial appointments and exits – details of all ministers who entered or left their roles between two dates. 

Ministers who exited one role may have been appointed to a new one – and the database   counts changes in job title as a new appointment, unless this relates to a departmental restructure (see below).  

The default start date is 29 August 2024, the day Keir Starmer made his final ministerial appointment when forming a government, and the default end date is the current day.

Advanced use 

For advanced users, the underlying data is published as a collection of CSVs and as a SQLite database on GitHub, under the licence described above. The underlying data includes parliamentary (MNIS) identifiers for all those who have them.

Details of the structure of the database and SQLite scripts to run a number of standard queries are also available in the GitHub repository. If you have any questions, contact us at ministers.database@instituteforgovernment.org.uk.

Definitions

Role

Broadly speaking, the database attempts to report accurately the role name in use at the time. One key area where a different approach is followed is over the use of courtesy titles for ministers of state and parliamentary under-secretaries of state. Role names in use have varied between ‘minister of state (minister for X)’/‘parliamentary under-secretary of state (minister for X)’ or ‘minister of state for X’/‘parliamentary under-secretary of state for X’. We have standardised around ‘minister for X’, with seniority signalled by the ‘rank’ column (see below).  

Cabinet status

The database records cabinet status using data from GOV.UK, the list of ministerial responsibilities produced by the Cabinet Office and cabinet minutes stored at the National Archives. Ministers’ tenure in a role is split into multiple time periods where their cabinet status changes. 

• Full cabinet – full members of the cabinet. This always includes the prime minister, the chancellor of the exchequer and all secretaries of state.
• Attends cabinet – junior ministers who are not members of cabinet but who are invited to attend all cabinet meetings. Since October 1998, standing invitations to cabinet have been recorded in the list of ministerial responsibilities; before this point, standing invitations are inferred from the minutes of cabinet meetings.
• Attends cabinet when ministerial responsibilities are on the agenda – junior ministers who are not members of cabinet but who may attend some cabinet meetings relevant to their brief. See, for example, Dawn Primarolo’s appointment as minister for children 2009–10. This category was only used between 2007 and 2014; outside of this period many other ministers were occasional attenders at cabinet but this went unrecorded.
• Non-cabinet – all other ministers.

Rank 

What is reported as ‘rank’ is more accurately ‘rank equivalence’ – an IfG-derived categorisation, which attempts to classify posts with posts of similar seniority: ‘secretary of state’ rank equivalence, for instance, includes more than just those with the legal title ‘secretary of state’; the financial secretary to the Treasury is included as ‘minister of state’ rank equivalence despite being a legally distinct office. 

The database uses the following rank equivalences. Where a minister holds an additional role alongside their main portfolio (like ‘minister for intergovernmental relations’ or ‘minister for women’), the database uses the rank equivalence of the primary role.

Departmental restructures

By default, roles that span departmental restructures (‘machinery of government changes’) are linked when you search the database. This means that if a minister continued in effectively the same role despite changes to the structure of government or the name of the minister’s department, the roles are not counted as two separate appointments. 

For instance, Jeremy Hunt’s time as secretary of state for health (2012–18) is combined with his appointment as secretary of state for health and social care (January to July 2018), despite the change in the department’s name.

Ministers on leave and acting ministers

The Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Act 2021 introduced formal paid maternity leave for ministers, allowing the prime minister to designate a ‘minister on leave’ for up to six months, and to appoint another paid minister to temporarily fill the role. The database records as ‘on leave’ all ministerial appointments where ministers have been formally designated as ‘minister on leave’.

Before 2021, ministers took leave – whether maternity leave or for other reasons – on an informal basis. Where it is known that a minister was on leave, the database marks the appointment as such, but our information about ministerial leave pre-2021 is incomplete.

Temporary ministerial appointments made to cover ministers on leave, e.g. Michael Ellis’s appointment as attorney general in 2021, are recorded in the database as ‘acting’ roles. It also marks as ‘acting’ other appointments made on a temporary basis – such as David Hunt’s tenure as secretary of state for Wales in 1995.

Specific dates

The database provides the option to use certain named dates when looking up a ministerial role, viewing the entire government, or viewing appointments and exits. These include all general elections since 1979, and the day each prime minister completed their first ministerial line-up upon taking office. There is an element of judgement in determining which appointment is the final one made by a new prime minister, particularly when the appointment process continue for a long period of time.