Working to make government more effective

Interview

Margaret Hodge

Margaret Hodge discusses being the first ever children’s minister, her struggles with civil servants and the lessons she learnt chairing the PAC.

Margaret Hodge
Margaret Hodge was minister for culture and tourism between 2007 and 2010.

Margaret Hodge (now Baroness Hodge of Barking) was the Labour MP for Barking between 1994 and 2024. She served as a junior education minister (1998–2005) including as the inaugural minister for children (2003–05), as well as minister for work (2005–06), minister for industry and the regions (2006–07) and minister for culture and tourism (2007–10). After leaving government, Hodge was elected chair of the Public Accounts Committee (2010–15).

Tim Durrant (TD): You first joined government in July 1998 as the minister for employment and equal opportunities. Tell us about being appointed. Did you have a conversation with the prime minister?

Margaret Hodge (MH): I did have a conversation with the prime minister, which is different from how Keir Starmer does it. I think I was called into Downing Street on that first occasion that I was appointed. And one of the things Tony Blair did very well is he came round and did meetings with the teams, and I thought that was really good. So not only did Tony always ring you to appoint you or sack you, but he would also come round once a year and just meet the whole team.

TD: The whole departmental team?

MH: The whole departmental team. It was really, really good.

And I know Tony really well, and we disagreed about things, so they were quite feisty discussions. ‘Structure, not standards’, I remember because I was in the Department for Education. He was playing around with structures and I said, ‘you said you’d do standards, you wouldn’t do structures.’ We disagreed but the process was very good.

But he did appoint me, I remember, and then you go immediately on to the department. And of course, one of the things I hadn’t worked out – which I know now – was that the private office was very upset because they’d lost their previous minister, who they liked and it took me a bit of time to get my head round that. So I come in and think, ‘oh, I’ve become a minister, this is absolutely great’ and I hadn’t really appreciated their feelings, so you’ve got to think about the sensitivities of the people who are there.

And my other really early memory which I joke about – and you’re going back to 1998 so you’re pushing me a bit – is that one of the first decisions I had to take was to appoint the head of the Equal Opportunities Commission [the predecessor to the Equality and Human Rights Commission]. And I thought, ‘this is great’ and I interviewed people and I came to a decision. I thought I had decided. And I just didn’t realise that nothing, nothing you decided as a junior (I was a PUSS [parliamentary under-secretary of state]) ... I didn’t have the power to decide, which was completely frustrating. And also the role of the officials: they didn’t like who I’d chosen. It was a choice of two people. There was one who had lots and lots of experience and one who was a bit risky, but much younger and I of course went for the risky, much younger of the two. And they didn’t like that.

"And I just didn’t realise that nothing, nothing you decided as a junior (I was a PUSS) ... I didn’t have the power to decide, which was completely frustrating."

TD: And were you able to get that through?

MH: Well, only because I’m bolshie. But I assumed I could take the decision. I didn’t realise it had to be ratified up the food chain, both ministerially and with officials.

TD: This was in the Department for Education and Employment: one of the big things you dealt with was Sure Start [a cross-government initiative to improve outcomes for children]. What was it like working across government on such a big priority?

MH: I’ll take the question in principle rather than just chronologically. I didn’t start doing Sure Start and I got the Sure Start brief later when I became children’s minister [in 2003]. In the early years I did nursery education. We were developing full entitlement to nursery education: every child got it and we developed the curriculum. We did some really, really good work to embed that.

When it came to Sure Start, it is interesting: people came to it with very different perspectives. It came out of the work of an official, Norman Glass, at the Treasury and he did the work before we arrived. So every individual takes credit for it but he actually did the ‘invest early and that is the best way of equalising life chances’ and all the Head Start [a programme to support low-income families] research from the [United] States and all that sort of stuff.

I had done work as a local authority leader in Islington when the ILEA [Inner London Education Authority, which oversaw education in the 12 inner boroughs] was abolished, and we took over their nursery schools and we merged education and social care, which was very radical at the time – you know, building the service around the needs of the child. And so David Blunkett [shadow secretary of state for education and employment 1994–97], when we were in opposition, asked me to chair an early years task force, which I did. That was really good: in terms of mechanisms – and I tried to get the buggers to do it this time and they didn’t – I just got every stakeholder involved in a task force we ran on early years, so that they all felt that they’d have input into the policy development.

So when I went into government, I had all that background: of doing something in Islington and helping David write the early years policy statement, although I wasn’t appointed in the first year because – a bit like now – they didn’t have enough jobs; you know, more people than jobs so I had to wait a year before I got appointed.

But people came with different perspectives. Norman had really established the principle. Tessa Jowell [public health minister, 1997–99] and David Blunkett [secretary of state for education and employment, 1997–2001], to take two, thought that it was all about bonding: that Sure Start was about getting the parent and child bonding and that had to be the focus. Yvette [Cooper, public health minister, 1999–2002] was much more about getting women into work. Harriet [Harman, secretary of state for social security and minster for women, 1997–98] was much more about childcare. Gordon [Brown, chancellor of the exchequer, 1997–2007] was very much about the economics of getting women into work. So you had all these different perspectives that you had to bring together and it was quite a little battle. And I always thought from my experience in Islington, and actually from my experience as children’s minister, that if you really wanted high quality early years interventions, you had to employ people with much higher qualifications. The most highly qualified professionals in the early years field were the teachers. So I always wanted it to be education-led, but simply because they held the highest qualification.

"So you had all these different perspectives that you had to bring together and it was quite a little battle."

But it was an interesting battle, which I did win, but it was a battle. I still think – in fact, I’m doing a speech in a couple of weeks about it – and I think back, ‘what did we get wrong? What did we get wrong? Why was it destroyed? Why was it undermined?’

And there’s one thing I think we did get wrong – well, a question mark – which is that we went for a universal model. If we’d targeted, it may have been more difficult to destroy, but the argument we had at the time – because we had the debate, universal versus targeted – was that we really wanted middle class buy-in. And actually, a lot of poor kids also live in juxtaposition to these families – if you think of London – so it was very difficult to do area targeting that really picked up some of the poorest children. But I think if we’d been more targeted on deprived areas, maybe we would have created something that people wouldn’t have cut.

And the other reason it got destroyed was that halfway through Tony decided to devolve school budgets to schools. Local authorities went ballistic. They were losing a whole load of their budgets. So the compensation was that they got the Sure Start budgets, which we had run centrally. And I fought it a bit and I lost. That meant that the local authorities were less stroppy about losing their education budgets but Sure Start never had a statutory backing, so when the cuts came in 2010, it was the easiest thing to destroy. I really remember going round the country saying, ‘this is the new frontier of the welfare state’ – that’s sort of what it was – and never in my worst nightmares thinking that they would totally destroy it.

And then another policy issue which is really important and which I learned: because you’re building services around the needs of the citizens – in this case, the child – getting those professionals to work together with each other is hugely, hugely challenging. Getting them out of their silos. And I think it’s the sort of reform we should still be thinking about today. For example, the word ‘urgent’ means something different if you’re in health from if you’re in education or if you’re in social care and even getting a common understanding was difficult. And I didn’t understand the complexity of that – it’s a challenge. It’s something the IfG should spend time thinking about.

And then the final thing I would say about it is that health was a nightmare. Because if you think about it, the first person any parent or child sees is the midwife and then the health visitor. They’re the ones who could at the very, very earliest identify a child that needs extra support and all that sort of stuff. And they were the worst to try and get to work collaboratively or outside those silos and that was a tragedy. That was a tragedy.

TD: And was that the health service or the health department here in Whitehall? Or both?

MH: Both. Everywhere. The whole of Health is a big sort of Stalinist empire, really, that nobody can break through.

So that’s a heck of a lot on that. I think there should be some insights for policy making out of it.

"The whole of Health is a big sort of Stalinist empire, really, that nobody can break through."

TD: You mentioned that you were minister for children. You were the first person to have that title. What was it like establishing a new ministerial role? How did you go about setting out the priorities and working out what you are going to do?

MH: Nightmare. There was a stage when I nearly cracked up. They actually brought somebody in to help me and she looked at my board and I had 17 meetings on it in one day. It was a complete nightmare.

Learning how to prioritise was important because it was all new. I was trying to do the early years stuff; I was trying to do all the child protection stuff; I was trying to do the offer for teenagers. I mean, we were everywhere. It takes you a long time to learn to be a good minister and I didn’t prioritise very well. So that was a nightmare. I worked 24/7 and I was really working hard, as productively as I could have done.

But it was incredibly exciting. We wrote Every Child Matters [a 2003 green paper that preceded the Children’s Act 2004], which I still think is a brilliant document. I still think Sure Start is, you know– the other thing with Sure Start is that it was community-based. It got the dads involved. It got the mums into work. It got the training going. It had everything in it. It was a really, really brilliant idea from Norman.

So it was a nightmare. It was a nightmare. And what would have helped me? I mean, I’m a bit of a workaholic and I’m a bit of a control freak, so I’m not very good at delegating. So it’s probably partly my fault and my character. I mean, it’s just very difficult. It’s a new job, isn’t it? It was a completely new portfolio. But I had somebody who was sort of a work coach, who just saw me through for a couple months and then I ran my diary better and then it all became a little bit more manageable.

But we had to do adoption. We were doing really difficult stuff. Cafcass [the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service] was a complete mess. We had to literally sack the whole board and sack the whole executive and bring that all together. It had brought together all sorts of things and done it really badly. So it was a big, big challenge.

TD: And one of the challenges for any minister is media attention. There was a lot of media interest in you.

MH: You mean bad media interest [laughs].

TD: Bad media interest, partly because of some of the stuff that happened in Islington previously [where abuse had allegedly occurred in council-run children’s homes during Hodge’s time as leader]. How do you manage negative media coverage as a minister?

MH: Well, better than this lot do, but I’ve had so much of it [laughs].

I always say to people, you have to compartmentalise your life and you have to realise it’s not you. You know, I then became the darling of the [Daily] Mail when I was on the Public Accounts Committee [PAC]. It was the same old me. So you’ve just got to be able to do that and you’ve got to have a hinterland, which I’ve always had. I’ve got family that I care about, but I do lots of other things: I play the piano, which is big for me.

"I always say to people, you have to compartmentalise your life and you have to realise it’s not you."

But there is a very funny story that I do tell you because it is amusing. So, I had a very, very difficult period over the children’s homes in Islington. It was shit because the media pack just decided that they were going to get me. And from my point of view, I had been leader in Islington when the abuse in children’s homes was uncovered, but I had absolutely nothing to do with the children’s homes and I did all the right things when the stuff came out, so I never thought I’d done anything wrong. But nevertheless, the media, led by the Evening Standard, were out to get me.

And I went into No.10 in the middle of this shit and David Hill [Downing Street director of communications, 2003–07], who was working there and had taken over from Alastair Campbell, said “The pack are after you, Margaret.” So I then said “OK, this is not worth it. I’m giving up.” So I went home to write my letter of resignation and then Sally Morgan [Downing Street director of government relations, 2001–05] rang me up and said “Tony doesn’t want you to go. You’ve done nothing wrong”, which was true. So I said, “I’ll give it another 24 hours and see how it goes."

And I sat there for 24 hours, and then my daughter – my kids were at home and I didn’t leave the house because the ‘pack’ were outside – but we ran out of milk, so she went out to get a bottle of milk and came back and said “there’s only two of them outside, Mum. Shall we offer them a cup of tea?”. So I said “go on, go and offer them a cup of tea.” She went out and another 20 jumped out of two white vans [laughs].

But it sort of just went. It went. It’s weird. Why does it [go]? You know, there’s just a limit. And so, you know, I just survived it. But there was a point where I was going to pack it in.

Finn Baker (FB): You left the education department in 2005. By that time you had served under four secretaries of state and 19 junior ministers had come and gone in your time there.

MH: Ridiculous.

FB: Did that level of churn impact on the department?

MH: I think that one of the things that Tony got really, really wrong was changing us every year and that is one of my memories: you sat there and you knew it was a reshuffle day and you would be absolutely on tenterhooks. And he never left us alone.

"I think that one of the things that Tony got really, really wrong was changing us every year ... he never left us alone."

I mean, the reason I got kicked out of the children’s department in the end – which I think was such an error – was Ruth Kelly [secretary of state for education and skills, 2004–06]: she and I didn’t really hit it off and because she’s secretary of state, she gets the choice. So I would have stayed in that job but for her. And that’s really, in terms of delivery – I think it’s probably a bit arrogant to say so, but I think if I’d been there for longer we might have put it on a more sustainable basis.

FB: And when you are moving around so much, how do you get up to speed with each new brief that you get?

MH: It takes time. It takes time. I always said the last job I got was the only time I had really learnt how to be a minister – so that’s 11 years in. Terrible [laughs].

At the beginning, I did have a system. I talked to all my stakeholders. It takes you two to three months just to get your head round the stakeholders. Don’t take a decision early – think about it. Don’t come in with any preconceptions – think about it. And when I wrote green papers or white papers I’d always do it by massive consultation with stakeholders and then use their ideas and put together something that felt good, with maybe one or two of our own.

"Don’t take a decision early – think about it. Don’t come in with any preconceptions – think about it."

But it was only when I became culture minister – I had a year off, my husband was ill and I took a year; I was the first minister to get compassionate leave and actually then promised the job back. So after my husband died in June, Gordon had me back in September and said “you’ve got to come back now”, which was really decent. But anyway, in that last year I came back – and I knew we only had a year left – I just had six priorities and I thought I’m not going to do anything else but these six things. And obviously there are things you’ve got to respond to and events and all that stuff, but I had these six things that I was determined to do in the year. And I did.

FB: And having spent so long in the education department, your next three jobs were in three separate departments.

MH: Ridiculous! [laughs]

FB: Was there much continuity between the portfolios?

MH: No, completely ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. And actually, in all honesty, I went into DTI [the Department of Trade and Industry] and that was the most frustrating department ever. I had the big company law review and legislation – which Tony didn’t even tell me I was going to get – and I knew absolutely FA about company law.

But I did that and I took through this bill that had already been worked on for years and years. But the civil servants there (I hope I’m not offending): I just came in – I’m quite full of the joys of the spring so I’d come in in the morning at eight o’clock all boom, boom, boom – and they were the most appalling civil servants. I just couldn’t stand it. They were pen pushers: ‘as long as it’s off my desk’. They’d never do a report in time. They’d never come back in time.

"[T]hey were the most appalling civil servants. I just couldn’t stand it. They were pen pushers"

So when Gordon took over a year later, he offered me to stay there – that’s the one continuity – and I said “no, I can’t. I’m not getting any satisfaction out of it” and I thought that would be the end of my ministerial career, and then actually he gave me the culture job, which was absolutely lovely.

TD: Just before you go on to the culture job: what can you do as a minister in that situation, when you’re not getting the service you need from officials?

MH: Well, by persistence. By just going back and saying “you promised me this. You promised me this. You promised me this.” I mean, my best secretary of state was James Purnell [secretary of state for culture, media and sport, 2007–08]. He was the best team player. He was really, really – I really enjoyed working with him. So you’ve got to have the secretary of state and, dare I say it, Alistair [Darling, secretary of state for trade and industry, 2006–07] was not – maybe the officials were like that because of him actually, I hadn’t really thought about that. His preferred option was not to take a decision. The best decision [he felt] was not to take a decision and I’m just made in a different way.

I have two stories about Culture which are really interesting. One is that when I arrived there, you do all these appointments – the British Museum and all the art galleries and all that sort of stuff – and we were appointing only 25% women and I thought ‘this is ridiculous’. So we put together a list of about 500 women who could possibly have served on some of these boards. Not political – the list had Tories, not like they do it now – it was a very, very mixed thing. And I just said to them “I want you to appoint women” and I remember, I think it was the National Gallery – they were furious about it because “this is positive action, blah blah blah blah”. And the chairman rang me up and strongly objected to any positive action and so I said “well, I just won’t agree the appointment”. And magically in a year we got to 46%. I then went off on my compassionate leave, came back and it was under 26% again, which is another interesting thing: how do you embed change, or is everything transitory?

The other interesting thing is that I was in charge of the listing of buildings – grade one and so on. And I thought this was slightly ridiculous because it’s always public buildings and a lot of the time these buildings – it’s particularly the brutalist stuff from the 1960s – are really ugly and they’re completely unfit for their purpose. They’re not fit for purpose. So there was an FE [further education] college I went to which was hideous and a housing estate in Tower Hamlets and you wouldn’t want to live there in a million years and there was this Preston bus garage. And they wanted to list these things.

And I said we ought to put a criteria into the framework, which said ‘is it fit for purpose?’ – you know, something about its relevance to today’s needs. And I lost that one – none of them [the civil servants], none of them wanted it. Everybody was against me. And they kept saying “we’ll bring you a report” so every week I was “where’s the report? Where’s the report? Where’s the report?”. And I did get it through but I got it through too late for it to bed in and so they’ve gone back and all the stuff I refused to list has now been listed, including this hideous bus garage at Preston, which I remember, as a woman, if you walked through – there was this massive tunnel – you’d be petrified. Absolutely ridiculous.

Anyway, that’s an interesting reflection on ministerial power. You’ve got to be very persistent and I think you’ve got to prioritise. That’s what I learnt. If only I had had those six, seven priorities in everything.

"You’ve got to be very persistent and I think you’ve got to prioritise. That’s what I learnt."

FB: And you mentioned the challenges of working with civil servants. Do you feel that they supported you when you went on compassionate leave? The IfG recently produced a paper on ministers’ maternity leave and the importance of private office in helping ministers take leave.

MH: No, they just cut me off. It was really abrupt. I was still doing constituency work because I was fighting the BNP at the time [the British National Party, which became the official opposition on Barking and Dagenham council in 2006] but no, I had nothing.

FB: And do you feel that that was because you were the first minister to take compassionate leave? Or was it just the way the office was set up?

MH: Has anybody else ever taken compassionate leave?

TD: Not that we are aware of. There’s the maternity leave arrangements which the last government brought in [in the Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Act 2021] but ministers in the New Labour government had taken maternity leave informally as well.

FB: James Brokenshire took leave during his own illness.

MH: He did, yes.

My sense is – and it’s only a sense – that it wasn’t handled well. Andy Burnham [then Hodge’s secretary of state at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport] rang me and said, “what the hell are you taking leave for? You’re bonkers.” And I thought he was bonkers to tell me I was bonkers. And then they gave the job to Barbara Follett [then minister for women] and I think they told her that when my husband died, I’d come back. But she never forgave me for taking the job back. So it wasn’t handled well. There was something – I mean, I never got into what happened, but Gordon, I thought, was really, really, really kind.

"Andy Burnham rang me and said, “what the hell are you taking leave for? You’re bonkers.” And I thought he was bonkers to tell me I was bonkers."

FB: Moving onto other roles, you mentioned being leader of Islington council. Did that prepare you for ministerial life? It’s quite different, leading a council and then being a parliamentary under-secretary of state. How did they compare?

MH: Big fish in a little pond. Control of my life.

I think – I know we were seen as being loony left – but we did some really exciting public policy reform stuff [at Islington council]. We did this bringing together – things that people talk about today that were described at the time as being left-wing – so bringing together education and care for early years was absolutely radical at the time. Nobody had done that. And we also did what we called ‘decentralisation’, so we set up neighbourhood offices and we put housing and social services and cleansing and all those together and the idea was that it would be a one-stop shop. And we were lambasted for that.

But we were able to do all that, and I’m afraid we were able to get around central government cuts in expenditure as well. I always say we invented PFI [private finance initiatives, which involved private firms being contracted to manage public projects] because when Thatcher absolutely cut local authority spending, Mo Mowlam’s [later secretary of state for Northern Ireland] husband – they lived in Islington – he worked in the City and he introduced me to these guys, and again this was considered potty but I still think it was the right thing to do, we sold our town hall and our municipal buildings and that raised capital, which we then invested to keep the housing capital programme going. And I think if you look at Islington today and compare it to Camden, our stock looks much, much better and I think it was that investment. 

I mean, I loved my time but I’d done it for 20 years and that was long enough. It’s very interesting though: what was the best time? I’m writing a memoir at the moment – a funny memoir – which I’m calling Battle Axe, so it’s all the battles I’ve been involved in, and the interesting thing is, I’m having to invent a chapter on ministerial life because as a minister, I wasn’t really involved in big battles. You had this disagreement about Sure Start or you had an argument with the officials over should you or shouldn’t you have a new criteria for assessing the listing of buildings. So you had those little things going on, but they were not big. So all the big battles have been with others – when I was fighting the BNP in the borough, when I was fighting here [in parliament, as the chair of the Public Accounts Committee] doing the dirty money and tax avoidance and evasion. So maybe I’m more of a campaigner, but I’ve enjoyed both and people think I’m an okay administrator. But it’s weird, the years as a minister were, on the whole, I think good years.

"I loved my time but I’d done it for 20 years and that was long enough."

I’ll tell you another very interesting policy development. We were trying to get – this was the women working together – we were trying to get the right to request flexible working which was very radical. There was Harriet [Harman]; there was me, Margaret Jay [leader of the House of Lords and minister for women, 1998–2001] and Tessa Jowell was probably around in those days – those sort of women. And both Tony and Gordon thought it was an absolute crap idea and that business would go potty and all that sort of stuff. And it was a mixture of us working together with – there’s a wonderful woman working in No.10 called Carey Oppenheim [a special adviser in the No.10 policy unit, 2000–05] and Sally Morgan – and it was then the women from No.10 putting pressure and us from parliament and we got that through, and of course, in an odd way, it’s probably the most important transformation of women’s ability to balance their working lives with their home life that we’ve ever done.

FB: And in that year before you came into government, you were briefly chair of the education select committee.

MH: Yeah, as compensation because he [Tony Blair] didn’t make me a minister and I was upset [laughs]. In those days, he could choose.

FB: And did that influence what you went on to do in the department?

MH: I think my experience in local government has always made me an implementer and someone who understands the detail, not just a policy wonk, but how policies can be translated into effect. I mean, we did good stuff on that select committee, actually and I think we helped David Blunkett because we exposed the amount of money – public expenditure, GDP – we were spending on education was very low according to international standards, so we forced that up.

Did it influence me? Did it influence me? I mean, it strengthened my understanding of the education world. I tell you one thing that it did do: we did a study on early years and we went to Switzerland with the select committee and there’s a really interesting thing they do there, which is that the only compulsory element of the early years agenda – because they also had the foundation stage – is music, because music helps kids work as a team, and it helps them develop patterns and skills for maths. And then I worked with David Miliband when he was schools minister and I was children’s minister and we did that really good programme where we got music into the curriculum, if you remember – that’s all gone as well. So that was an influence that I got from going to Switzerland as chair of the select committee.

FB: And looking at the other end of your time in ministerial office, you went on to be the first directly elected chair of the Public Accounts Committee. Did being a minister influence what you were doing on that committee or how you did it?

MH: I mean, I have an understanding of the public sector. I can’t think there’s anything I haven’t done in the public sector. I’ve done everything: I’ve been on non-departmental bodies, I’ve chaired school boards, I’ve been on hospital trusts, I’ve been on prison boards. So I’ve done the bleeding lot so I’ve got a real understanding – and I’m now doing something which I’ve never done before, which is chairing a university, the only thing I’ve never done before. So I’ve done everything. My life has developed an understanding of the public sector.

"I can’t think there’s anything I haven’t done in the public sector. [...] My life has developed an understanding of the public sector."

But what I think really, really influenced how I did the Public Accounts Committee was fighting the BNP, because it made me understand much more how important it is for politicians to connect with their voters. It’s very relevant to today. We weren’t listening to them. We didn’t understand their problems. So I always thought about the voice of the burghers of Barking when I framed my questions. 

And a lot of stuff on PAC, I’d got to the age there where I could sit there and they would talk technical jargon to you and I’d say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about” rather than hide behind the technical jargon. So I think that’s why the Mail thought I was a darling, having absolutely hated me when I was in Islington.

FB: And is there anything that you learnt from your time on the Public Accounts Committee that you wish you’d known when you were a minister? Anything that you would do differently if you had your time in ministerial office again? 

MH: I think if you want to enhance the quality of public services, you’ve got to experiment and you’ve got to accept that you get things wrong. That’s what I would have learned: greater honesty about the things... The very early reports at the PAC was stuff that I got wrong as a minister. So I think it’s creating a culture and environment where innovation doesn’t have to succeed.

"I think it’s creating a culture and environment where innovation doesn’t have to succeed."

But apart from that, would I have been different with my officials? Isn’t that interesting? What would I have done differently as a minister? I hadn’t thought about that one. I mean, I think it’s this issue about focusing. 

One of the very interesting things is I think the Labour government was good at evidence-based policy: we did the evidence base on Sure Start, we did the evidence base on what became levelling up – all those regeneration [projects]. We did a big evidence base on what worked in terms of regeneration and interestingly there was a right-wing think tank report on that which showed that one of the things we’d done as the Labour government was one of the things that really did begin to improve deprived areas – I can’t remember which programme it was now. So I think the evidence base would be more important. What would I do differently?

Oh there are things – I think the way that even as children’s minister, by the end of the two years, my institutional memory was better than any of the people I worked with. And that was shocking. And that comes up when you’re doing PAC stuff. That comes up time and time again. We’ve got to rejig how we do that. And I think the other thing – I mean there are things I would change, there’s loads now I think about it – the accountability structure. When we had officials sit in front of us at the Public Accounts Committee, it’s this structure – which we’re all thinking about but can’t replace – of civil servants who are accountable to ministers who are accountable to parliament. That is a broken system but the difficulty is trying to replace it. I would have much stronger accountability [of civil servants].

If you have that different accountability, stronger accountability, I’d have much more openness about advice – you know, all the stuff about things being political and therefore private. You do take political decisions, even how you – and I hope to God they’re doing it now – how you slice up cakes of money. It’s not always new money but you slice it up. To me, it would be to deprived areas. It resonates with my values but the values then tend to go with the politics as well. So I think greater transparency about all that. And I always think local government is a good example there because in local government you do have the chief executive and the officers who report directly to councils. They don’t have to report through their political class, and that doesn’t take the politics out of how councils operate but it does make for more open consideration and debate. And if we did that a bit more, then we might not get things wrong as often as we do.

FB: We’ve got two questions to wrap up – what was your proudest achievement in government and what advice would you give to new ministers?

MH: Proudest must be Sure Start, except although I’m so proud of Sure Start I’m miserable that it hasn’t been maintained since. It was a great thing to start but we got it wrong because they were able to destroy it. And my advice is: prioritise.

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