What can think tanks learn from the IfG’s Ministers Database?
September 5, 2024
The Institute for Government is launching its Ministers Database, which holds information about all government ministers since 1979 – who served as a minister, in which roles, and for how long. We hope that making this publicly available will allow a range of researchers to benefit from this unrivalled source of information in their work.
What does the database include?
Our colleagues first started developing a database of ministerial appointments in the early 2010s to carry out quantitative analysis of government reshuffles. Since then, we have drawn on a variety of sources – including GOV.UK, the parliament website, Butler’s British Political Facts, and newspaper reports – to expand the database to include information about every ministerial appointment since Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979.
Users of the database will be able to easily find out who held each ministerial role, what their job title was and which department they served in, the rank they held in government and the dates they were appointed to and then left the role. This information can be downloaded in a spreadsheet format so that visitors to the database can easily carry out analysis of ministerial careers.
The database also includes a function to automatically generate timeline charts, which provides a visual representation of those who have held a particular ministerial position over a given date range, or an overview of individual ministers’ experience.
What does it tell us about how the UK government has been run over recent years?
The main story from the database is the fact that ministers generally don’t last that long in their jobs. Political scandals have led to some particularly short appointments in recent years, like Michelle Donelan’s two days as education secretary in 2022 or Grant Shapps’s six-day stint as home secretary later in the same year. But across all appointments in the database, the average time secretaries of state spend in their role is a little over two years. The Institute for Government has previously highlighted that this turnover undermines good government, as it prevents ministers from getting properly on top of their brief, causes unnecessary changes in direction and makes it harder to hold ministers accountable.
The database also highlights the instability in government over the last few years. Secretaries of state who started their job after the EU referendum spent an average of one year and three months in post; pre-2016 the average tenure was two years and four months.
Beyond this overview of political churn, the database can also be used to understand the rate of turnover among ministers in specific policy areas – and how that may have undermined the government’s approach towards issues like tax, housing or prison reform.
How can UK think tanks and research organisations use it?
Think tanks and research organisations can make use of the database in a number of ways, to understand:
- Which ministers have done a particular job in government.
- Who was a minister at a particular point in time. For example, database users can easily see who was a minister in the Department of Health and Social Care the day the first Covid-19 lockdown was announced, or can view ministerial appointments and exits between two dates – such the flurry of job changes during the collapse of Boris Johnson’s government in July 2022.
- How government has changed over time. The database allows users to compare how much previous ministerial experience members of the cabinet have had at different points in time; how the number of ministers in each department has varied; and the fluctuations in the gender balance of the cabinet.
These are only a handful of ways in which you could use the database – there are many potential opportunities from linking it with other tools, such as the parliament API or Wikidata. Do get in touch with us at [email protected] if you decide to use the database in your work, if you’d like to know more, or if you have any comments.
