As the Labour Party faced down a significant rebellion of its backbench MPs on welfare reforms recently, attention turned to parliamentary arithmetic as people tried to work out exactly what kind of majority Keir Starmer had in Parliament. Under the UK’s constitution, the government needs to have the support of a simple majority of MPs in the House of Commons. Without it, it cannot pass legislation. Losing votes on legislation can be damaging to a government and occasionally fatal (this is especially the case for budget legislation and legislation enacting key policies).
As journalists and others gauged the scale of the rebellion that Labour faced, attention turned to the so-called “payroll vote”, the group of MPs who hold offices that require them to support the government. When there is opposition within a party to certain measures, e.g. the welfare bill, the more votes the government can guarantee through the payroll vote, the safer the government is. The size of Labour’s payroll vote took many people by surprise. According to the Institute for Government as of March 2025, the payroll vote is 176 MPs, comprised of 90 ministers (including whips) in the Commons, 43 parliamentary private secretaries, 27 ‘mission champions’ and 20 Labour trade envoys.
As far back as 2010, the Public Administration Select Committee sounded the alarm about the payroll vote, arguing that “the ministerial side of government has now grown too large”. Two pieces of legislation are meant to place limits on it. Under the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975, there is a limit of 95 on the number of Members of the House of Commons who can be ministers at any one time. While under the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975, a limit on the number of ministerial salaries that can be paid at any one time (109) was introduced. However, there are loopholes in the system which have allowed recent governments to increase the size of the “payroll vote” without increasing the number of ministers or ministerial salaries. The Ministerial and other Salaries Act can be circumvented with non-salaried positions such as mission champions, trade envoys and Parliamentary Private Secretaries (PPSs) who are more loosely affiliated with the government, but nonetheless expected to vote in line with them.
Parliamentary private secretaries account for the lion’s share of these informal appointments. Under the Ministerial Code, Cabinet ministers and ministers of state may appoint PPSs’, provided the Prime Minister approves them. These are not considered members of the government, but they are expected to support government votes and no PPS who votes against the government can retain their position. While these appear to bend the rules on cabinet size, there are few downsides to such unpaid appointments for the government. They secure informal allegiance to the government, act as eyes and ears for the government within their parliamentary party and serve as a helpful buffer in case of backbench rebellions.
When the Public Administration Committee expressed concerns about the size of the payroll vote it was 119 people. Since then, it has only increased to what is certainly an all-time record. The Committee noted that in 1900 there were only 60 ministers. More recent data, compiled by the House of Commons Library going back to the 1970s, shows the payroll vote creeping to its current high of 176. The Public Administration Select Committee recommended capping the payroll vote at a maximum of 15% of all MPs, the current total is almost double that at 27% of all MPs and accounts for almost half (44%) of all Labour MPs in the House of Commons.
One of the main roles of the legislature is to scrutinise the actions of the government and to hold them to account for their actions. Under the UK’s constitution, this role is already hampered by the fusion between the executive and the legislature. As the Cabinet is drawn from the legislature and must automatically have a majority in the House of Commons, the executive already exercises a high degree of control over the legislature. As such, where the main party has control over the legislature, it may be less inclined toward “self-criticism” by scrutinising the actions of the executive too closely. The rigid control exercised by the governing party over proceedings in the House of Commons was recently identified by David Anderson as a central problem within the UK’s constitution. He rightly links that control to the “immense patronage that is available to Prime Ministers in order to keep their troops in line” and a primary vector for this patronage is the payroll vote. A large payroll vote doubles down on the executive dominance over the legislature. It stands to reason that the chances of the Cabinet being held to account by the legislature diminish where almost half of the party’s MPs are “on the payroll”. While the legislation from 1975 sought to place some limits on the payroll vote, there is nothing to stop a government from putting every member of the party on the payroll vote through informal unpaid appointments, even if that is unlikely or improbable.
Another question worth considering is why this Labour Party’s payroll vote is so unusually high? One can understand why Theresa May and even Boris Johnson wanted a large payroll vote. May, for example, had a tiny majority toward the end of her tenure and the turmoil in the party over votes on issues related to Brexit saw many rebellions and huge disruption to the party voting system. In these circumstances, the impetus to “lock in” as many votes as possible is understandable. Yet the political circumstances of this Labour party are completely different. It has a substantial majority and doesn’t face the same turmoil over Brexit. That same need for security is absent, but there might be other factors at play.
Firstly, the Labour party has been out of government for a very long time and the desire to dispense sinecures as a reward to faithful party members for long service may partly explain the outsized payroll vote.
The second possible explanation is that Keir Starmer is a victim of his own success. The Conservative party has been obliterated and while they remain the titular opposition in the House of Commons, in reality, they are facing an existential crisis. If Keir Starmer is looking for his opposition in the House of Commons, he shouldn’t look in front of him, but behind him, as the rebellion over welfare shows. Starmer’s sizeable majority has emboldened his party to vote against the government without risking a governmental collapse. How can a government counteract this? By drawing as much of his party (44% of their MPs) into the orbit of the Cabinet as he can by padding out the payroll vote. This is not the first time that the Labour Party has done this while in office. The previous record high for the payroll vote (146) was in 2001. Tony Blair had won a landslide majority in June 2001, securing 412 seats and a majority of 166. The opposition was similarly weak with William Hague’s Conservative party only securing 166 seats, while the Liberal Democrats had 52. Today, Labour have 403 seats and a working majority of 165. As counterintuitive and paradoxical as it may seem, the record size of the payroll vote may actually reflect the insecurity of Starmer’s position, particularly as a right leaning leader of a left leaning party.
The Labour Party came into government with a mandate for renewal. They aimed to create a government of service, committed to ethics and integrity. If the government is serious about this aim, packing the payroll vote to a record high is not consistent with it. As the government reviews ethics and integrity across government (assuming it still is) it would do well to take on board the suggestion to limit the payroll vote to a maximum percentage of MPs to maintain a healthier constitutional balance between the executive and legislature and improve democratic oversight of it.
Stuart Wallace.
* The author would like to thank Paolo Sandro for his comments on an earlier version of this post.
Stuart Wallace is an Associate Professor at the University of Leeds where he teaches constitutional law and international human rights law. He is a contributing writer for the Constitution Society.
The Constitution Society is committed to the promotion of informed debate and is politically impartial. Any views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and not those of The Constitution Society.