Parliamentary under-secretary of state
junior minister in the government of the United Kingdom
The parliamentary under-secretary of state (historically under-secretary of state or just parliamentary secretary, particularly in departments not led by a secretary of state) is the lowest of three tiers of government minister in the UK government, immediately junior to a minister of state, which is itself junior to a secretary of state.
Background
The Ministerial and Other Salaries Act 1975 (c. 27) provides that at any one time there can be no more than 83 paid ministers (not counting the Lord Chancellor, up to 3 law officers, and up to 22 whips). Of these, no more than 50 ministers can be paid the salary of a minister senior to a parliamentary secretary. Thus, if 50 senior ministers are appointed, the maximum number of paid parliamentary secretaries is 33.
The limit on the number of unpaid parliamentary secretaries is given by the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975, ensuring that no more than 95 government ministers of any kind can sit in the House of Commons at any one time; there is no upper bound to the number of unpaid ministers sitting in the House of Lords.
The position should not be confused with the permanent secretary, which is the most senior civil servant in a government department (also known as the permanent under-secretary of state), nor with a parliamentary private secretary (an MP serving as an assistant to a minister entitled to directly relevant expenses but no further pay).
Of his tenure as an under-secretary in Macmillan's 1957–1963 Conservative government from the Lords, the Duke of Devonshire noted: "No one who hasn't been a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State has any conception of how unimportant a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State is".
List of parliamentary under-secretaries of state
Current
There are 44 parliamentary under-secretaries of state, of whom six are unpaid.
The public source identifies “Parliamentary under-secretary of state” as junior minister in the government of the United Kingdom. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Parliamentary, under-secretary and state.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3492070. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1975, 1957 and 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “Parliamentary under-secretary of state” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.