Sir Suma Chakrabarti did more than most to bring the civil service into the 21st century. Now that he’s president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Sam Macrory offers a penny for his thoughts
Trailblazing seems to come easily for Sir Suma Chakrabarti. The first British Asian permanent secretary in the UK civil service; the youngest permanent secretary; the first British president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
And there’s another first on his CV that many civil servants perhaps have most reason to be indebted to him for: as perm sec at the Department for International Development, Chakrabarti negotiated a working week that ensured he would be present for his young daughter’s breakfast and her evening bath, while also working from home on Fridays.
The-then novel arrangement saw Chakrabarti described in the press as the “part-time perm sec”, or the man with the “bedtime deadline”, but with the advent of shared parental leave, compressed hours and remote working, he seems to have been ahead of the curve.
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“I used to say to my colleagues that I was only a trailblazer because I was a bloke,” he says of what now seems a sensible rather than surprising attempt to balance work and family.
“Female colleagues have had to do this for much longer, but they got no publicity and quite often their careers were held up, in my view. What was interesting in the press was here was a man who was not going to work in quite the same way as men before him.”
Refusing to work in quite the same way has served the 56-year-old Chakrabarti well. After a glittering career he left the civil service in 2012 to join the EBRD, where he has just been re-elected for a second term as president.
In his smart office at the bank’s Liverpool Street headquarters, a map dominates the wall behind his desk. It isn’t there for effect. Chakrabarti’s job takes him across a sizable portion of the globe as he invests the bank’s finances in projects designed to boost market economies and democratic principles, a mission which has expanded since the bank was created in 1991 – following the fall of the Berlin Wall – to encourage those fledgling countries emerging from the former Soviet Union.
As it marks a quarter of a century since its founding, Chakrabarti says the bank can be proud of its successes. He highlights Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary as “countries that have really transformed themselves”. The EBRD has expanded into Central Asia and Africa, but Chakrabarti intends to lead a period of consolidation during his second term, explaining that “it is important to try and maximise impact in existing territory.”
New challenges have also arisen, and in a recent speech in Serbia Chakrabarti drew attention to a growing mood across the continent, and beyond, which jars with the bank’s thinking. “The cause of internationalism and the arguments in favour of economic integration are being challenged,” he warned. “In my lifetime I cannot remember anything like the scepticism about these values that we see today.”
The EBRD may be a few miles east of Westminster, but the tremors of Brexit are being felt.
“Some people in eastern Europe and obviously people here in Britain have felt the EU has overreached itself, that the balance between national sovereignty and pooled sovereignty has gone too far,”
Chakrabarti explains. “That has led to populism. And there have been issues in the last 10 years about growth. People are not feeling that well off…and they link that back to things like the eurozone, so that brings into question the whole project of integration. Where these anti-integrationist voices are now being heard, that is clearly a direct challenge to our values.”
It may have the word European in its title, but the EBRD is not an EU institution – though the EU and the European Investment Bank are among its 67 shareholders. But while Brexit has no impact on the bank’s structure or finances, it will, says Chakrabarti, “make life complicated for our countries of operation”.
And what Brexit eventually means, other than Brexit, as prime minister Theresa May repeatedly insists, is keeping Chakrabarti occupied.
“If it is an orderly Brexit, with the UK being part of an extended family – I’m talking in terms of an amicable divorce here – then the impact on our counties of operation is not that great. If it’s highly disorderly, with no clarity on what the future trading status of the UK is, then it could have a very, very negative impact on our countries of operation. It potentially has adverse economic consequences.”
Chakrabarti outflanked French and German candidates to secure his first term as EBRD president in 2012, with the then chancellor George Osborne quick to boast that “the success of a British candidate to lead this important European institution shows the strength of and support for Britain’s influence in Europe and around the world”.
“I used to say to my colleagues that I was only a trailblazer because I was a bloke" – Sir Suma Chakrabarti
How times change. As Chakrabarti sees Whitehall battling with the consequences of Brexit, does he wish he was still at the heart of government – or is he happier to be out of it?
He laughs at the question, and insists he is delighted with his current role. But he is clearly a more-than-interested spectator as he watches the civil service take on what he calls “probably the biggest challenge of all time”.
Born in West Bengal, Chakrabarti first came to the UK when his father’s PhD required the family to leave India. He returned to India for a while before making his way back to the UK to read PPE at Oxford and then complete a master’s in economics at Sussex. It was while studying he met the woman who would become his wife – management studies professor Mari Sako – and he ended up staying in England in what he has called a “story of accidental migration”.
He joined the civil service, worked his way up the ranks of the Overseas Development Administration, the forerunner to the modern day DfID, and bolstered his CV with stints at the Treasury – where he ran the rule over Gordon Brown’s first public spending review – and the Cabinet Office, where he helped to set up then prime minister Tony Blair’s strategy unit. In 2002 he became permanent secretary at DfID in an appointment that made history: at 42 he had become the civil service’s youngest permanent secretary and its first Asian one. Then, in 2008, he moved to the Ministry of Justice where he served as perm sec until he left Whitehall in 2012.
His first-hand experience of other nations’ civil services has increased his admiration of the one he left behind.
"There is no doubt – and I don’t think British ministers or the British civil service say this enough – that it is the best civil service in the world and it remains that way" – Sir Suma Chakrabarti
“It’s quite striking when you see public administration around all our countries of operation, and also our non-recipients as well. There is no doubt – and I don’t think British ministers or the British civil service say this enough – that it is the best civil service in the world and it remains that way,” Chakrabarti says. “I can see that every day when I work with other administrations. They should be proud of what they’re doing, and the UK government should say more about how proud they are of the civil service.”
Warming to his theme, Chakrabarti continues to sing the praises of his former employer and its “meritocratic, non-political” set-up.
“It is often debated in Whitehall whether they should move to a French or American system. Woe betide you ever do that,” he warns. “That is a system that was adopted in some parts of eastern Europe and with great regret now. If you change governments and you remove all the top layers of your civil service, because you want your politically aligned civil servants to come in, you basically destroy the public administration for another two or three years while these people learn what to do. It’s not sensible.”
Despite the fulsome praise, Chakrabarti admits that he has enjoyed stepping out of the shadows and becoming a public figure. “I did speeches and I was in the press, at least in Civil Service World, and yes I appeared in parliament before committees, but here you have a political role yourself and a very public role,” he explains, before contrasting the challenge of answering to just one minister compared to the EBRD’s shareholders.
“You’re in charge of the strategy of the organisation and you’re working with 67 shareholders whereas [in Whitehall] I was really working with one shareholder,” he explains. “You spend much more time managing and working with the shareholders than you would have done with ministers.”
Of the secretaries of state he worked with, two stand out: Clare Short at DfID and Ken Clarke at the MoJ, both of whom he remains in touch with. “They try to tell it as they see it and they are up for a debate as well,” he said. “They have vision. That’s so refreshing. They are not interested in marginal change, they want to make big changes. They are the two I found most empowering.”
He speaks so fondly of his former colleagues and is clearly proud of his present employer, but can he pick out where one could learn from the other?
EBRD staff, he says, “are very strong in the contracting side of things – there was always the issue in the civil service of managing contracts, holding the private sector to account in its provision of public services: I came across this very strongly in the Ministry of Justice. Those things are much more natural in a private sector setting.”
However, busting perceived wisdom that Whitehall likes nothing less than change, Chakrabarti says the civil service “knows that change can happen and they know how to do it, whether it’s policy change or change of management. It’s much faster.” And the EBRD? “That’s one of the biggest eye-openers for me. I knew multilateral organisations really well, but I didn’t realise how difficult it is to change methods.”
A working method he has sought to change is the one which first brought him to the media’s attention. Forging a work-life balance is not such a pressing issue for Chakrabarti at the EBRD: “If I did it now, my 21-year-old daughter would think I had gone barmy!” he confides.
But he says his stand made him a better permanent secretary, not least because he was “always interested in how staff could think of their life beyond work.” He praises DfID in particular for the changes it undertook; the EBRD, he says, is beginning to move forward but is “at the foothills compared to the civil service.”
But one change in Whitehall never really happened. The first Asian perm sec in the British civil service was portrayed as a role model for ambitious BME fast streamers, yet more than a decade on the numbers have stubbornly refused to shift. All of the current perm secs are white, while the proportion of senior civil servants from BME backgrounds currently stands at just 4%.
“The leadership has to reach out to try and encourage people to apply for jobs they don’t think they are credible for" – Sir Suma Chakrabarti
Chakrabarti is not impressed, warning that the civil service “needs to up its game in recruiting talent from wider backgrounds”. Rejecting the idea of some sort of quota scheme for ethnic minority applicants, he instead believes Whitehall must do more to diversify the civil service.
“It’s something civil service leaders have to do,” he says, though he quickly moves the discussion on from race to gender.
“The leadership has to reach out to try and encourage people to apply for jobs they don’t think they are credible for. All the research shows women tend to be much more cautious about applying for jobs, whereas blokes tend to think they can do anything. So you have to reach out to women and urge them to apply for jobs because you think they are credible. It’s very important.”
Perhaps Whitehall needs a British Asian to rise to the role of cabinet secretary for change to really happen? Chakrabarti had been seen as an outside bet to succeed Gus O’Donnell as in 2011, but instead the role went to Sir Jeremy Heywood. Would he have liked to do it? “I would have, of course, but there was never a vacancy,” comes the reply, suggesting that he had no ambitions at the time of O’Donnell’s retirement. “If there was a vacancy at the right time, I would have applied,” he makes clear.
For once, Sir Suma Chakrabarti was unable to demonstrate his trailblazing talents. However if Brexit takes place during his second term at the EBRD, he may find himself in yet more uncharted territory – as a Brit still in charge of a major European institution once Britain has left the European stage.
CHAKRABARTI ON…SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER
“I think it is important for civil servants to feel that they can speak truth unto power, and then still maintain a relationship. For me, I learned this when I was a young civil servant during the Pergau Dam affair [a national scandal during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, which came to be known as the 'arms for aid' deal]. I was the private secretary to the minister. The Overseas Development Administration permanent secretary at the time, Tim Lankester, gave his advice that we shouldn’t do this project. He was overruled by the foreign secretary, the project went ahead and the rest is history.
"What I learnt from him is: courage, tell it as it is, do your best and tell the ministers that this isn’t the right thing to do, but if they still want to go ahead, support them. But put it on the record. He did that. I had to do that in the Ministry of Justice once because I asked for a direction [a written direction from the minister, who then bears responsibility] as well, because I didn’t agree with the policy.
"You have to be willing to do that in extremis. I think the civil service has got better at doing this. There has been a culture change: people are just not willing to go along with things they think are a bad use of public money."