Interview: Bronwyn Hill

The appointment of a permanent secretary normally goes almost unremarked outside Whitehall, prompting just a handful of stories in the trade press. Not so for Bronwyn Hill (pictured above): her arrival at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) this March garnered national coverage, including a mention on Radio 4. For Hill’s appointment took the proportion of female permanent secretaries in the main home departments to 50 per cent, and was announced just a few days before International Woman’s Day.

The Guardian described Hill as “the woman who smashed Whitehall’s glass ceiling”, but she seems a little non-plussed by this aspect of her story. Attitudes to women have changed since she joined the civil service, she says, but mainly in that “the novelty value has worn off”. It’s her social background, rather than her gender, which she mentions with pride and which she thinks marks her out among leaders in Whitehall.  Born and brought up with five siblings in Bradford, she was the first in the family to go to university – both her parents left school at 14. “It’s good to show other people that you don’t have to come from a privileged background” to succeed in the civil service, she says: “You just have to be resilient, and resourceful, and willing to get on.”

Her career has certainly demonstrated resilience. Asked what drew her to her first job in transport planning policy at the Greater London Council (GLC), she replies: “The 1981 recession”, adding: “That was the only job offer I had”. She has also had her share of career moves brought about by political change. When the government abolished the GLC in 1986, she moved to the Inner London Education Authority; two years later the ILEA was closed down. “My great story is that the government keeps abolishing organisations that I work for,” she smiles – but she adds that “although organisations and institutions change, the work usually continues in some shape or form. As an individual, you have to be flexible enough to see where the next opportunity is for you, and not to feel held back because of that. Change often brings opportunities.”

For Hill, the opportunity in 1988 was a recruitment drive into Grades 6 and 7 of the civil service. She got a job in the transport department, and spent most of the rest of her career – excluding two years as director of the Government Office for the South West (GOSW) – working on transport projects as the department went through various iterations. She doesn’t see the leap to Defra as a big one: the transport and environment briefs were combined in the Department for Environment, Transport and the Regions from 1997 until the creation of Defra in 2001, she points out, so she already knew many people in the department. “I’m a very pragmatic, practical person,” she continues, “I like to get out and about and see what’s happening on the ground and I think that’s the link between transport and Defra: both of those departments are very real, dealing with [tangible] things.”

Partnership working
Both departments also work with a large number of external partners, particularly at a local and regional level, and Hill has plenty of experience of this through her regional transport work and time in regional government. At the GOSW, she says, she learnt much about the benefits of devolving power and freedoms to local authorities, but also about the importance of encouraging local collaboration to deal with cross-border issues. “There are still some issues that you need to look at at a more strategic level, and you need to recognise what those are,” she says, “but it doesn’t have to be done by national government or regional government: it’s about getting local authorities to work across [boundaries] where they’ve got a mutual interest.”

The idea of encouraging collaboration around points of mutual interest seems to be a key tenet of Hill’s leadership style. Asked what she sees as her greatest achievement prior to becoming perm sec, she points to work she did over the course of a decade on transport in London. “What I think I delivered, though not on my own, was the step up in investment in the Tube; Olympics transport [investment]; and the Crossrail go-ahead,” she says, but this was only achieved “through developing what I call collaborative leadership between the department and Transport for London.” Strong connections at senior levels with TfL’s transport commissioner and his team, as well as a clear shared objective, saw both organisations through “really big challenges like a massive disagreement on the London Underground PPP, successive mayors, different governments,” she continues.

She hopes to continue this style of leadership at Defra, and urges her new staff to consider how “you build those alliances across organisational boundaries both inside Whitehall and then between Defra and our external stakeholders.” She has two pieces of advice on how to achieve this. Firstly, she says, “you have to get to know people before you hit the crisis”; she has spent much of her Defra induction period visiting external stakeholders to begin building relationships. She speaks with particular enthusiasm of a visit to Essex Wildlife Trust which demonstrated not only the importance of supporting local projects, but also Defra’s reliance on civil society organisations for much of its work. The department has a good reputation for working with these organisations, she says – Hill explains that Defra has a “much more systematic approach” and “much more extensive” engagement than other departments “because we rely so heavily on what the voluntary sector does” – but there is still more to learn.

Early engagement of external groups was a lesson she thinks the department has learnt from the forestry U-turn earlier this year. Though Hill wasn’t working in Defra at the time, she believes the events showed the importance of “being really careful to prepare the ground properly before announcements and decisions”.

“My understanding is that a few lines in the Public Bodies Bill were put in when I don’t think all the preparation and the public engagement had been done, for whatever reason,” she says. “What we’ve now learnt is that doing that [public engagement] later is very difficult” – particularly when you’re facing “the power of the social media” to move an agenda on quickly. There is a need for pace when introducing reforms, she says, but “sometimes you have to go a bit slower to take people with you.”

I wonder if this balance is particularly hard to strike when a new government is keen to enact early reforms. Again saying that she can’t speak directly about the forestry example, Hill replies: “I think when you get a change of government, civil servants really want to show that they’re willing to serve that government”. Now, after more than a year of working together, she believes that there is “a more mature relationship” between civil servants and ministers; these days, officials feel more able to speak out when they think a policy should be revised or slowed down.

Shared objectives
Hill’s second piece of advice on how to build collaborative leadership is to spend time understanding the viewpoints and priorities of other organisations. “However passionate I might be about Defra,” she says, “I need to understand where the other person is coming from and put myself in their shoes if I’m going to come to some sort of agreement about where we want to be.” This, she suggests, is “an important skill which we need to do more [to develop] in the people coming through the system”.

The approach of establishing agreements based on common goals features heavily in Defra’s recently-published waste strategy, which sets out plans to develop waste-reduction agreements with a number of sectors such as hospitality. The department used a similar approach with supermarkets and food producers through the 2005 Courthald Commitment, which aimed to reduce packaging and food waste by 2010. It had mixed success: food waste fell and supermarkets reduced the average amount of packaging per item, but the overall waste reduction targets were missed because the volume of sales rose by more than the reduction in packaging waste.

Nonetheless, Hill believes that voluntary agreements remain a very effective – and cost-effective – way to achieve government goals in this area. “The more you can do through voluntary agreements the better the result will be, and the more sustainable it is, because it means we’re not having to enforce and regulate,” she says.

Agreements should start by focusing on the points where government’s and industry’s interests align, she says – for example, where business can save money by reducing packaging. There will be times when interests don’t align, though, so agreements mustn’t focus solely on carrots such as reducing costs. Lord Henley, the minster responsible for waste, “occasionally says that we’ve still got this big stick [of regulation] that we’ll wave if it doesn’t work, and I think we have to be clear about that,” says Hill.

Stepping back
Reducing regulation is a key priority across government, and Defra is currently in the spotlight of the ongoing Red Tape Challenge (see Opinion, p4). This presents a particular challenge for a department which deals with a large tranche of EU regulations, but identifying where government can step back from policy issues will be a key discipline for the future, says Hill. “When you’re in government and someone says: ‘I’ve got a problem…’ the immediate reaction is to think: ‘What can government do?’.” Civil servants must have the discipline to instead start by asking: ‘What would happen if we did nothing?’ and ‘Is there a different way of solving this?’ she says.

Hill likes to give examples wherever possible – a mark of her practical nature, perhaps – and here she mentions a review of farming regulation which was commissioned last summer and reported in May. The final report suggested, she says, that “if you step back and work more collaboratively with the farming industry and other people who have an interest, actually you might not need to do as much regulation; you might even go back to Europe and persuade them to reduce some of the regulation”.

This is, she notes “quite ambitious stuff, going way beyond engaging” and will mean “having some quite tough conversations with the farming industry and others to say: ‘How can we do this differently?’.”

Defra officials are now reviewing the report’s 200-plus recommendations to see how they can be implemented. One of the review’ s crucial points, though, was that changes to regulation or processes must be underpinned by cultural change. In his introductory letter to ministers, the review’s chair Richard MacDonald – a former director general of the National Farmers’ Union – wrote that “without culture change, issues don’t get dealt with. The key strategic message from our report is that Defra and its agencies need to establish an entirely new approach to and culture of regulation; otherwise the frustration that we, farmers and food-processing businesses have felt will continue”.

Learning by example
Effecting that culture change, Hill suggests, will be about “learning by example, showing people good case studies of what we’ve done when we’ve really challenged [assumptions]. One of the things I like to do, and probably haven’t done enough, is to get teams who have done interesting, innovative things to give talks within the department to say: ‘This is what the problem was; this is how we thought about it; this is what we did’ – and to be open about the positives and negatives.”

One team she will be encouraging to do this is the unit working with British Waterways to transfer the functions and assets of this public body to a new charity – currently being established – by April next year. This work, she says, has been going really well – again because of early engagement with the British Waterways team – and “we’re having to do lots of new things” from which other civil servants can learn.

For example, there have been particular challenges around agreeing a funding settlement. The charity will still require long-term funding from government, explains Hill – and this must be “sufficient for them to have some certainty about the future, because they’re taking on a big commitment and potential liability,” while still ensuring value for money for the taxpayer. “So that will involve, and has involved, some pretty tough negotiations with them and us getting some people to check that their plans are realistic, efficient,” she says. “It’s forcing us to be innovative about the way we think about long-term funding commitments.”

Hill has contributed to the process her own experience of setting up long-term funding commitments with local government about transport investment. This ability to “read-across” lessons from one area to another demonstrates the value of civil servants looking beyond their organisational boundaries when it comes to solving policy problems, she says.

Since the flurry of negative coverage over forests earlier this year, and the flutter of positive stories when Hill was appointed, Defra has remained largely out of the national spotlight in the last few months. This probably suits Hill just fine: if your department is on the front pages, it’s unlikely to be a good day for the perm sec. But she must be hoping that one day the department comes into the spotlight for delivering promised improvements in waste, regulation or biodiversity – another key priority for ministers. On that day, one imagines, Hill will be pointing out that it wasn’t traditional thinking which led to those improvements, but an open-minded approach to external challenge and close collaboration with partners across all sectors.

Hill's priorities for Defra
Defra has already cut staff numbers by 12 per cent through a voluntary exit scheme and may need to reduce them slightly further – “maybe another five per cent in core Defra”, says Hill. As with all departments, it will need to change the way it works if it is to deliver improved results with declining resources, and Hill has set out three key themes she wants to focus on while Defra goes through this change.

Firstly, she wants to encourage a “one team focus”, and see closer working between policy teams and delivery agencies. Arm’s length bodies spend 80 per cent of Defra’s money, she says, and closer links with those bodies will help to ensure better value for money.  Alongside this, she wants the department to have a “focus on delivering efficiency savings on corporate services across that wider network”; this again involves “a one team approach” and “a relentless focus on what our priorities are”. The department must work out what it can and should do, she says, while continually assessing the importance and priority of new projects or policy areas: “If it’s such a high priority that it’s unavoidable, [we need to ask]: ‘What are we going to reduce our priority on in order to do that?’”

Last year’s staff survey saw a small drop in Defra’s engagement scores – something which Hill sees as concerning but almost inevitable, given the timing of the survey. Two main concerns among staff, she says, were change management and the visibility of the senior leadership. In response, the senior team has been taking it in turns to update a team blog as well as visiting as many teams and sites as possible, improving visibility and encouraging staff to feel that they can play an active role in the change programme. Defra has also begun a change management programme for grades 6 and 7 – a cadre which, Hill believes, “felt slightly neglected in terms of: ‘What’s my leadership role?”. Around 300 people have been on this programme, which is supported by director general-led sessions focusing on change.

CV Highlights
1960     Born in Bradford, Yorkshire
1981     Graduates from Girton College, Cambridge, with a degree in Geography; takes up a role working in transport planning policy for Greater London Council
1986     Moves to the Inner London Education Authority
1988     Joins the Department of Transport to work on a review of traffic law, moving through various posts including director of the regional transport directorate
2005     Moves to Government Office for the South West as regional director
2007     Re-joins transport department as director general, City and Regional Networks/Major Projects and London Group
2011     Appointed permanent secretary, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs