Interview: Sir David Normington

“Enjoy it.” That is the advice of Sir David Normington (pictured above), Home Office permanent secretary until his retirement at the end of this month, to Dame Helen Ghosh as she prepares to take over at the department.

Speaking before Ghosh – currently the permanent secretary at the environment department – had been publicly confirmed as the Home Office’s next top official, Normington told Civil Service Worldthat his advice to his successor would be: “Remember that, as Roy Jenkins said when he was home secretary: ‘In the Home Office, tropical storms blow up out of a clear blue sky’. But the tropical storms always pass. If you get into a storm, just turn into the wind, get your head down and get on with it, and there’ll be some calmer water later.”

‘Get your head down and get on with it’ seems to sum up Normington’s attitude to many things. His definition of what makes a good minister – “They listen, they discuss, they decide and set a very clear direction” – is echoed in his advice to civil service leaders dealing with difficult organisational or policy reforms: listen, plan, communicate, and move “faster than your instincts”, because “if you’ve got ambition, you need to get on with it”.

Contributing to the conversation
As Ghosh takes the reigns at the Home Office, Normington will be enjoying a long holiday (“somewhere warm”) before taking on the posts of First Civil Service Commissioner and Commissioner for Public Appointments from next April. The two roles – combined in one person for the first time – will see him regulating appointments to the civil service and to public bodies, to ensure selection is on merit and conducted according to the relevant legislation and codes of practice.

At a pre-selection hearing in front of the public administration select committee, Normington acknowledged that after a 37-year career in the civil service, he is seen as the “archetypal insider”. As he put it to Civil Service World: “I have to prove to people that I can make the switch to being a regulator: I am absolutely confident I can.”

Some have suggested the three-month gap between leaving the civil service and becoming a regulator is too short, eroding his independence and objectivity in the role. “I won’t be able to convince people of that [independence] till I get on with it,” he said. “So I’m not sure it would help to leave it, say, for six months. I might as well get on with it.” If he was to leave a longer gap before taking up the role, he points out, “I’d still know everybody”.

In some respects, the job seems a natural fit for Normington. As well as chairing recruitment panels for appointments to the top three levels of the civil service, and ruling on potential infringements of the Civil Service Code, the civil service commissioners are required to “bring their experience and judgment to bear on a range of important leadership, human resources and policy issues”, according to the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) report on the role. And workforce development and leadership is, says Normington, his “specialist area” within the permanent secretary community. In 2008, for example, he carried out a review into the workforce and reward strategy for the senior civil service (SCS).

“Getting the best people appointed on merit to the top of the civil service and to quangos is the way you make the public services better,” says Normington, “so why wouldn’t I use all that expertise and go on contributing?”

Normington’s 2008 report, as well as suggesting a new pay and reward structure – which is now being worked up by the Cabinet Office – recommended that the SCS be reduced in size, with a greater focus on leadership development. It noted some of the problems encountered when recruiting from outside the civil service into the highest grades; highlighted the need to develop talent from within; and suggested that more should be done to encourage external recruitment, and to open up competition, at lower levels of the civil service – views he reiterates when we meet.

As First Civil Service Commissioner, Normington will not have a direct say in individual decisions on whether to open posts to external candidates at lower levels, or whether the levels of external recruitment are too high across government –“after all, that’s about the performance of departments, which the commission can’t judge”. But the Civil Service Commission has a “unique view of all the competitions that are being held for the civil service and who is winning those competitions”, Normington says, adding that it is entirely legitimate to feed that data, and the commission’s conclusions, back into government. He mentions contributing to the debate several times. After so many years within the system, one senses he is looking forward to contributing his experience and conclusions from a new, more independent perspective.

He will also be seeking to reform the codes of practice which govern public appointments to make them more focused on principles, rather than process, and told PASC he would expect to have proposals for these reforms ready by September next year.

A long service
In seeking reform, Normington will be on familiar ground. He has a reputation for delivering change in the departments he has led, most recently revamping leadership and organisational structures at the Home Office and overseeing a split of its functions to create the Ministry of Justice. Before joining the Home Office Normington was permanent secretary in the Department for Education (DfE), where he oversaw a swathe of policy reforms as well as a 30 per cent reduction in the workforce at its headquarters.

Even before this, Normington was known within the DfE as ‘Bichard’s enforcer’ for his role in implementing the organisational reforms of his then-boss, Sir Michael Bichard, and had developed a reputation for delivering policy reforms – in part during his time as director-general for schools from 1998. He describes his stint at the education department as “one of the greatest periods of my career”.

“You could see standards improving as a result of some things that politicians and civil servants had done,” he explains, adding that throughout his career he has been motivated by a sense that his work benefits others. “In education, more than anywhere, you are able to go and see in a school something that has a direct connection with something that you have been doing in your policy work or in your leadership of the department.”

Standards did improve in education during this period, but many teachers also complained of ‘initiative overload’; of too much change, too fast. Sir David’s response to these criticism begins with a caveat: “Remember, I’m the civil servant implementing the policy,” and then returns to his ‘get your head down and get on with it’ attitude: “With big reforms of any sort, there is an issue about what the pace of that change should be. My view is you should always go faster than the people [who] you want to change want you to go: people always want you to slow it down, but actually if you’ve got ambition you need to get on with it.”

Into the fray
It was Normington’s reputation for delivering reform that led to him being approached for the position of permanent secretary at the Home Office. Four months after he joined, he faced his first ‘tropical storm’: the department was hit by revelations that more than 1,000 foreign prisoners had been freed without being considered for deportation.

The next month, home secretary Charles Clarke was shuffled onto the back benches and replaced by John Reid, who publicly described the Home Office immigration operations as “not fit for purpose”, and was scathing about management across the organisation – a view which seemed to be supported by the Home Office’s first Capability Review in 2006, which gave it the lowest score among all departments.

“I thought: ‘This is probably the challenge of my career’,” remembers Normington, describing the experience of being at the helm of that struggling department, in a rather understated way, as “pretty stressful”.

“During the summer of 2006 we were leading the news every day, week after week, and all of it was bad,” he says. “Unless you have armour-plated skin, you are going to be stressed by that; and I also felt responsible for the staff of the Home Office, who I didn’t think deserved to be in that place.” Normington describes the fact that civil servants operate in a “glare of publicity” as the worst change he has encountered over the course of his career. “Of course we should be held accountable,” he says, but his concern is with “criticism for the sake of it.” Some parts of the media exhibit “a wish to drag public services down,” he adds. “I don’t like it; it’s one thing I won’t miss.”

Normington himself is no stranger to the media glare: in 2008 another tropical storm blew up over a police investigation – into leaks from the department – which led to the arrest of Conservative MP Damian Green. The decision to pass this investigation over to the police rested with Normington. “We’d had about 20 leaks and we just hadn’t found [the source],” he remembers. “You have to go on investigating and investigating; eventually we felt we needed more professional help.”

From the little that he is willing to say on the record on this topic, it’s clear that Normington feels the police investigation – which involved a search of Green’s parliamentary office – did cause damage to the Home Office. It will also, of course, have strained the relationship between Normington and Green – now a Home Office minister. But Sir David is an old hand at smoothing over conflicts with ministers: in the three years immediately after joining the department, he had to gain the trust of three secretaries of state.

“You spend an awful lot of time with them, particularly when you’re permanent secretary; and you often go through the mill with them. With several of mine we went through some really tough times; therefore, if you’re at all successful, you build up a sort of friendship.” He still meets with most of his former secretaries of state for lunch or drinks occasionally, he says, adding in one of the dry asides which pepper his conversation: “even John Reid”.

So Reid’s morale-dampening comments didn’t wreck their relationship? “He and I had quite a tough time to begin with,” says Normington, “but we sorted it out, and by the end of his time here we’d built the sort of relationship we needed. We see each other from time to time now. You should never carry those kinds of problems for long, should you? It just isn’t sensible, so we worked quite hard to make sure that’s all behind us.”

Waiting for improvements
Although Normington describes his first year at the Home Office as the biggest challenge of his career, it taught him, he says, that “if you do the right things and if you have confidence it will eventually come right– but it takes longer than you think: you’re waiting for the green shoots to appear, and just when you’ve given up hope things start to improve.”

Improvements, he says, began to show in the middle of 2007. “As you’ve got improvements, you can then play those improvements back to your own staff and begin to build the sense that, yes, this organisation can improve and can regain its confidence.”

By 2008, the department’s second capability review was much more positive, describing progress in many areas. Key to this success, he says, was developing “a really good leadership team – not just right at the top of the Home Office, but at a number of other levels too.”

Building this team was partly a job of investing in training and development, he says, but also about getting the right people in place. “You have to move some people on who you don’t think are strong enough; you have to be very particular about who you select.” The permanent secretary should retain ultimate control over appointments to key posts, he argues, “because every time you make a mistake and get the wrong person in the job it’s a setback,” he says.
Having got the right people in place, he says, his team could focus on building a vision for the department. This was then communicated to all staff through a number of what the capability review described as ‘imaginative communication strategies” – including a personal blog which, Normington says, facilitates “a sort of permanent, ongoing conversation about what the department is like and what people’s concerns are”.

What’s in a name?
At the education department, Normington had become known as the ‘smiling assassin’ during the period of workforce reductions. At the time of his promotion Peter Smith, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, described him as “civilised and urbane, with a beaming smile – but underneath he’s a tough nut”.

“I don’t mind what I’m called,” says Normington. “You have to be judged by what you do and what you get done. I’d like people to think that I have worked hard to involve our staff and communicate with our staff; that I have always had a strong sense of the people in the organisations that I’ve been working with, even if we’ve had to reduce their numbers – that sense of understanding how people might be feeling and trying to respond to that.”

This is reflected in his response when asked if he has any regrets from a career he repeatedly describes as “fantastic”. Normington says that, given his time again, he might “handle 2006 a bit differently”; he could have set out his new vision for the department more quickly, he says, at that time of low morale and media scrutiny. At the education department, he adds, he was well known; but at the Home Office he hadn’t built his reputation yet. “I didn’t work hard enough at trying to project what I was trying to do to the Home Office,” he says. “I rather took for granted that [staff would] think: ‘He’ll know what he’s doing’. Why would they? They didn’t know anything about me.”

Normington reserves his final comments for the people he has led. He will continue, he says, to “go on promoting the positives for the civil service”, because “people do the most amazing things: they put themselves in danger; they work all hours of the day to serve the public, and just want to get more recognition of that”.

“That happens in my own organisation: the sense of commitment in the Home Office to making the UK a safer place is just enormous,” he concludes. “We as civil service leaders – and as ex-civil service leaders – need to go on telling those stories about what our staff do, because we should be so proud of it.”

All change
Normington has been heavily involved with several major organisational reforms in his career: the merger of the education department with employment in 1997; the 2001 split to transfer employment functions to the newly-created work and pensions department; and the 2007 split of the Home Office to create the Ministry of Justice.

Department and agency chiefs facing mergers and organisational change as a result of the coalition’s non-departmental body reforms may be interested to hear his reflections on the processes involved. On mergers, he says, “go faster than your instincts”, and “don’t allow the things that people hang onto from the past to stick around.

“In a merger there are lots of things that are symbols of the previous organisations, and basically you need to abolish those as fast as possible,” he continues. “Create a sense of purpose and vision for the new organisation and merge the performance management, the IT systems, the football teams – by the way, the football teams were the most difficult things to merge!”

Pace is also key when splitting functions: “Do it as quick as you can, because the longer you take over it, the more miserable people will be,” he says; and “move on very fast to telling people about the future, not about the past.

“When something is done, don’t mourn its passing,” says Normington. “Think about the future – because after all, we all want something to aim for, and we’d rather aim for something interesting and exciting than mourn what is past.”

CV Highlights
1951    Born in Bradford
1973    Graduates from Corpus Christi college, Cambridge, with BA in Modern History, and joins the Department of Employment on the same day as work and pensions permanent secretary Sir Leigh Lewis, who is also retiring at the end of this month.
1983    Becomes principal private secretary to Tom King as employment secretary
1992    After a period as regional director in the employment service, becomes director of personnel and development in the employment department
1997    Promoted to director-general of strategy and international analytical services at the Department for Education and Employment
1998    Becomes director-general for schools
2000    Joins the civil service management board
2001    Promoted to permanent secretary at Department for Education and Skills
2006    Moves to Home Office as permanent secretary
2010    Retires as a permanent secretary and accepts up new, dual role