The former DCMS perm sec breaks bread with Suzannah Brecknell
Who?
Dame Sue Owen was permanent secretary at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport from 2013 to 2019. Her 30-year career in government included over a decade at HM Treasury, a posting to the British Embassy in Washington, time in the No.10 Policy Unit and a stint as director general in the Department for International Development. Before joining DCMS she spent four years in the Department for Work and Pensions, first as director for welfare and wellbeing, and then heading up a newly created strategy directorate from 2011.
Alongside these roles, Owen also led a cross-government working group looking at the progression of women in the civil service and in 2015 she was named the civil service’s diversity champion.
Currently, she is a specialist partner at the consultancy Flint Global and holds a number of non-executive posts including acting as non-executive chair of the Debt Management Office Advisory Board.
We discussed...
Championing diversity in the civil service The biggest success was getting across the argument that diversity wasn’t just the right thing to do, it was actually a driver of performance. So the realisation that there is a business case for diversity: if people feel included at work, they’re going to perform better and, equally importantly in the civil service, if you’ve got a range of people from different backgrounds and fields, you’re going to make better policies.
There have been examples of things where we probably didn’t have a sufficient range of people. Think of something like Grenfell. Did we have policymakers at the top of the civil service who’d ever lived in a tower block like that? It was that realisation that really helped change things.
What she wishes she could have done more on In the four years I was diversity champion we made progress on things like ethnic diversity. I think we were probably better on social background than many people might think, but there’s a long way to go on ethnic background and heritage. And also on disability and mental health. These aren’t things you can change overnight, you just have to persist.
It’s very important that you have a cabinet secretary who’s really championing it and an experienced permanent secretary who is also keeping on top of it because you can’t afford to take your foot off the accelerator.
Missed job opportunities I haven’t always got jobs that I applied for. In many cases, I got promoted at the second or third attempt. Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t get some of those jobs, because I wouldn’t have been able to do the much better jobs that came along. It was characteristic of the jobs I’m pleased I didn’t get that I probably applied for them for the wrong reasons. For example, when I was in Washington, I applied to be the UK director at the IMF and World Bank. Tom Scholar got that job. I know I could have done it well, but I realised I was applying in order that we could stay living in the US, which would have been much better for my husband, and also good for my son. Or, I applied to be the permanent secretary in Wales – I was doing that because my mother lived in Wales. When you’re applying for jobs, your heart’s got to be in the subject matter of the role, rather than all the other things that come with it.
Different career trajectories I was unusual in some ways in that I didn’t join the civil service 'til my early 30s. I spent my 20s drifting around being an academic. When I got to the Treasury I absolutely loved it, but I was already older than a lot of people doing the same sorts of jobs. I didn’t get a director role until my mid-40s. But then I had a lucky break – being promoted to DG at DfID when I’d only done one director role. That was because [then-perm sec] Suma Chakrabarti put his faith in me. I’m very grateful, particularly as I was by then nearly 50. But I turned out to be quite good at leadership so he did the right thing. I think people should do that kind of thing a bit more often.
"I often say to women, it doesn’t matter if you’re not a permanent secretary by the time you’re 40. There’s plenty of time, and careers that can develop at different paces"
I often say to women, it doesn’t matter if you’re not a permanent secretary by the time you’re 40. Because then what are you going to do at 50? There’s plenty of time, and careers that can develop at different paces. I don’t think there’s a set formula that you need to be absolutely hooked on.
Working well with partners DCMS has a very connected business-model – a tiny centre and about 45 arm’s-length bodies. The ALBs are the experts, and it’s really important that we know them well and use their expertise. My approach was to talk a lot to the chairs and the chief execs of ALBs – I had a lot of breakfasts, and coffees. If you understand each other, it’s much easier to deal with any crisis or shared project, even if you don’t agree on things. But if you only engage with people when there’s a problem, it’s never going to work.
Of course it is more difficult when you’ve got the kind of revolving door of ministers that we’ve had in the last several years. As civil servants, you can build up these good relationships with arm’s length bodies. But you ideally need a minister to build them up as well. On the other hand, sometimes you get a minister like John Whittingdale: when he came into the department, he’d been chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee for 10 years. So he already had relationships built up.
How to make mission-based government work One thing is not to have too many priorities. That will mean, within individual departments, you can’t do nearly so much. Then the second thing is, you’ve got to have ministers who are prepared not to compete with each other. There have to be incentives for them to collaborate and get the joint outcome. So often in politics, ministers want to make their mark, and you can understand that, but you’re not going to solve all these problems unless they work together. So that’s going to require quite a lot of discipline from the centre to make that work. In terms of the mission-boards [proposed by Labour], I think it would be a good idea to have private sector representatives – that would make good use of the skills and experience they can bring. Finally, you’ve got to be clear that any money allocated is for that priority and can’t be appropriated by any department.
What makes a good minister? A good minister really cares about the issues, listens to different points of view, and then may triangulate those views. But then you need a minister who will actually make a decision. A lot of people find that quite hard, certainly if they’ve been in opposition a long time.
More generally, it helps to have a minister who treats the civil service as assets.
A fantastic minister is one who already knows a lot about the subject, but we very rarely get that, and understandably so. I’ve mentioned someone like John Whittingdale, who already knew the landscape. Another example is Iain Duncan Smith: he was completely passionate about reforming the welfare system, which had always been in the ‘too-difficult’ box.
Dame Sue Owen (left) with CSW editor Suzannah Brecknell
IDS’s early days at DWP Iain Duncan Smith wasn’t the shadow work and pensions secretary, so before the election we had no indication of the changes to come. The shadow had been Theresa May: we’d had access talks and there were one or two organisational things she wanted to do, but it wasn’t a wholesale reform of the welfare state. Thankfully when James Purnell was work and pensions secretary he had been looking at whether you could merge all the housing benefits and out of work benefits with the in work benefits, so we had done some work on it. When Iain came in, we were able to really quickly look at proposals from the Centre for Social Justice and come up with some plans.
The problem was that it hadn’t been in the manifesto, it wasn’t all in the Treasury’s costings. Cameron was quite supportive but the Treasury was trying to cut spending quite drastically. So those weren’t the greatest circumstances, but it was quite an exciting time to be there.
And it was also really interesting to have input from the private sector through our non-executive board. One of the non-execs – Ian Cheshire, who was the chief executive of B&Q at the time – said this is a 10-12 year programme and, in the private sector, if we were doing this, we wouldn’t be trying to do several other things at the same time. But of course, IDS was so focused that he was in a hurry, so the implementation was too quick, initially. It was thought of as a failing project at some points but now, more than ten years on, it is implemented. So that’s another problem – the political cycle which ministers must work to isn’t long enough to see results on these really important things.
Changing civil service skills When I joined the Treasury it was – or was felt to be – all about being really clever. But even then the Treasury knew it needed more economists and people who could do numbers, not just people who’d done Greek and Latin. Since then I think the civil service has become much better at knowing that you need emotional intelligence as well, and you need good leaders: people who can lead a department in a way that gets the best out of everyone.
“The civil service has become much better at knowing that you need good leaders: people who can lead a department in a way that gets the best out of everyone”
Another positive change is the growth of the professions. We always had, happily, properly trained lawyers. Economists were starting to come in when I joined, and it’s been really good to see the functions grow more recently. To have proper training, and only hiring qualified people to do finance, procurement, commercial, project management and so on – all of that has saved the taxpayer a lot of money.
Having said that, I think we are only just about getting to where we need to be with digital skills, and the area where we’re not making any progress at all – bizarrely something on which I agree with Dominic Cummings – is that the civil service needs more scientists.
I think a lot of scientists fail at those first, online recruitment tests – they get filtered out far too soon so we need to revamp that system. And even when they get in, departments don’t know how to use them properly.
Improving the centre of government You need No.10 and No.11 on the same page and not competing with each other, and you need a very strong cabinet secretary who is going to bring the departments along with them. The centre should have its key priorities and be really focused on them, rather than trying to micromanage everything. For example, for the centre to try and micromanage every appointment is ridiculous – let the ministers make their own choices and get on with it.
Her first civil service job It was January 1989. Before joining I’d been in for a practice day and Gus O’Donnell – who was my deputy director, or Grade 5, as we called it then – had shown me round. I had seen a whole variety of jobs and said: “Well I’m happy to do any of them apart from being on the forecast.”
So, he put me on the forecast team. In those days the Treasury did the economic modelling that is now done by the OBR. I was forecasting North Sea oil with about 20 others covering all the other areas. You didn’t have the sort of tech we’ve got nowadays, so the model would run overnight. You’d come back in the morning to all these sheets of output, and then you’d have a meeting to look at it.
Very soon after I joined there was an accident in the North Sea and we had to brief Nigel Lawson on the economic impact and then we had to work with the policy thinkers who were in charge of North Sea oil as well. So it was really exciting to suddenly see on the front of the FT something you were actually working on. You had messengers who brought you files, you had in-trays and out-trays and if you wanted something typed you sent it to the typing pool. There was a definite team feel across the department so you really felt part of something. I completely loved it from day one.
Her hardest day There’s been quite a few hard days but it has to be the day after the Brexit vote: 24 June 2016. My husband and son have their birthday on 24 June, and I’d had all my senior staff over the night before for a summer party. My plan had been that I would have Friday off and there would be lots of lovely leftovers from the night before. A couple of my staff stayed the night, and of course we woke at 7am to find the vote hadn’t gone as expected so there was nothing for it but to go straight in to work.
That was a very difficult day because it had not been government policy to leave the European Union and we genuinely hadn’t done any work on it. In fact John Whittingdale, who was a Brexiteer, had asked me earlier in the week if it was true that the government hadn’t done any work on it and I said: “Yes, because it’s not government policy.” But on Friday morning, it was government policy.
There were a lot of people in the office who were very shocked, who just hadn’t expected it, there were some who were upset. The minister asked if he should come in. I dissuaded him from doing that, but by mid-morning I felt we needed to kind of get a grip on this and so we had a town hall meeting where I said: “However you personally voted on this, it is now government policy and we have to now help the government do this.”
It was also tough because the following Friday was the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. On the risk register for that event we had very low probability, very high impact risk that the UK votes to leave the EU. We did a lot of work to establish whether our plans could still go ahead: would the EU president still come? Would the royals still come? Of course the answer was everything did go according to plan, the only issue was that nobody wanted to be seen with David Cameron on the day, so we had to handle that.
Her proudest achievements I worked on the Five Tests which were developed in 1997 to assess whether the UK should join the Euro. It was just an amazing piece of incredibly thorough analysis that I don’t think we’ve seen a lot of since. It showed the power of having all the facts and analysis at your fingertips to enable ministers to make decisions really well.
I’m also proud of the diversity work, which again showed the importance of having all the numbers to back up what you want to do. Then there’s also the work we did at DCMS, turning that from the department that had the lowest morale and staff service into being one of the ones that had one of the highest People Survey scores. I’m proud about that because it meant we were then able to kind of punch above our weight because everybody came to work feeling really motivated and supported to do a great job.