In her first CSW interview as perm sec at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Sarah Healey shares her thoughts on changes ahead, and her tips for keeping worries at bay
Like most people who take an interest in politics, Sarah Healey didn’t sleep much on the night of the 2024 election. “That’s okay,” she says. “You can go for a few days on the adrenaline.” But while most politics-watchers had finished their involvement in the democratic process as they left the polling booth, the permanent secretary at the communities department (which was about to change its name, though not its focus), was relying on adrenaline to carry out the unique role of supporting a major democratic transition of power. It’s a role that gives her – and many other civil servants – a huge sense of pride. “There is a huge amount of energy that comes with the post-election feeling, no matter what the new government,” she says, before adding: “An energy and a whole new set of tasks.”
Healey worked with five secretaries of state in her last role as perm sec at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and she is well used to the rituals of handshakes by the door and clapping-in that go with welcoming a new minister. How is it different when the change is the result of an election, not a reshuffle?
“You always feel a great responsibility as a permanent secretary to make sure that your new secretary of state is happy with the support they’re getting,” she says. “But obviously it’s a bigger sense of responsibility when it’s a significant shift, and when it’s someone who doesn’t have years of experience but is keen to get on with making a difference.”
Six months on, the evidence that her new secretary of state – also the deputy prime minister – was keen to make a difference can be found in the result of all those post-election “tasks”. A new National Planning Policy Framework, an ambitious English devolution white paper and the unsafe cladding Remediation Acceleration Plan are just the most prominent outputs since the election.
"There’s a lot of fluidity in how things work in the few days post-election. People can feel almost as worn out by the uncertainty as by the intensity"
Last summer, Healey helped her staff to manage this workload by encouraging them to take a proper break when possible, but also acknowledging the unsettling nature of change for her teams. “We tried to focus really hard on communication, because inevitably there’s a lot of fluidity in how things work in the few days post-election. People can feel almost as worn out by the uncertainty as by the intensity,” she explains. “And so my absolute number-one focus was to make sure that everybody knew what was happening and what the new priorities were as quickly as possible – what we’d heard from ministers, and also what their preferences were, how they liked to work.”
Place-based policy
Healey joined the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities – as it was then known – in February 2023 as part of a perm sec shuffle caused by the creation of the science, business and energy security departments. She recalls being “thrilled” at the move, drawn by the department’s “huge, really significant cross-government agenda”, comprising closely connected social and economic policies that lend themselves to systemic thinking.
She contrasts this to her old departmental home: “I absolutely loved DCMS, but it’s not always straightforward to explain why heritage policy was in the same department as cybersecurity. Whereas at MHCLG, it is all about the places that people live and what they mean to them. And so working in a way that’s really coherent, both internally but also across government, is very, very important to me.”
This incudes a place-based approach that makes the most of MHCLG’s wide geographic spread. “The thing that’s really unusual about MHCLG,” she says, “is that, for a primarily policy department, we’ve got a vast number of offices around the country.” This is appropriate for the department that “thinks from the perspective of place like no other”. Her ambition is for teams in each of those locations to work on making “place-based policymaking” a reality.
Alongside this, there’s a natural fit between MHCLG and the Places for Growth agenda – government’s drive to relocate thousands of civil service roles out of London. Like most departments, MHCLG has made good progress overall, but shifting senior roles has been a slower job. This matters, Healey says, because good leaders play a key role in building a community that attracts talented people to the civil service.
“If you don’t have enough SCS in a location, then the location is not as vibrant, not as driven,” she says. “We’ve got some amazing directors and deputy directors who spend their time making the places where they work really fantastic offices to work in. But if there are places that don’t have enough senior officials... it can be really hard to encourage more people to take jobs in a place where they might not be sitting on a daily basis with the rest of their team.”
In 2024, the department focused particularly on building SCS presence in Wolverhampton – home to its second HQ – and in Darlington, where MHCLG is part of what Healey calls the “increasingly huge and growing government economic campus”.
SCS leads were appointed in both these locations last spring, with the Darlington role advertised specifically in Darlington and Wolverhampton as part of a drive to advertise a certain proportion of jobs for locations outside of London. Doing this tests the market of talent in those areas, and enables MHCLG work with universities and other employers – including departments in those locations – to “spread the word” about civil service jobs.
Mission-led working
Healey describes MHCLG as a “mission-foundational department”, working across almost every mission established by the new government, although it doesn’t explicitly lead on any of them. “Missions are real in local places,” she says. “The connections between policy challenges – such as growth or safe streets – and the solutions to those challenges are much more obvious in a local setting than in the meeting rooms of government buildings.”
The foundational role, as Healey sees it, “is to connect the missions with those places. We’ve always been an advocate for local and regional government, and the main conduit between central government and local governments. We can, I think, use that role to give people access to help shape and deliver the missions.”
She echoes this when asked what kind of leadership a mission-driven civil service would need. “Mission-driven leadership is all about collaboration, isn’t it? It’s about openness, and keeping your eyes on what it is you’re trying to achieve.” This shared goal is “the North Star”, she says. “That makes a real difference for people’s sense of inspiration about what they’re trying to do.”
Healey also recalls the importance of a clear North Star, or a “galvanising” vision when she reflects on her experience of cross-government working throughout her career. A standout example, she says, was work on the Children’s Plan, led by Ed Balls when he was secretary of state for children, schools and families. The plan was a “galvanising document” which was developed collaboratively with other departments and set out a clear aim of how government would “make the UK the best place in the world for children to grow up”.
"The connections between and solutions to policy challenges are much more obvious in a local setting than in the meeting rooms of government buildings"
Healey says she remembers clearly the day when a DG in the department – Sir Tom Jeffery – came up with that strapline. “I’m a real ‘doer’ so I was already focused on making the thing happen, thinking much less about the big picture vision,” she recalls. “But one day Tom said in a meeting with [Balls] ‘We’re here to make the UK the best place in the world for children to grow up’ and everyone in the room thought ‘That’s it! That’s what this is about.’”
That’s not to say the doing wasn’t important, she continues, explaining that underneath the Children’s Plan were a set of Public Service Agreements, negotiated as part of the spending review which took place at the same time. These pushed through delivery, she said, but the statement and strategy were key in building a common focus.
Healey is no stranger to driving collaboration across a system – at DExEU, she was one of two directors general helping to build the department once it was formed by then-prime minister Theresa May. Likewise, MHCLG and DCMS rely on collaborative working in different ways. So how does one make that kind of leadership work?
“Some of it is about mindset,” she says. “Asking yourself: ‘Do I have the right answer to this or is somebody else likely to have as good an answer as I have?’ It’s being really respectful of broader perspectives and wanting to know what other people’s experience of your policy agenda and delivery is, because that will be a fantastic indication of whether you got it right or not.”
Devolution
Though its name has changed, MHCLG’s underlying focus remains very similar.
Government after government has declared the benefit of handing more powers to local and regional areas, but progress has been patchy and slow. In recent years, however, there have been some key shifts, such as the establishment of elected mayors in some regions – which Healey describes as an “essential, established part of the architecture of government and governance in England” – and wide devolution deals known as “trailblazers” for a few key areas. These deals, initially covering greater Manchester and the West Midlands, gave the combined authorities power over areas like transport and skills, and the government was also building proposals to give these areas a single funding settlement, rather than a patchwork of grants from different departments.
"Collaborative leadership is about mindset. Asking yourself: ‘Do I have the right answer to this or is somebody else likely to have as good an answer as I have?’"
CSW spoke to Healey in the autumn, before the new government had set out its plan on English devolution. Avoiding policy details, therefore, we discussed instead what she saw as the key factors that would influence the success of this agenda. First, she noted the challenge of capability and capacity within local government.
“You want to be sure that you’re not loading responsibility onto organisations that are not ready for it, or capable of making the most of it. You want it to be a success,” she says. Linked to this is the need to test and follow evidence, rather than pushing ahead with models that may not work. For this reason, she says, the trailblazer model has been a really good idea, allowing new structures to “run in those places before you roll it out everywhere”.
She also reflects on the need to reassure peers across Whitehall about the mechanisms – not just the benefits – of devolution. “We need to do a really good job of recognising the concerns that departments might have about meeting their policy objectives, while devolving a lot more control to local areas,” she says. “We have a model of personal accountability from permanent secretaries with the spending of public money to parliament. And it’s important that we sustain that while at the same time giving greater responsibility to local areas.”
Several weeks after we meet, the English devolution white paper is published, outlining how the new government will address these challenges. The white paper sets out what it calls a “simple” goal to drive a step change in devolution: all areas in England should eventually be covered by strategic authorities, modelled on the successful combined mayoral authorities structure. To start with MCAs will get the extra powers currently only available for trailblazers. All MCAs will also get a single funding settlement, described as an integrated settlement. This would give local areas greater flexibility over how they spend money, accompanied by greater accountability through a “single, mutually agreed outcomes framework, monitored over a spending-review period”.
Grenfell and listening to challenge
Healey joined MHCLG long after the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire and can’t yet give a detailed response to the specifics of the inquiry report, but she’s surely been reflecting on the lessons. Does she think MHCLG already does things differently, as a result of the tragedy? Yes, she says, “not least the immense focus on building safety, moving from a very small number of people who felt that was their prime responsibility to a significant team. There has also been a programme of remediation and a substantial change in the regulatory environment.” Yet, she warns against complacency about the broader lessons from Grenfell, “and which you see repeated in inquiries such as Windrush and the Horizon scandal”.
These inquiries, she says, should prompt questions like: “Are we listening enough to the voices of those people who we don’t normally hear from? Are we open to criticism? And when somebody says they think something isn’t working, do we reach for the line that explains why it’s working – or do we actually look at whether they might be right?” She adds: “This department was criticised in the report, rightly... the work ensuring that you are open to challenge doesn’t stop.”
Healey recalls a piece of work she did with a cohort of officials on the Future Leaders Scheme some years ago. Using People Survey data, they found organisations where staff felt safe to challenge were also the most engaged. Next, they looked at the organisations with the highest scores around challenge: “In almost every instance, there was a formalised but systematic way of getting feedback and input... saying, ‘we want to listen to what you’ve got to say’.” There is more to do on this, she says. “It’s clearly incredibly important to make sure you don’t retreat into, ‘I’m only listening to what I want to hear’.”
It soon becomes clear when talking to Healey that she is deeply interested in people – both the stories they tell and how she can learn from them. When CSW asks what she might have been if she hadn’t become a civil servant, her two replies reflect this passion for people.
When she was seven, she says, she wanted to run the National Portrait Gallery. “I love portraiture. Always have – it’s the fact that each one is a sort of story of a genuine person who represents something important, or is telling a story of the past. You can see into a different time as well, to the time when the portrait was made. I just think that’s really exciting and interesting.”
Though she never got that job, she did get to work closely with the Portrait Gallery at DCMS, she notes with evident pride, before adding that she might also have considered a job in retail. “Shops are really interesting places. How do you provide an environment people want to be in? How do you both respond to and shape what it is that people want to buy? I love the interaction with the public. I used to work in a bookshop, and I just loved talking to people.”
It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that Healey has chaired the Civil Service People Board for several years. It’s an agenda that really matters to her, she says, and takes up a substantial amount of her time.
On this year’s agenda for the board will be a refreshed civil service workforce plan – which, according to the Budget Red Book, will set out “bold options to improve skills, harness digital technology and drive better outcomes for public services” – as well as an update on the civil service D&I strategy. Getting the latter right will be a “big priority”, Healey says, as the board aims to “set out an ambitious evidence-based vision on diversity and inclusion”.
While the details of these plans are still being developed, clues to how Healey will approach them can be found in her description of the Civil Service People Plan, launched last spring. “What I really liked about the plan,” she says, “is that it’s a very concrete set of actions that are trying to genuinely change the experience of people working in the civil service: how they recruit, how they do learning and development and how they can rely on their HR function to really perform.”
She also highlights new civil service line-management standards – rolled out in August – that set a baseline of capability for all line managers as a key development. “When you think about people’s actual experience,” she says, “it so often comes back to how great their manager is – or not, as the case may be.
“I think if you could get everybody recognising the value of line management and up to that standard, that is the area where we can make the biggest difference to people’s performance and their experience of working in the civil service and therefore solve a lot of things like retention and turnover.”
Another insight into Healey’s character emerges when CSW asks what keeps her awake at night: “My mantra is that you should only worry about things when worrying about it is going to help, and a lot of the time it doesn’t help. So I don’t worry about it.”
She adopted this approach, she says, after watching the film Bridge of Spies, which explores the relationship between an American lawyer, played by Tom Hanks, and a suspected Russian spy, played by Mark Rylance.
“At various points during the film, Hanks says to Rylance: ‘You might go to the electric chair. You don’t seem worried.’ Rylance just replies, ‘Would it help?’... I remember thinking: that’s such a good mantra. Worry about things when it will help. It’s a good way of trying to manage stress, to ask yourself: ‘What is the stuff that I can really make a difference to by being concerned about it?’”
Housebuilding target
The government has pledged to build 1.5 million new homes by the end of the parliament – or 370,000 homes a year, well above the number built in recent years. It has set mandatory targets for local authorities in a reformed National Planning Policy Framework, which also requires councils to review green-belt boundaries and identify lower-quality “greybelt” land that could be made available for new developments. If councils are failing to meet their targets, central government will step in to oversee delivery.
CSW met Healey before the new NPPF came out, but it was already apparent that housing targets would require bold action. Beyond the difficulties of driving delivery at a local level, industry has raised concerns over skills shortages and other factors that limit the UK’s capacity to get building.
The only area where government plays a role in delivery is via the Affordable Housing Programme, which supports councils and housing associations to build more social housing. The AHP got a £500m boost in the most recent Budget, but has itself been hampered by delays and challenges. In July 2024, the government announced the programme would deliver between 110,000 and 130,000 houses by 2026, compared to an initial target of 180,000 set in 2020.
What has MHCLG learnt from these challenges? Healey says it “embarked on a really serious programme”, thinking hard about how to respond to the kind of supply-chain and wider market challenges that impacted the AHP – like the pandemic and sharp rises in inflation.
A lesson from that experience, she says, is the need to closely monitor and step in early if things are not going to plan. Indeed, she attributes recent rises in the number of houses built in part to “fantastic work done in the department to track delivery and monitor what’s happening on the ground in a much more active sense”. But it’s also important, she suggests, to design systems that allow for flexibility in the way delivery partners respond to external shocks.
As an example, she points to the levelling up funds given by the previous government to support regeneration work locally. After councils found it hard to spend these in time, the department radically changed the way requests for flexibility were handled. This meant local authorities could adapt their plans in the face of changing circumstances.