Everything about Richard Mottram totally explained
Sir Richard Mottram GCB (born
April 23,
1946) is a British
civil servant, who retired in
2007 from his most recent senior post as
Permanent Secretary, Intelligence, Security and Resilience in the
Cabinet Office.
Education and early career
Mottram was educated at
King Edward VI Camp Hill school in
Birmingham. He entered the central government civil service in
1968 aged 22 with a first class degree in
International relations from
Keele University. Most of his peers were from
Oxbridge. From 1975 until 1977 he served in the
Defence and Overseas Secretariat of the
Cabinet Office. He was then the secretary of two study groups on the rationale for and system options for a successor to the UK's strategic nuclear deterrent which led subsequently to the decision to adopt Trident. He was then appointed private secretary to the permanent under secretary, MOD: Sir Frank Cooper. From 1982-1986 he was
private secretary to a succession of
Secretaries of State for Defence -John Nott, Michael Heseltine and the late George Younger.He was Heseltine's Private Secretary at the time of his resignation in 1986 over the
Westland affair.
In
1985, as
private secretary to
Michael Heseltine, the Secretary of State at the
Ministry of Defence, he was a witness for the prosecution in the trial of
Clive Ponting, who was later acquitted of breaking the
Official Secrets Act for passing information to
Labour MP Tam Dalyell about the sinking of the
Belgrano during the
Falklands war. When asked whether answers to parliamentary questions should be truthful and not deliberately ambiguous or misleading, there was a long silence before he replied: "In highly charged political matters, one person's ambiguity may be another person's truth".
From 1986 to 1989 he was the
Under Secretary responsible for the defence programme, and from 1989 to 1992 the Deputy Secretary with responsibilities for UK defence policy and strategy, and defence relations with other countries at the time of the end of the
Cold War.
Multi-purpose Permanent Secretary
After this, in 1992, he was appointed as a
Permanent Secretary, first at the
Office of Public Service and Science in the
Cabinet Office. His responsibilities there included public service change, Civil Service management questions, and science and technology policy and the science budget.
Then in 1995, he became Permanent Secretary at the
Ministry of Defence, where he worked on, among other things, the Labour Government's Strategic Defence Review.
In 1998 he became permanent secretary at the
Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions. Mottram's tenure at DETR saw important developments in environmental pollicy and the publication of White papers on Urban and rural policy. A 10 year transport plan was developed building on the 1998 White paper on Integrated transport. One aspect of transport - railways - tended to dominate in the media. New institutional arrangements were introduced with a Strategic Rail Authority alongside the Rail Regulator but the appointments by
John Prescott of Sir
Alastair Morton as chairman of the
Strategic Rail Authority and
Tom Winsor as
Rail Regulator proved an unhappy partnership which ended in 2001 when Morton resigned and was replaced by
Richard Bowker. Mottram's term also saw the rail crashes at
Ladbroke Grove,
Hatfield and
Potters Bar. The national railway infrastructure company
Railtrack got into serious financial difficulties after the
Hatfield rail crash in October 2000 and on 7 October 2001 was put into administration on the petition of the Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions
Stephen Byers MP in very controversial circumstances. Mottram was closely involved in the preparations for the administration of Railtrack and in July 2005 was called as a witness in the largest class legal action ever brought in the English courts, when 49,500 shareholders of Railtrack sued the Secretary of State for Transport and the Department for Transport for damages for
misfeasance in public office. The case was lost because the shareholders couldn't prove targeted malice on the part of Stephen Byers, that's an intention maliciously to injure the shareholders.
On 11 September 2001, after both
World Trade Center towers and the
Pentagon had been hit in the
attacks, a special advisor in Mottram's department -
Jo Moore - sent an email to the press office of her department which read:
Mottram was still at the DETR in
2002 when, after further controversy over alleged "burying of bad news" involving Moore and
Martin Sixsmith, the department's Director of Communications, Stephen Byers announced that both Moore and Sixsmith had decided to resign. Mottram was in the middle of negotiations with Sixsmith at the time of the Byers announcement. According to Sixsmith he said to a colleague as Byers headed to the interview studios:
After Sixmith included this quote in an interview with the Sunday Times about his "resignation' it was picked up extensively in the media and tended to be reported in bowdlerised form as "f***ed", leading Tony Wright, the Chairman of the Public Administration Committee at the time, to comment to Mottram that "Our note-takers have trouble with asterisks."
At the same time - May 2002 - as Stephen Byers resigned as secretary of state, Mottram was moved to the
Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as permanent secretary. In his time at DWP a number of innovative policies were introduced on welfare to work and pensions and the department agreed to achieve staff reductions of 40000 posts against a starting point of 130000 staff (full time equivalents), much the largest efficiency-related staff saving within central government. By the time Mottram left DWP, implementation of this saving was well underway.
Sir Richard moved to a strategic position at the
Cabinet Office on
11 November 2005 as
Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator (still as a permanent secretary and also as a safe pair of hands with wide experience across government). He succeeded
Bill Jeffrey. He also took on the role of
Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. His post was subsequently retitled as Permanent Secretary Intelligence, Security, and Resilience, Cabinet Office.
As part of this role, created to parallel but learn from creation in the
U.S. of a
Department of Homeland Security, "he
- oversees the Civil Contingencies Secretariat and the Intelligence and Security Secretariat and
- leads interdepartmental work on counter-terrorism and crisis management".
According to the
Cabinet Office explanation of his role, "
The Permanent Secretary Intelligence, Security, and Resilience is the Accounting Officer for the Single Intelligence Account, from which the three Security and Intelligence Agencies are funded. He also acts as Deputy Chair of the Civil Contingencies Committee, supports the Home Secretary in his role as Chair and, in the event of any serious incident requiring central government coordination, acts as the Government's senior Crisis Manager."
Sir Richard also chairs the
Joint Intelligence Committee, whose credibility needed to be reestablished after intelligence reports were apparently "sexed-up" for PR purposes during the chairmanship of
John Scarlett. The JIC's role had come under scrutiny in the review of the information about
weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq and the
Hutton Inquiry into the suicide of MoD weapons expert,
Dr. David Kelly.
It was announced in July 2007 that Sir Richard is to retire from the Civil Service in the autumn when the responsibilities he holds will be reorganised into two posts, and with the Cabinet Secretary taking on the Accounting Officer role.
Other roles
Sir Richard is a Governor and a Member of the Council of the
Ditchley Foundation, a Governor of
Ashridge Business School, and served as President and then a Board Member of the
Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management.
Offices held
Further Information
Get more info on 'Richard Mottram'.
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