Next week, I am looking forward to giving the annual Kerslake Memorial Lecture, held in honour of the late Lord Bob Kerslake and hosted by PSC, one of the organisations he chaired.
Bob's untimely death in 2023 robbed public life in the UK of a person of wide and deep experience, a lifelong devotion to public service and a friend and mentor to so many people. I miss him greatly, as I know many readers of The MJ do.
I first met Bob in central government, when he was appointed permanent secretary of the then Department of Communities and Local Government in 2010 and I was minister of state. Bob was not Whitehall-raised but had made his reputation – which endures – in local government.
Taking his first class maths degree from Warwick University to train as an accountant at the Greater London Council, he went on to be chief executive of Hounslow LBC. Most famously, in the 10 years from 1997 at Sheffield City Council, he turned the authority from a troubled one to a showcase for what our great cities could become with visionary leadership.
Preparing for the lecture, I was reminded of the extraordinary skills and abilities that the best local authority officers command and am convinced Bob's path from local government to permanent secretary and head of the civil service should be much more commonly trod.
Bob was not the only brilliant local government officer to be a great national government official. I recruited into the Cities Policy Unit several excellent people from local government – like Mike Wiltshire and Kris Krasnowski, now senior officials in central government.
In his 2013 book, If Mayors Ruled the World, the American political theorist Benjamin Barber describes how mayors of big cities need to have a much wider and more developed range of abilities than government ministers.
They need to be able to rove across multiple areas of policy, manage the interactions between them and be pragmatic problem-solvers rather than ideologues.
They also need to bring people together from different walks of life and professions and bind them in common projects, learn from how their peers in other cities do things and emulate them.
All these qualities describe what successful local authority chief executives do too. And Bob exercised these abilities like an orchestra conductor, effortlessly bringing different instruments and voices together, with a driving vision that created more than the sum of its parts.
When I was a cabinet minister and Bob was head of the civil service, I often consulted with him.
If I was struggling to resolve a problem, a 10-minute coffee with Bob would see him understand the complexity, reflect on what could be done without pulling rank, and very often go away and make the calls himself to implement his creative win-win solution.
He personified the motto Harold Macmillan pinned to the door of the Number 10 private office: ‘Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles every knot.'
I felt very well served by my officials in Whitehall during 10 years as a minister and I am honoured to maintain friendships with many of them.
But looking back, why were there so few senior Whitehall officials with experience of local government? Why is there a glass wall between two outlets of public service that are closely allied? How ridiculous that one set are invariably referred to as ‘officials' and the other as ‘officers'.
Bob was not the only brilliant local government officer to be a great national government official. I recruited into the Cities Policy Unit several excellent people from local government – like Mike Wiltshire and Kris Krasnowski, now senior officials in central government.
The brilliant Tom Riordan is drawing on his exceptional tenure as chief executive of Leeds to be second permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care. And the traffic is two-way: Tom Walker, a star MHCLG official, is currently a chief officer at Essex CC.
There are others too. But still too few. What Bob brought to central government was not only his exceptional personal talent and deep values, his experience and vision was also developed through the amazing academy of service in local government. We should draw on it more.
Greg Clark is a former Conservative levelling up secretary and executive chair of the University of Warwick's Innovation District
