(05-12-2014 21:04 )Mellow Wrote: [ -> ]Sky news is reporting today that the next Chief Exec could be a woman.
http://news.sky.com/story/1386533/treasu...-ofcom-job
Rumoured to be Sharon White, but that could be smokescreen or could fail at one of the many hurdles, unless this is an official leak after the selection process has been gone through but not been signed off.
![[Image: Sharon-White-008.jpg]](http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-620/h--/q-95/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/6/27/1372362844243/Sharon-White-008.jpg)
Here is some info from 2012:
Sharon is currently Director General for Public Spending at HM Treasury. Prior to this role Sharon was formerly a Director General at the Ministry of Justice and the Department for International Development.
In Oct 2013 she was appointed second permanent secretary at the Treasury with responsibility for managing Britain’s public finances, including overseeing a fiscal squeeze expected to last until 2020
FT Oct 30 2013, though she was appointed head of spending in March 2012, presumably 1 rung lower on the departmental ladder.
[Hmm, where I work internal job moves are banned for the first 2 years. She is moving after just over a year. Encouraged to apply perhaps? Or jumping a sinking ship?]
Nuffield College Oxford 2012 Wrote:Sharon joined the Civil Service in 1989 and worked at the Treasury in the early 90s. She spent time in Washington at the British Embassy analysing US welfare reforms and then worked on the same subject at the Downing Street policy unit. She then worked on international development at the World Bank before taking the role of policy director at the Department for International Development. After beginning a family Sharon returned to domestic policy at the Department for Work and Pensions and the Ministry of Justice, before returning to the Treasury in late 2011.
Sharon has a BA Hons Economics from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and an MSc in Economics from University College London and is married with two small children.
Guardian Wrote:It doesn't seem long since Lord Richard Best, that indefatigable housing activist and networker; then head of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, said he had roped an outstanding young civil servant into one of the philanthropy's projects for social good. She was, he said, not just smart, but intensely aware of issues around social justice. [Just what we need, another "socially aware" interventionist]
Sharon White has now reached the top of Whitehall, becoming second permanent secretary at the Treasury. It's speedy promotion – White is in her early forties – yet she has served her time in Whitehall's salt mines, such as the Department for Work and Pensions. Her CV bursts with fascinating assignments, including stints working abroad at the British Embassy in Washington DC, at the World Bank and as director general in the Department for International Development.
... As second PS she is takes charge of the department's role as finance ministry, ...
Being female and black, she is on many wish lists [and a mum with young kids, dont forget that when filling in the Equalities form] ...
White's partner is Robert Chote, the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, but neither during his present job nor in his previous role as director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies has a whisper been heard of information shared that should not have been. The couple are conspicuously discreet, devoted to family and work – and occasional trips to the theatre.
But discretion can cover omission. White doesn't do grandstanding, but sometimes you might wish the Treasury's director of public spending to paint a big picture. On her successive visits to the Commons Public Accounts Committee, she has maintained the Treasury line, which is basically to abjure responsibility for the quality and effectiveness of public spending, concentrating instead on volume control. Very little about how cutting spending in one area may paradoxically increase it in another; or about investing today for savings tomorrow. [Be interesting to see if she changes when she no longer has to toe the line of bosses above her]
...
When annual staff turnover at the Treasury is 18% its effectiveness is impaired, and White's spending teams tend to be limited and formulaic in their approach to how departments connect their budgets and their outputs. [Limited and formulaic approach? Oh dear, turn the handle, push out a sanction.]
...
Quote:Before becoming a civil servant, she worked for a church in a deprived area of Birmingham.FT Oct 30 2013
Oh shit. A religious connection. Of course it might just have been an employment thing rather than a vocation, and her views may have matured, but still worrying. Is she an active Church member, and thus part of an opinionated minority? Socially interventionist? Morally driven to protect people from themselves? Who knows.
Ah, it seems the
Telegraph (Nov 29 2010) knows, having written this in Nov 2010:
Quote:Chote and his wife, Sharon White, married in 1997. The couple live in Hampstead, London, have two young sons, and are regular churchgoers.
White is a high-ranking civil servant in criminal justice, who used to work in Tony Blair's Downing Street Policy Unit.
Worked in the policy unit of good old Catholic Tony eh? Not compulsory to be religious, but I doubt it would have been an impediment either.
Sharon Whites husband, Robert Chote, is, or was an elected member of the Parochial Church Council of Hampstead Parish Church, unless there is another person of that name. He was reelected for 3 years in 2010. Its not an onerous duty, with just 5 meetings a year, but it does suggest that he and, by extension, his family, are not representative of the ordinary population and may be more moralistic.
EXECTIVE SUMMARY
Mum with young kids
Religious
Track record of following the government line and not rocking the boat
Kept her maiden name
Feminist?
Socially aware
But ... bean counter focussed on short term finances rather than deeper consequences?
