Sir Gus O’Donnell, or ‘Gus’, as he’s universally known within Whitehall, has had a busy day. Kicking off with cabinet and concluding with his sit-down with Whitehall & Westminster World, the cabinet secretary has squeezed in meetings, conferences, planning for Civil Service Live and much more besides – but he’s not complaining.

“This is a tremendous job,” he says, clutching a mug of late afternoon tea in his office overlooking Horseguards. “And one of the best parts is that every day brings its own challenges. You just don’t know what’s going to be thrown at you. It’s great when things work, when policies are successful and you can see government making a real difference to people. I’ve learned a lot. I think in every job if you carry on learning every day, then that’s great.”

That every day is different has been amply demonstrated by some of the events which have tested Gordon Brown’s administration since last July. In the first month alone, Foot and Mouth, terrorism, floods all struck… The list seems endless. “You name it, it has been thrown at this prime minister, and I’m glad to say that our crisis-management facilities, Cobra, came through. Of course, there are times when things don’t go as well as you would like,” concedes O’Donnell. “But I can’t grumble. As I said, I’ve learned a lot.”

Of course, Sir Gus had already built up a rapport with the prime minister and many of his advisers during their years working together at the Treasury. He is quick to agree that this has been valuable. “Any cabinet secretary needs to have a personal relationship with the prime minister of the day. In my working relationship with this prime minister, it was good that we weren’t completely new to each other and we weren’t starting afresh,” he says.

The transition to the Brown government, which seems so long ago now, was widely seen as a textbook operation. Smoothly handled by the civil service, it prompted few of the damaging headlines that some seemed to expect, and O’Donnell is proud of how his colleagues coped with the changes. “It was a demonstration of the professionalism of civil servants that the transition went so well,” he says.

“Changes in political leadership are very sudden and very dramatic in this country. In the United States, there is an election and then another couple of months before the new president takes over. In the UK, one prime minister gets in a car to go to see the Queen. Then a new prime minister comes back within a matter of less than two hours in this case. But because there was an uncontested leadership election, we had that extra degree of certainty for a period of six weeks. And I think we used the time well.”

By all accounts Sir Gus enjoyed a good working relationship with Tony Blair and his aides. Asked for his assessment of how Blair and his successor differ, O’Donnell talks about their different characters and experiences. “As you would expect, they have different styles and different strengths. The most obvious thing is that the circumstances were also different. Mr Blair was prime minister for ten years, and unusually for a prime minister, Number 10 was his first government job. That shaped his approach, and by the time I came in 2005, he had very clear ideas about what he wanted to do. Mr Brown had of course been chancellor for those ten years. So he came in with his vast experience of the Treasury and government, and that has shaped his approach. So it’s different experiences, different styles, and different strengths.

One of the key changes in Downing Street was Brown and O’Donnell’s decision to appoint Jeremy Heywood – whose previous jobs included as principal private secretary to Tony Blair – as permanent secretary in Number 10. Asked how this is going, Sir Gus says Heywood has made a flying start. “It’s going really well. Jeremy was leading co-ordination of domestic policy while he was at the Cabinet Office. Tom Scholar, before him, did a great job, and I think Jeremy is doing a tremendous job. He has exceptional experience dealing with senior ministers from both parties over many years and knows all the main issues well.”

Prior to his move to Number 10 Heywood had been working outside of the civil service in a senior position in the City. Such a career move, while somewhat uncommon, echoes a point which Matthew Taylor made in the last edition of Whitehall & Westminster World. Taylor, who was formerly chief strategist for Tony Blair, told this newspaper that “all civil servants should spend a significant amount of time in local government… I wouldn’t allow any civil servant to get beyond a certain level unless they spent at least a year in local government. This is crucial”.

O’Donnell accepts some but not all of this. “One of the things that I think Matthew Taylor was talking about was the importance of knowing how to deal with elected officials,” he says.

“But what really matters is that those at the top of the civil service have got a good breadth of experience,” he reiterates. “Is that always going to be local authority? No. Some people have come in with experience of running a big charity. Others have had lots of private sector experience in a real customer-focused delivery area. These are all very valuable.

“Someone like Clare Chapman, coming in as workforce director-general at the Department of Health straight from a position as group personnel director at Tesco, clearly really knows about and understands what customers want. I think that this set of experience is tremendous. Would I say that someone like her can’t get on because she never worked in a local authority? No. But I would say that people should get as good a variety of experience as they can.”

Sir Gus has been a member of the civil service since 1979, when he joined the Treasury as an economist. Subsequent posts included being press secretary to the chancellor and prime minister – positions where he honed his excellent communication skills – and the UK’s executive director to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The civil service, then, is in his blood. Certainly, when he took the top job in August 2005 he hit the ground running. Ever mindful of the fact that the vast majority of the civil servants in this country – now just under half a million – work outside of London, he symbolically spent his first day in post outside of Whitehall, and soon unveiled initiatives on subjects such as diversity and what he calls his ‘4 P’s’: pride, pace, passion and professionalism – qualities that he wants all civil servants across the country to display.

But what’s next? Where does he go from here? O’Donnell has set out his four big priorities that he is urging his permanent secretaries to focus on going forward.

“One of them remains and will always remain, diversity,” he explains. “Second is skills. We’ve committed ourselves to the Leitch Review targets, and this is about enhancing skills levels across the whole of the civil service. We’ve done a lot at the more senior levels on things like professionalisation, particularly in finance and HR. What I want to do is spread this through all levels of the civil service so we can get all civil servants thinking about making the most of their skills.”

Next up is health and wellbeing, something that he says he thinks is “really important”. “I was at a conference and heard Professor Cary Cooper [the chairman of the Sunningdale Institute], talk about how a motivated, engaged and happy staff really perform a lot better. Ultimately this is all about helping us deliver better for the public.”


Sir Gus’ fourth priority is sustainability, “We have got to do our bit in terms of developing and meeting overall CO2 targets.” We’ve seen private companies do various initiatives in this, so we have got to do our bit as well, and that’s what we’re doing.”

O’Donnell’s satisfaction with how government and the civil service has tackled the issue of climate change is evident. “I’ve been really pleased about the way government worked on long term issues, like how we are going to secure our energy supplies for the future and how we are going to tackle climate change,” he says. “What started with some joint work between the Treasury and the Cabinet Office, headed by Nick Stern, has led to work that I think has made an international difference. Thought leadership around the world is changing the way governments are approaching this issue. If you look at the US presidential elections you see the three candidates all agreeing that climate change is real and we need to do something about it. So this work is literally going to change the world. What could be better than that?”

And in terms of what is probably his flagship reform, capability reviews, O’Donnell expresses satisfaction with their success. “We’re into the next stage now,” he says. “We’ve reviewed all the departments once and there were a lot of people who said we’d never get that far, so it’s good to get it started. We’re now on to the second stage, re-reviewing departments, getting the changes that we need and taking the process forward. This is going well.”

Asked about the fact that Sir David Normington and his colleagues at the Home Office have long earmarked their re-review as a pivotal moment in that department’s reform programme, O’Donnell says it shows how the reviews can be a real driver for change. “Departments know they’ve got to change and constantly improve,” he says. “It will be great to have the review teams come back in and assess how things have gone. I hope that they will see the progress that certainly I have seen as I have gone through the stocktake data.”

Looking further ahead, he identifies the cross-cutting Public Service Agreements as a real priority. “Capability reviews were great in focusing in on departments, the next stage is for us to get departments working together effectively,” he explains. “We’re doing pilots now, including here at the Cabinet Office, looking at how good we are at doing this, and I think they will show up some capability needs. I think we will find that we have to work even more closely with local authorities and third sector people and organisations. We need to know if these relationships are working well and how we can strengthen them.”

One of O’Donnell’s priorities as cabinet secretary has always been to get out of Whitehall to meet frontline staff and to showcase to the outside world the best of what the civil service has to offer. So with this in mind, how frustrated was he by the HMRC data loss incident? After all, you could argue that it made his job that much harder, damaging the reputation of the civil service in the eyes of the public, politicians and business.

He admits, somewhat ruefully, that there’s no point in denying the incident had an impact. “But what is most important of all is that we win the public’s trust in respect of handling their data,” he adds. “Once we’ve got their trust, and that consent, we can use data to improve the service we are offering people. This can really help. We don’t want to be asking people the same questions over and over again. I always say that I’d like to get to a similar stage as Amazon. There, if you buy a book, it recalls your previous purchases and recommends others. When we give people a service it would be great to be able to say, ‘This service fits your needs and here are others which might further help you’. This would be another way of improving what we do for the most disadvantaged groups. But fundamentally, even to get started on this agenda, we must first make sure that the data people give us is secure, and the review I’m leading is looking very carefully at how we can improve this.”

Another priority for the future is encouraging staff of all grades to seize the day and come up with fresh and radical ideas. “We don’t want things like capability reviews and reforms to be top down,” he says eagerly. “I want all civil servants to be radical and to make things happen. I want them to innovate and to take well managed risks. And senior civil servants need to think how they inspire their troops and how they make things change.”

This is so important, he continues, because the public wants the state to do more and more. “People want the government to help tackle issues like obesity, for example,” he says. “We are going to have to find innovative ways to really help people. In the health area, there are lots of things where if only people changed a small part of their lifestyle, they would be tremendously better off. We have to help them do that.”

But that’s for another day. Heading back to his desk, he continues to have a bounce in his step. “It’s fantastic being cabinet secretary. I have to pinch myself every day.”