Baroness Hogg

Sir John Major had Sarah Hogg at his side for four years after he appointed her head of the policy unit in Number 10. He says in his autobiography that “she was respected by civil service mandarins and by politicians”, and also notes her “sharp brain, often hidden behind an engaging giggle”.

Indeed, Hogg has long had close links with the Conservative Party: her late father, Baron Boyd-Carpenter, was a minister in Harold Macmillan’s government, and she is married to Douglas Hogg, one of John Major’s cabinet members and now a fellow peer.

Speaking to CSW, Hogg says that she “took on the [non-exec’s] role because I have known the Treasury for a long time and have a great regard for it.” She certainly has the right CV: as well as her experience in Number 10, Hogg was for a long time a financial journalist and has been business editor or economics editor on a number of national newspapers.

Dame Deirdre Hutton
Having been on the Treasury’s board for two years, Deirdre Hutton says she still finds the role “fascinating”, adding that “The Treasury is at the heart of government; how can you not find it a privilege?”

Dame Deirdre has plenty of experience sitting on boards. Since she began her career aged 17 as a researcher for Glasgow’s Chamber of Commerce, she’s spent the majority of her career on the boards of public sector organisations.

From consumer councils through to food safety authorities and parole boards, Dame Deirdre has seen her fair share of efficiency drives. “Almost everything I have done has been about making organisations work more efficiently and, generally speaking, that means working with less,” she tells CSW.

In particular, Hutton found her experience as chair of the Food Standards Agency instructive: she took over from a chair who was “extremely gifted in policy”, and so decided to focus on “making the organisation work more effectively”. The best way to do this, she discovered, was to appoint a chief executive who came in from the private sector – there are clear parallels with the civil service professionalisation agenda, and the beefing-up of departmental boards with private sector expertise
.
In her spare time, Hutton is something of an opera buff – most recently seeing Adriana Lecouvreur at Covent Garden, which she rates highly. She also enjoys hill-walking in the North-West of Scotland, and “good company over dinner”.

Sir Callum McCarthy
The former director of the Bank of England and CEO of Barclays Bank North America is, for the most part, taking a well-earned break from financial issues. But since 2008 he has set aside the time for a role on the Treasury’s board, to which Sir Callum McCarthy brings a huge amount of experience. Having worked in the Department for Trade and Industry throughout the 1970s, he has experience of coalition government, a large budget deficit and, indeed, a radical Conservative administration seeking to quickly reform the public sector. This experience came in useful recently, he tells CSW, when the board helped senior civil servants in the department to “prepare seriously for the prospect of how to face an election and the possibility of a new administration”.

As a rule the job of a non-exec, McCarthy believes, is to provide advice within an organisation – and to keep quiet outside it. “I might tell my friends what I think of a policy,” he says, “but I wouldn’t tell anybody else. I think it’s terribly important that people who do any of the non-executive jobs don’t give running commentaries on their views.”

In his spare time, Sir Callum keeps two beehives in the back of his garden and, ever since a nasty stinging incident, “takes great pains to do all the manual manipulation while fully protected”. This seems appropriate for a Treasury non-exec – as does another of McCarthy’s habits: the occasional distribution of honey.

Michael O’Higgins
The Treasury board has had no problem meeting the requirement, set out by the government’s lead non-executive director Lord Browne to a select committee recently, that each board must have “at least one independent non-executive director who would be regarded as a financial expert”.

Michael O’Higgins not only complements the macroeconomic knowledge of other non-executive directors but, as chair of the Audit Commission, also brings particular expertise in scrutinising organisations’ administration spending.

He tells CSWhe took the job in 2008 because “I’m an economist by training and I’ve been interested in public policy most of my working life. I was an academic who wrote about public policy issues, and a friend saw the advertisement and said: ‘This would be perfect for you’, so I applied.” He has found it “very stimulating”, particularly because the financial crisis hit just after he took on the role.

As government seeks to do more for less, O’Higgins thinks departments should “start with what is required for the public, and then work back to whether there are other ways we could do it”. In particular, he notes the importance of channel shift and says civil servants should ask: “Are there ways that self-service could be used without use of public servants’ time?”
In his spare time, O’Higgins likes watching sports, and recently returned from a trip to the Ashes in Australia. He also enjoys wine and cookery, and says that his signature dish is a slow-cooked shank of lamb.