Dame Lesley Strathie started her civil service career in 1972, after leaving school at the age of 16. She would eventually become chief executive and permanent secretary of HM Revenue and Customs, one of the biggest and most challenging government departments. She was unusual, not only as a woman who reached the top job, but also because, as her boss Sir Gus O’Donnell told CSW, “she had worked her way up” over a forty-year civil service career.
Strathie’s first role was in the Scottish Government’s health department, where she was an administrative assistant. She then moved to the Unemployment Benefit Service in London in 1984, where she was a benefit supervisor. In an impressive rise through the ranks, she was a district manager of the newly-created Employment Service by 1994, and by 2001 she had been appointed director for London of Jobcentre Plus, and then its chief operating officer.
By 2005, after only five years in the senior civil service, Strathie was appointed chief executive of Jobcentre Plus and second permanent secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions. While in post she drove through a £4bn change programme which transformed the effectiveness of the service. Edward Leigh, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, told Strathie at a hearing that if all programmes were run as well as Jobcentre Plus, they would do PAC out of a job.
During her time at DWP, Strathie helped to pioneer the biggest “back to the floor” programme in government, spending a week each year doing the job of one of her front-line staff.
In 2008, Strathie was appointed chief executive of HMRC. Reflecting on her tenure, cabinet secretary at the time Gus O’Donnell later said to CSW: “I think she was a bit of shock to them because they’d tended to have someone who was more of an expert on tax policy”, whereas Strathie’s background was operational. She brought a focus on the “tax gap”, O’Donnell recalled, and her negotiation in 2010 of a spending review settlement – which reinvested £900m into tackling avoidance, evasion and criminal activity – would have a lasting impact on the department.
Strathie’s era at HMRC was one in which jobs were being lost to automation, as people were increasingly filling in their tax returns online.
“She was very aware of the human side of that,” O’Donnell said. “The technology, these changes are going to happen, we needed to prepare for them and make sure we treated people fairly.” He described her travelling around the country to speak to staff about the implications of staff cuts and office closures. “One of her great strengths was being very honest,” he added.
O’Donnell also recalled that Strathie was “an influential voice” at Wednesday morning perm sec meetings “because she was different”.
“She was a great sort of element of diversity, in its broadest sense, to the ranks of perm secs – she would apply a very different lens to the rest of us who had grown up in the policy space and very rarely had sat opposite someone filling in a form to claim unemployment benefit,” he said. This made her someone “we all looked up to, because she could do something that none of us were remotely capable of doing – running operations with tens of thousands of people and very direct interaction with customers”.
“We used to talk a lot about the importance of operational experience but very few of us had it. Lesley was immersed in it,” O’Donnell added. “There were a lot of people who would chip in on policy or ministers, but she was saying, ‘Well never mind all that, is this going to work in practice? How does it feel from the customer point of view, from the person who’s just been made redundant walking into a Jobcentre for the first time in their lives?’”
Lesley Strathie was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath in 2010 for her services to public administration.
Sadly, Strathie did not live to continue her impressive career. She successfully fought cancer in 2003, but the disease returned in the summer of 2011 and she was forced to step down from her post in November of that year. She died in January 2012, at the age of 56.
In a CSW obituary following her death, Sir Leigh Lewis, a former DWP perm sec and long-time colleague, said she embodied the best of the civil service, in particular because of her “enormous compassion”.
He also said she “inspired huge affection in her colleagues – a fact reflected by the letters of support she received when she stood down, including many from people who’d worked with her over 20 years before”.
Ofcom boss Melanie Dawes, who was a director general at HMRC when Strathie led the department, later told CSW that Strathie had been “a hugely important” role model for her.
In a 2023 interview Dawes said: “She was extraordinary – a real inspiration. When I joined in the late ‘80s it was vanishingly unusual to be a senior woman in the civil service – or anywhere else. So those who were there, like Lesley, I have so much respect for. Yes, I had to push through some barriers along the way. But my generation of female civil servants benefited massively from the support of those women.”
O’Donnell noted that, as head of the operational delivery profession, Strathie worked hard to enhance the status of people in operational jobs at a time when the civil service hierarchy tended to put policy people on top.
Strathie could walk into any DWP or HMRC office and talk with real authority, because she had done the jobs that people in those offices were doing, according to O’Donnell. People on the civil service operational frontline were “suddenly seeing someone who had started off where they were as the leader”, he said, which helped counteract the assumption that all civil service leaders had to have gone to Oxbridge and got on the Fast Stream.
In 2013, the former HMRC perm sec became the namesake for the Dame Lesley Strathie Operational Excellence Award in the Civil Service Awards. “I can’t think of anyone better,” O’Donnell said. “She personified all the things you would want – someone who really cares about making the operational side of the civil service work, mainly because this is about delivering for customers who need us.”