Permanent secretary at the Department of Transport and then Revenue and Customs, Lin Homer invited challenge and aimed to learn from different perspectives
Over a 36-year public sector career, shaped by a time of significant transformation, Dame Lin Homer served as permanent secretary of two large government departments, chief executive of two local authorities, and leader of what was then known as the UK Border Agency. These roles, in controversial and highly visible areas of policy and operations, brought with them many challenges and – for Homer – a great deal of personal criticism.
Throughout these challenges she remained good humoured and tenacious, insisting on the importance of scrutiny while defending her decisions and always returning to the purpose of her work.
“I like doing things that bring me close to the public; something that the public cares about,” she told CSW in 2011 when she had just been appointed as perm sec at the Department of Transport, after nearly six years in the world of border control and immigration.
“I like the forms of public service that bring me into regular, if you like edgy, contact with ‘real’ people,” she said. “And I absolutely made a bid to move from one department that people have strong feelings about to another that I thought delivered an equally important and critical service”.
“If you’re in that space, the strength of opinion can make it controversial, but the passion that people feel over these services is what gives me the continuing desire to do it well,” she said. “I’ve been a public servant all my life, and as long as I’m working in the public sector I want to be in and around those services that really, really matter to people.”
Born in Norfolk in 1957, Homer went on to study at University College London, where she gained a law degree, and qualified as a solicitor in 1980. Her first job was for Reading Borough Council, followed by a 15-year stint at Hertfordshire County Council where she rose to be director of corporate services. By 1998 she was chief executive of Suffolk County Council, followed by three years in the top job at Birmingham City Council.
In 2005 Homer was criticised by the election commission for perceived failings in her role as returning officer in local elections in Birmingham, where large scale postal voting fraud was uncovered. She defended her role, saying that she had been in “strategic but not operational control”, and was cleared of deliberate obstruction in the case.
Criticisms nonetheless dogged her, and soon after this she left the chief exec post to take up her first civil service position: a director general role at what was then known as the Immigration and Nationality Directorate within the Home Office.
The directorate was soon in the middle of a high-profile scandal around the release of foreign prisoners, which led to the resignation of Home Secretary Charles Clarke and prompted his successor John Reid to utter his infamous judgement that the Home Office was “not fit for purpose”. omer maintained his confidence in Homer, however, and she embarked on a long period of organisational reform which would see the directorate ultimately renamed as the UK Border Agency.
Speaking to CSW in 2011, Homer said the reorganisations made the most of “enormous synergy between customs and immigration”, improving operations but also giving staff the opportunity to broaden their roles. Nevertheless she was glad that the pace of restructuring seemed to be slowing, saying she was “keen that the agency, having done some of that quite significant change, be allowed a little bit of time to put that into effect and reap some of the benefits”.
While at UKBA – which was restructured again in 2013 – Homer was also caught up in criticisms of the e-borders scheme, introduced in 2003 by Tony Blair to tighteningimmigration controls through better data collection and analysis at the UK border. It was originally set to be operational by 2007.
US firm Raytheon won the £750m contract to deliver e-borders, but was fired in 2010 for its “disappointing” performance. Reportedly, Homer would have preferred to re-launch the Raytheon contract rather than sacking the firm.
In 2015 the National Audit Office published a highly critical report saying that checks at Britain’s borders still relied on outdated IT systems. Speaking to the Public Accounts Committee that same year, Homer said the UK Border Agency had provided “12 years of continuous improvements” to border security even if progress had been “slower” than she had wanted.
Defending the e-borders scheme to PAC, she described it as “big and bold”, and said that while contracts don’t always work, in this case “a lot of it worked”. Meanwhile former Home Office minister Caroline Flint said at the PAC hearing that “it might have worked out cheaper to re-launch the Raytheon contract, as Ms Homer had wanted”.
Homer was first appointed to a permanent secretary position in 2011 when she replaced Robert Devereaux at the Department of Transport. Within a year she had moved on from DfT to take up the position of perm sec at HM Revenue and Customs after the death of its former perm sec Leslie Strathie.
She regretted that she and Strathie didn’t have any overlap “because I could have learnt so much from her,” she told CSW in 2012. Noting that Strathie was “one of the people I turned to, as a relatively new civil servant, to learn from”, Homer said that when facing difficult decisions at HMRC, she would “try to think about what Lesley would have told me to do”.
Homer joined HMRC at a time when technology and working practices were changing – a new PAYE management system, introduced three years prior to her appointment, had led to a huge caseload backlog. Alongside this, a new requirement on employers required them to report payroll data to HMRC on a monthly rather than an annual basis. “Nowadays a lot of young people are changing jobs every 18 months, so we’ve really got to have a system where the data input quality is better,” she said at the time.
Homer also oversaw child benefit reform, in which parents and carers were asked to consider opting out if they earned over £50,000 annually. This involved writing to around 1.3m people in an attempt to clarify the impact of the reforms and the choice to be made.
This combination of reforms and new measures may have exacerbated the difficulty experienced by members of the public when attempting to contact HMRC by phone or by post. In 2013, the department was criticised by the Public Accounts Select Committee for its "woefully inadequate" response to an NAO report concerning poor customer service by HMRC.
As she had done previously in her career, Homer attracted personal criticism as the official in charge when the department’s performance came under fire. She was called “Teflon” by The Times and “Dame Disaster” by the Guardian.
But her ministers backed her: in 2013, speaking to the Home Affairs Select Committee, who had queried her suitability as HMRC perm sec, Treasury secretary David Gauke described her as “a highly effective chief executive and the right person to lead HMRC”.
Government statistics support Gauke’s confidence: Homer led a recovery in customer service at HMRC from a low point of 48% of calls answered in 2011 to almost 90% of calls answered in 2015. Under her leadership, overall revenues raised by HMRC increased by 9% from £474.2bn in 2011-12 to £517.7bn in 2014-15, according to the same government source.
In January 2016 Homer was made a Dame Commander Order of the Bath in the new year’s honours list for public service particularly to public finance. In the same year she announced that she would retire from her position at HMRC. She was succeeded by Jon Thompson. In 2016 she was made a Dame Commander Order of the Bath in the new year’s honours list for public service particularly to public finance.
“It has been a privilege to have been with HMRC during a period when the improved performance of the Department has been increasingly recognised,” Homer said in 2016. “I have found commitment to public service and dedication to customers among our people wherever I have been, coupled with a deep level of specialist expertise and operational excellence.”
In a blog written just before stepping down, Homer said she did not “believe in the idea of a ‘perfect’ Civil Service career path…there are certainly well-trodden routes, but I think we need to look beyond these to find talent wherever it exists.”
“Until recently, it was strongly felt that to become a permanent secretary you needed to join the civil service through the Fast Stream and spend some time working in a minister’s office,” she wrote. But her own career showed that experience in other sectors and operational leadership have increasingly become routes to the top, and she encouraged all officials to “think about your careers in terms of the skills you’ll need, rather than the paths that others might have followed”.
Several years earlier, speaking at Civil Service Live, Homer explained how a career dedicated to public service – but moving across different parts of government – had shown her there is always something to learn from different perspectives. “We should be confident about what we do well,” she said. “I do not believe public servants always learn from others – we have a lot of skills and expertise we can share – but I think being open to the possibility that someone else has cracked something that will be useful to you or that they might see into your business an approach that you can’t see – that is something which – because I have moved around – I bring with me as my automatic default model.”
In 2017, Homer returned to Suffolk County Council to undertake a review of councillor remuneration. She also took up a position on the governing body of the University of Birmingham, where she served two terms as a lay member of the University Council, and has served as a Board member for the Centre for Ageing Better.
Alongside a challenging career Homer also raised a family, and she shared with CSW in 2010 that her favourite Christmas present each year was skiing with her three daughters in Chamonix: “When they were small my three girls were a little line behind me. Now they’ve all grown into young women I don’t see them for dust; but fresh air, clear blue skies and good company is a great treat.” She also shared her worst Christmas present: “Early in our marriage, my husband gave me an iron. He learnt quickly!”
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