The first woman to serve as permanent secretary in more than one department, Lomax took a leading role in monetary and fiscal policies, and was known for her strong probity
Rachel Lomax joined the civil service in 1968, the year in which the Fulton report decried the “cult of the generalist”, and just as a relatively new Government Economics Service was bringing more specialists into departments.
Lomax spent the first two decades of her civil service career as just such a specialist – working as an economist in the Treasury, initially in a junior role and then becoming a senior analyst in 1978 just before the Thatcher administration came to power. Leading key teams over the next few years, Lomax was at the heart of debates on monetary and fiscal policies at a crucial moment in the country’s economic history.
She also spent some of this period working part time to care for her young children – a practice largely unheard of at the time. Decades later in 2011, she would remark that working patterns still hadn’t adapted to the demands on women’s careers during their child-rearing years.
At the same event – convened by the Institute of Welsh Affairs to discuss diversity in the workplace –she rejected the idea of quotas to improve gender diversity, saying: “I would hate to be appointed on a quota. Appointments must be made on merit.
“Having said that,” she added, “the definition of merit is too narrow.”
Even within the narrowly-defined perceptions of merit in the 70s and 80s, Lomax’s talent stood out. In 1985 she became the first woman to serve as principal private secretary to the chancellor – a role which would establish a career-long pattern of breaking new ground for women in public life.
By 1994, after a series of increasingly senior roles in the Treasury including joining the department’s Top Management Board in 1990, she had become the first female head of the Cabinet Office’s Economic and Domestic Affairs Secretariat. She went on to be the first woman to serve as permanent secretary in more than one department and, after leaving government in 2003, the first female deputy governor of the Bank of England. Reflecting on this string of "firsts" in an interview marking her BoE appointment, Lomax downplayed any notion of conscious crusading, saying: “I've been first at almost everything I've done. It's a function of my age.”
It was also a function of her age to face the kind of casual misogyny which is less prevalent in professional life today. In the same interview she recalled how, as one of the few female economists in the Treasury in the 1970s, she was asked by two visiting journalists to pose for a picture with the only computer in the building. She refused after learning they planned to caption it “the Treasury model”.
After her stint as head of the EDS in the Cabinet Office, Lomax spent time on secondment to the World Bank, returning to the UK government in 1996 as permanent secretary for the Welsh Office.
Within a few months she was helping the New Labour government deliver its pledge to hold a referendum on establishing a Welsh Assembly. When voters backed the plan, she oversaw the rapid passage of the required legislation and the creation of the organisational structures needed to support and house the new devolved administration.
“That process of change required skilled handling for it was without precedent in our constitutional history,” according to Welsh barrister and former public servant Winston Roddick. Speaking as Lomax was made an honorary fellow at the University of Aberystwyth in 2010, he said she had been “the right person at the right place at the right time to handle that process of change and it was a marked success, without doubt.” Roddick worked with Lomax when he was appointed (by her) as the Welsh Assembly’s first general counsel. He described her as “very experienced, highly persuasive, charming – and formidable in the offensive”.
Lomax’s secretary of state at that time, Ron Davies, would later describe her as having “a great capacity to see the big picture and think in those terms” but also as being “exceptionally good on the detail that you need to make things happen”.
Lomax left the Welsh Assembly in 1999 to head up the Department of Social Security, again taking on an organisation facing a radical shift in how it operated. As New Labour focused on its “Welfare to Work” ambitions, she re-organised the department and its agencies, shifting resources to the frontline as well as professionalising its corporate services.
In 2000 she led the merger of DSS with the Employment Service and part of DfEE to support the creation of Jobcentre Plus and the Pension Service, alongside the renaming of the core ministry to become the Department for Work and Pensions
In 2002 she moved to the newly-created Department of Transport, following Alisdair Darling who had been made transport secretary after the high profile resignation of Stephen Byers. In her final year as a civil servant she helped Darling to set a strategy for the new organisation, recruiting a new top team and addressing staff’s battered morale following the political upheaval of Byers’ departure.
After joining the Bank of England, Lomax gave an interview with the Guardian in which she described her satisfaction at being back in a world of economic discussions after the string of "clunky management" jobs in Whitehall.
"I really am very fascinated by questions like, have we got a [monetary] framework that works? Is it that inflation has come down world-wide anyway, or that central banks have got better at fighting inflation? It's a world of puzzles and I find it very good to get back to that sort of thinking."
On the bank’s monetary committee she developed a reputation as a “Dove” – usually arguing against rate rises, so much so that in 2010 Roddicks (the QC who had worked with her in the Welsh Assembly) noted: “On the rare occasions she did back a rate rise, people sat up and listened. And it is my personal experience of her that people do listen when Rachel Lomax speaks. She has a reputation for taking decisions coolly and getting them right – just the sort of adviser to have on hand in a global economic crisis.”
Another former colleague who worked for Lomax at the Welsh Assembly would later describe how it was not just her deep expertise which commanded respect, but also her strong probity. “She was quite incapable of doing anything, even signing a letter, which she felt to be wrong: there was a core of integrity there.”