Dame Sue Street: A pragmatic and resilient leader who brought private sector skills into government

Dame Sue Street joined the civil service in 1974, somewhat by chance. But it was her quiet determination – including a refusal to take no for an answer, or to take offense at well-meaning but patronising men – which took her to the top of government.

Street had joined the British Council straight after graduating from St Andrews University, but found herself “under-stretched” and, on the suggestion of colleagues, decided to sit the civil service entrance exams. She describes her first job in government as “a very traditional Home Office first administration trainee job: helping to draft a bill and helping to draft speeches”. But within a year she had moved on to a post which she found much more significant: helping to administer the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974, advising on whether the home secretary's powers to exclude or deport individuals should be used in particular cases. When one of the people she had recommended returning to Northern Ireland was assassinated the next day, she went to her boss in crisis: "I can't do this job. I'm responsible for this."

His response was to sit her down and work through the decision with her: "Go back over all the evidence you had. Tell me if you missed something. Tell me if there was something you did wrong. But if not, then that's the job. You take difficult decisions on the evidence that you have."

This, she says, exemplified the supportive leadership she experienced throughout her career. Her managers, she reflects, "were excellent not in the sense of caring about whether I was a woman or having children, but excellent because they didn't care about that. They just wanted me to succeed professionally, and so did I".

After several years at the Home Office, Street took a career break, accompanying her husband to Bogota and, while there, having two children. Once back in the UK, she called the Home Office personnel department to enquire about re-joining the civil service. She was told not to bother wasting a stamp in sending a letter. She didn’t take that for her final answer.

Knowing her track record and appraisals were strong, she wrote in anyway. Her letter was picked up by a senior official who took a chance on bringing her back. She slotted into exactly the same job she had held six years previously.

One difference for her, of course, was that by this time she was juggling that job with her young family. Earlier in her career she had attended a talk given by a female permanent secretary where “the message, very powerfully delivered, was: you could not have a family, a happy family life, and a successful career. It was so brutal”.

Street's response was to think: "Stuff that. I am going to live my life." Not many of her peers were working mothers at that time – "the question was never 'how' but ‘why’ I did it" – and at work "there was no quarter".

"Nobody was interested in the family. I never spoke about the dishwasher breaking down, or the kids having measles. I never ever mentioned family life. I was just expected to do the job, and I did the job,” she says.

With “a very good husband, and very good help” she navigated the challenges of a demanding job and long hours. On some days the contrast between the emotional toll of her job and the requirements of motherhood was stark, such as the day in 1982 when IRA bombs went off in two London parks.

“I had a really difficult day of briefing on body parts and facts and figures about terrible violence in London. When I got home my children's goldfish had died, and they were absolutely devastated. I couldn't just go and have a bath and, you know, cry. I had to deal with this thing that was very important for them.”

This contrast was often, however, what gave her strength. In a 2018 interview with Civil Service World, Street described how, as director general for justice policy, she had found it hard to come to terms the “collection of human misery” which she encountered as she dealt with vulnerable offenders and their victims. As well as stoic determination (“I just put my collar up and got on with it”) she found solace in the balance of her life. “I always found it wonderful to go home and know I could do something constructive and useful. Overall, a happy family life has been my touchstone and the key to enjoying a demanding career.”

Before she would get to that DG role, however, Street moved through a series of policy and legislative roles at the Home Office before moving to the Cabinet Office to help set up the Top Management Programme – a development scheme aimed at professionalising the leadership of the civil service.

The role would reshape her approach to leadership by bringing her into contact with private sector thinking and leaders, including a partner at PriceWaterhouse, who subsequently approached her to join the firm. The civil service refused to sanction a secondment, so she simply left, and spent three years in consultancy.

There, she says, “I learned a lot about IT and a lot about financial management. And I learned most of all about project management: time, quality, cost, the balance... we didn't do anything without a Gantt chart. They had wonderful IT, which showed who had what skills, who was available, who had what time. It took me a while to adjust, but I suddenly thought: this is so productive. There's a reason these people are making money from the civil service. It's because we don't know how to do this.”

In 1994 she was recruited back to government to lead the design and implementation of a cross-departmental anti-drugs strategy – a "right place, right time" moment, she says, given the political imperative to import private sector discipline into Whitehall.

“My career accelerated massively when I came back. I never expected, really, to get much past the beginning of the SCS, because I'd had all these years out [of the civil service].” But politicians and other leaders were impressed by the leadership and project management skills she had developed. The landmark Tackling Drugs Together strategy brought together several departments and hundreds of local authorities. When she presented it to John Major, he said: "I've never heard anything that began with so many stats. I've never seen delivery dates and costs." She replied: "Well, this is how a lot of the rest of the world does stuff."

Her next post, director of fire and emergency planning at the Home Office, produced one of her proudest achievements: a prevention strategy that halved fire deaths in the home. It also demanded a new kind of leadership. "I was a woman in a man's world, so I had to decide to be quite a public leader,” she told CSW in 2008. “I went through the fire training, I visited virtually all the local fire services, and I was in every issue of the fire service magazine. I decided that unless I respected them and they respected me, I would never be able to persuade them."

In 2001, following the DG of justice policy role, Street was appointed perm sec at the department for Culture, Media and Sport, where she would oversee London’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympics as well as a BBC Charter renewal and the early stages of building the new Wembley Stadium. She recalls being surprised when cabinet secretary Richard Wilson told her he had the job. “I must have looked absolutely dumbstruck. He just looked at me and said: “Are you questioning my judgment?” It was just so neat. It was him saying: ‘We think you can do this. So go do it.’”

This is another example, she notes, of the “seriously good line managers and leaders” she had. “That kind of Obama-esque inspiration of “yes you can” was quite important for me. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have... I wasn't naturally confident, and I wasn't really aspiring to go to the top, until suddenly I was.”

Walking into her first weekly ‘Wednesday Morning Colleagues’ meeting – the weekly gathering of permanent secretaries in Whitehall – was somewhat intimidating, she recalls. “I felt like a child going to nursery school, to the point where I said to one very debonair person: “Well, where should I sit?”

“He said: ‘Oh, it all depends,’ which I found very unhelpful,” she says, but another colleague “who subsequently became a good friend” offered her a spot next to him.

She recalls a piece of feedback from this stage in her career which exemplifies the slightly patronising – though mostly well-meaning – attitude of some men towards their female peers. “In one of my appraisals when I was already a permanent secretary, the first question – I'll never forget it – was: ‘How does it feel to be a petite woman with a soft voice around the permanent secretary's table?’”

Her attitude to this was that “as long as you've got the intellect and you've done the work, I don't think you have to fight a battle over these things”. So, she gave the questioner the benefit of the doubt, recognising that “it was about them trying to demonstrate emotional intelligence, not putting me down”.

In this vein she replied: “Well, I never seem to be forgotten. People always remember me. So that's how I make my mark. I don't have to shout or be tall... there are a lot of them around.”

Determined to set a different example to the female perm sec who had warned her off family life, Street and Helen Ghosh (who was appointed permanent secretary at Defra in 2005) made a conscious pact to "look happy as senior women".

"Of course there were strains. Of course we were tired. But we don't encourage other women by being a battle-axes. You just look like it's a privilege and you're enjoying it – which it is. It's part of the role of a leader to say: ‘I can keep calm, carry on and actually love it.’"

Street left the civil service in 2006, having decided when London won the bid for the 2012 Olympics that she should either step down or commit to stay in post until after the games. “I didn’t want to be driving that single issue and I didn’t have the background in construction,” she recalls, so she decided to move on.

Since then she has held a number of non-executive roles including five years on the board of the Ministry of Justice and two for HM Revenue & Customs. She has also continued to coach and mentor civil servants both formally and informally.

In 2018 Street told CSW that the most important quality in any leader is resilience. To achieve this, she says: “You need to believe in what you do, have that sense of perspective – knowing that actually very few things are life and death – to feel that there is support available, and that you have been given training and development to do what is being asked of you.”

Street’s career exemplifies this kind of resilience, and she makes a case for developing this among civil servants for both individual and public good. “If you don’t build that resilience early, you’ll get very fragile people at the top of organisations. People who are all about status and have lost a sense of purpose… whereas if they focus more on what they are trying to achieve, they will feel more passionate about what they are doing and people will feel inspired to follow them.”