A hugely respected senior leader, Valerie Strachan counselled women to be “highly visible” to let others recognise their success
Speaking at an Institute for Government event in 2015, Dame Valerie Strachan called out a behaviour which has dogged women in senior civil service roles for decades. Why is it that the sole senior woman in the department is always referred to as “formidable”, she asked. Why is it that this word is never used to describe successful men?
Strachan’s comments, made fifteen years after her retirement from the civil service, will have struck a chord with the generations of women whose leadership behaviours led to them being described as formidable, or “tough”.
She also spoke, at the same IfG event which explored the experiences of women in Westminster, of the “macho” culture she had experienced as head of Customs and Excise from 1993 to 2000. She described missing out on a job because one minister had not wanted a private secretary who was the mother of a young child. She also remembered that the department’s establishments officer had enquired, in considering Strachan for the post, whether or not she was pretty.
When Strachan joined the civil service in 1961, she told the IfG audience, new mothers faced a stark choice: return to work full time after a few months of leave, or else resign. Part time working was not yet a career option, although it did gradually become more regular and accepted over the course of her career, she said.
Despite these considerable challenges, Strachan forged a long and successful civil service career. Her first role on graduating from the University of Manchester was a junior position at HM Customs and Excise, followed by a move to the Department of Economic Affairs in 1964, then to the Home Office in 1966. She later returned to H M Customs and Excise, where she was appointed as assistant secretary in 1974 and as a commissioner in 1980. She went on to be one of the department’s deputy chairpersons, where her leadership in negotiations for the single European market won her the UK Woman of Europe award in 1992.
By 1993 Strachan had worked her way up to become chair of the board of Customs and Excise. A non-ministerial department, the board was responsible for the management of Customs and Excise, which put Strachan in a position equivalent to permanent secretary today. As Sarah Hegarty, writing for the Independent in 1993, pointed out, Strachan had achieved at the age of 53 what no woman had before: heading one of the oldest Whitehall departments, with a staff of 26,000.
It was a time of major change for the department, as the newly created Single European Market meant changes to almost every aspect ot it's work, and most of it's staff were being asked to do their jobs in a different way, and often in different places as some operations were moved from ports to inland offices. The process, including redeployments and some redundancies, "required quite senstive managing", Strachan told the Indepedent.
She also told the Independent that she had not seriously considered the civil service as a career option until she found herself going through the selection process, analysing problems and discussing solutions. At which point she thought: “This is interesting, I could enjoy this.” And just as she was considering a career change in the early ‘70s, “they promoted me into an interesting job”, she said.
Strachan’s promotion to the head of Customs & Excise was the third high-profile female appointment made in the era of John Major as PM and Robin Butler as cabinet secretary, following Barbara Mills as director of public prosecutions and Stella Rimington as the head of MI5. All three attracted keen media interest, in contrast to men in similar positions. As a press officer at HM Customs & Excise commented in 1993, when Sir Brian Unwin left his post as the head of department to make way for Strachan: “I don’t think anyone ever interviewed Sir Brian.”
The media commentary, Strachan later recalled, often focused on her appearance and dress sense – something that she worried might discourage other women from considering leadership roles.
In the 1998 Queen’s Birthday Honours, Strachan was made a Dame Commander Order of the Bath, having been made a Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1991.
Strachan retired from the civil service in 2000. She was extremely active in retirement, starting with a position as lay assessor on the Leggatt Inquiry from 2001 to 2002, which led to the creation of the tribunals service. She was vice chair of the Big Lottery Fund between 2004 and 2006, and was then a member of the Rosemary Nelson Inquiry, which looked into whether state agencies had colluded with the loyalists who murdered the Lurgan solicitor with a car bomb in 1999.
From 2006 to 2012 Strachan was a member of the Council of the University of Southampton, by whom she was awarded an honorary degree in 2013. She was a member of the Judicial Appointments Commission from 2012 to 2019.
Reflecting on the challenges of her impressive career, Strachan later emphasised the need for women to be highly visible senior leaders to show others – especially other women – that women can do the top jobs. Perhaps she will be glad to know that the department where she forged her career – now HMRC – carries the record for appointing the highest number of women to the position of permanent secretary.