Thirty years ago this year, the top-flight of the civil service welcomed a new female addition when Ann Bowtell became permanent secretary at the then Department of Social Security.
Bowtell’s appointment at the helm of DSS made her the most senior of three women perm secs at the time, the others being director of public prosecutions Barbara Mills and HM Customs and Excise chief Valerie Strachan.
Bowtell, who grew up on a council estate in Reading, had come a long way. Her civil service career started in 1960 at the National Assistance Board – part of the welfare landscape at the time. Early jobs saw her sent on postings to South Shields and the then-Metropolitan Borough of St Marylebone in central London, both seemingly as part of a process of giving future high-fliers “sharp end” experience of social security.
In a 1995 interview marking her appointment as DSS perm sec, Bowtell told the Independent on Sunday that her days of working the machine that stamped out benefit books in Tyneside and staffing an inner-London welfare office had been “a very good introduction to what it was all about”.
Bowtell said that working in the less genteel parts of Marylebone had been “an eye opener” in particular.
“I'd been brought up on a council estate, but I had been at the polite end of the market,” she said. “I just hadn't seen poverty and deprivation of that sort, and it doesn't leave you, even if you only do it for a relatively short time."
Despite joining the civil service at a time when the “marriage bar” – which required female civil servants to resign upon getting married – was a comparatively recent memory, Bowtell managed to raise four children and keep working.
She said that, in the early stages of her career, she had been oblivious to the barriers that her senior female colleagues had faced.
"It didn't occur to me that women couldn't get into senior positions – I just didn't notice that they were all single and childless, but they were," she told the Independent on Sunday.
Bowtell was granted substantial periods of maternity leave and permitted to work part-time for a decade. She reportedly even managed to persuade HM Treasury to change its rules to secure a year off work – unpaid – to accompany her advertising-executive husband when he landed a job in the United States.
At one stage in her career Bowtell said she returned to full-time civil service work to secure a promotion that would have been off-limits to a part-timer, then had another child to go part-time again. “It got quite ludicrous,” she said of the rules at the time in the early 1970s.
Later in the decade, Bowtell was one of the architects of Child Benefit. In the mid-1980s decade she had a key role in co-ordinating a major review of social security for then health and social-security secretary Norman Fowler. That work laid the ground for Social Security Act 1986.
The then-Department of Health and Social Security subsequently split into the DSS and the standalone Department of Health.
Bowtell left DSS for DH in 1990 and had responsibility for HR in both departments, earning a reputation for being “quite a toughie” among civil service unions. She became first civil service commissioner in 1992. During her three years in post she became notable for banning the practice of ministers interviewing perm-sec-level candidates for agency roles and indicating their preference before a formal civil service interview had taken place.
Six years after Bowtell ascended to the role of DSS perm sec, the department was consigned to the history books with the creation of the Department for Work and Pensions.