A “formidably successful” civil servant, Mueller championed flexible working
Bright young things joining the civil service’s Administrative Trainee programme (the Fast Stream, in today’s terms) in the mid-1980s might well have been welcomed at their training[1] [SA2] events by a petite woman wearing “many-buttoned, brightly-coloured[SA3] ” clothes who would tell them that the service they had joined was undergoing something of a revolution.
Anne Mueller – later to become Dame Anne – was second permanent secretary in the Cabinet Office and head of the Personnel and Management Office. She spoke at gatherings of new civil servants with “passion and precision”, according to one official who joined the civil service in 1985, and was described by another former colleague and friend as being a striking, elegant woman with a passion for bright clothes and antique jewellery.
The revolution she spoke of included the shift from a service where all recruitment, pay and spending was managed centrally, towards the model of departmental delegation we know today – as well as a new focus on developing management skills to improve efficiency across government.
It did not, despite Mueller’s high rank, include a tidal wave of gender equality at the top of the civil service. She was the only woman to be appointed at permanent secretary grade in the 1980s – and just the fourth to make that grade in the decades since Evelyn Sharp became a permanent secretary in 1955.
Her colleague and friend Collete Bowe – who went on to become a prominent businesswoman with a wide non-executive career, and who authored the Guardian’s obituary for Mueller in 2000 – described Dame Anne’s career as “formidably successful… carved out in tough parts of the Whitehall jungle, with big numbers and big reputations at stake”.
Mueller joined the Ministry of Labour in 1953, on her second attempt at passing the civil service examination. Her career was nearly ended by a road traffic accident in 1956[SA4] – while on secondment to the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, the fore-runner to the OECD – she was thrown from her car, and suffered injuries so severe that she spent two years in hospitals and rehabilitation centres. She returned to Whitehall in 1958 as private secretary to the department’s permanent secretary Laurence Helsby.
Through the 1960s and early ‘70s she moved up the ranks at the Treasury and the short-lived Department for Economic Affairs. She also – unusually for a civil servant at the time – achieved a diploma in management studies at Oxford’s Templeton College in 1968.
By 1972 she was an assistant secretary at the Department of Industry and the next few years represented, according to Bowe, “a time of great professional success” for Mueller. “During the mid-1970s,” Bowe wrote, “the DoI and the Treasury worked closely together on industrial policy, at a time when this was synonymous with large-scale state intervention in industry, and she was in the thick of it.”
The arrival of the Thatcher government in 1979 signalled a new approach to industrial relations, and Mueller was by now working on regional policy, which was “a very hot and tricky policy area in the recession of the early 1980s”, Bowe notes.
In 1984, Mueller was promoted into the Cabinet Office as head of the newly-formed Management & Personnel Office, which had taken on responsibility for training and managing civil servants from the disbanded Civil Service Department.
This was a time of great change in the structures of the civil service. In a speech she made in 1985, Mueller said: “Today the civil service is going through the most profound changes it has seen for over a century. The new civil service is still constructed on the merit principle but aims at a new professionalism… To this end it is focussing on performance and outputs, and individual responsibility for securing desired results.”
Much of the substantive and structural change was being driven by the Treasury’s Efficiency Unit, answerable directly to the prime minister, but Mueller’s PMO played its part in developing the new skills and management capabilities that the civil service needed.
A new “Top Management Programme” was introduced to train Grade 3 (director-level) officials in management and leadership skills, while other talent programmes were developed for middle managers. There was also a move to open up the senior civil service to people who had *not* joined via the Administrative Trainee route.
Other programmes within the MPO seem remarkably modern – a Forms Unit advised on improving the forms which citizens had to complete; there was a Central Unit of Purchasing (with just 11 staff), and an Enterprise and Deregulation Unit. Mueller was also an advocate for flexible working[SA5] , saying in 1985 that “a more imaginative approach to work patterns and career development [for men and women] can prevent some of our talented staff from leaving all together at a considerable waste of investment in my own department.”
Mueller’s advocacy for flexible working patterns even made it into Hansard - in 1991 a former intelligence agent Baroness Park would tell the Lords that Mueller had reported “job-sharing is working extremely well in the civil service”.[6]
In 1987, Mueller moved to the Treasury, with responsibility for civil service pay and working conditions. It was a sideways move, caused by the merger of the MPO with the Treasury’s Efficiency Unit, and it caused her some frustration.
There, she wrote a report, Working Patterns, which proposed the creation of a “core” and “periphery” civil service, with the latter seeing a large increase in temporary contracts and flexible working. Rather than focusing on the talent retention element, however, this report focused on the savings in pay and pensions costs that part-time work would generate. The idea caused great concern among unions who were concerned that it would mean the end of the permanent civil service and “sound the death knell for the role of government as a ‘good’ employer”.
Working Patterns was in any case very quickly superseded by the Next Steps report which delegated various civil service functions into new agencies with the ability to manage their own recruitment and set their own terms and conditions – leading to the higher salaries for many externally-recruited agency chiefs which we still see today.
Through all of her career Mueller had “a quality of steeliness which made her a particularly effective operator,” according to Bowe. “To experience a long, penetrating gaze from Anne, in response to some ill-considered or badly expressed intervention, was a fairly terrifying experience – and one made sure to have one's act together next time.”
Yet Bowe described the private persona of Mueller as “another matter… She was, first and foremost, a true and thoughtful friend. I first discovered this when, as a young civil servant still very much in awe of her, I found her, somewhat to my surprise, among the first of my colleagues to offer me practical and affectionate support at a time of great personal loss”.
Mueller retired from the civil service in 1990 on health grounds – she had by then been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and had for many years suffered from early-onset arthritis and chronic pain.
Despite these long-term health challenges Mueller was “determined to lead her life as she wished”, Bowe recalled. “When she could no longer drive, she took to a form of motorised chair, in which she whizzed, at some risk to pedestrians, around Notting Hill, parking it nonchalantly and usually illegally outside the restaurants she liked to visit. She did battle with the forces of bureaucracy to ensure that she, and others in her position, were treated with proper consideration. I could sometimes almost feel sorry for those on the receiving end; she always won.”