Leadership

Sue Owen might be enjoying more evenings out as the new permanent secretary at DCMS, but her days are spent demonstrating and improving the value of culture, media and sport to the UK. Suzannah Brecknell meets her

Mark Lowcock

Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Development

Permanent secretaries’ tenure is too short and the high turnover is sometimes to blame when “things go wrong”, according to former cabinet secretary Lord Butler, who also warned that civil servants “aren’t encouraged to speak truth to power”.

Three-quarters of former secretaries of state surveyed by Civil Service World support the calls for a commission to consider how the civil service should develop and reform.

Prime minister David Cameron has called on civil servants to “talk truth to power and tell it like it is” in order to improve policy.

David Thomas (pictured), commerical director at HMRC and a crown representative, will leave government in mid-December. He resigned his post in September.

Cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood has intervened in a bid to end the political briefings against work and pensions permanent secretary Robert Devereux.

The civil service must “significantly” improve its ability to understand company accounts if it is to make effective use of open-book contracts, according to government chief operating officer Stephen Kelly and chief procurement officer Bill Crothers.

The new Home Office permanent secretary, Mark Sedwill, arrived in Marsham Street soon after having worked in Afghanistan. He tells Joshua Chambers how he’s using his experience to turn the embattled department around.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has created a new director general-level role, in an effort to rebalance the department’s workload.

Sharon White, currently director general for public services, has been appointed as the second permanent secretary at HM Treasury.

There is a "shortage of project management skills" in the Department for Transport (DfT), according to Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).