Richard Mottram

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Sir Richard Mottram GCB, born April 23, 1946, is a British civil servant. He is the current Permanent Secretary, Intelligence, Security and Resilience.

1 Education and early career
2 Multi-purpose Permanent Secretary
3 Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator
4 Other roles
5 References

[edit] Education and early career

Mottram was educated at King Edward VI Camp Hill school in Birmingham. He entered the central government civil service in 1968 aged 22 with a first class degree in international relations from Keele University. Most of his peers were from Oxbridge. From 1975 until 1977 he served in the Defence and Overseas Secretariat of the Cabinet Office. He then became private secretary to a succession of Secretaries of State for Defence.

In 1985, as private secretary to Michael Heseltine, the Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence, he was a witness for the prosecution in the trial of Clive Ponting, who was later acquitted of breaking the Official Secrets Act for passing information Tam Dalyell, the Labour member of parliament about the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands war. When asked whether answers to parliamentary questions should be truthful and not deliberately ambiguous or misleading, there was a long silence before he replied: "In highly charged political matters, one person's ambiguity may be another person's truth".

From 1986 to 1989 he was the Under Secretary responsible for the defence programme, and from 1989 to 1992 the Deputy Secretary with responsibilities for UK defence policy and strategy, and defence relations with other countries at the time of the end of the Cold War.

[edit] Multi-purpose Permanent Secretary

After this,in 1992, he was appointed as a Permanent Secretary, first at the Office of Public Service and Science in the Cabinet Office. His responsibilities there included public service change, Civil Service management questions, and science and technology policy and the science budget.

Then in 1995, he became Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, where he worked on, among other things, the Labour Government's Strategic Defence Review. He was at the MoD in 1986 when Heseltine resigned over the Westland affair.

In 1998 he became permanent secretary at the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions. Mottram's tenure at DETR saw the appointments of Sir Alastair Morton as chairman of the Strategic Rail Authority and Tom Winsor as Rail Regulator, an unhappy partnership which ended in 2001 when Morton resigned and was replaced by Richard Bowker. Mottram's term also saw the rail crashes at Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield and Potters Bar. The national railway infrastructure company Railtrack got into serious financial difficulties after the Hatfield rail crash in October 2000 and on 7 October 2001 was put into administration on the petition of the Secretary of State for Transport Stephen Byers MP in very controversial circumstances. Mottram was closely involved in the preparations for the administration of Railtrack and in July 2005 was called as a witness in the largest class legal action ever brought in the English courts, when 49,500 shareholders of Railtrack sued the Secretary of State for Transport and the Department for Transport for damages for misfeasance in public office. The case was lost because the shareholders could not prove targeted malice on the part of Stephen Byers, that is an intention maliciously to injure the shareholders.

On 11 September 2001, after both World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon had been hit in the attacks, a civil servant in Mottram's department - Jo Moore - sent an email to the press office of her department which read:

It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors' expenses?

a suggestion which caused understandably severe criticism for its insensitivity, callousness and political ineptitude. As the administrative head of the department in which Moore worked, Mottram was in charge of the disciplinary process which applied to her.

Mottram was still at the DETR in 2002 when he advised Martin Sixsmith, the department's Director of Communications, to resign in the aftermath of untrue denials of a scandalous email about burying embarrassing news on days of momentous events. His secretary of state - Stephen Byers - also soon had to resign. One of his observations to his colleagues at the time was: "We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department is fucked. It's the biggest cock-up ever. We're all completely fucked." This statement was widely reported in bowdlerised form as "f***ed", leading Tony Wright, the Chairman of the Public Administration Committee at the time, to comment to Mottram that "Our note-takers have trouble with asterisks." The incident led to Mottram himself being interviewed in relation to these remarks on the BBC's flagship news and current affairs Today programme, an almost unprecedented event for a serving senior civil servant. It was thought that he had been ordered to do so by his political superiors.

At the same time - May 2002 - as Stephen Byers resigned as secretary of state, Mottram was moved to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as permanent secretary.

[edit] Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator

Sir Richard moved to a strategic position at the Cabinet Office on 11 November 2005 as Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator (still as a permanent secretary and also as a safe pair of hands with wide experience across government). He succeeded Bill Jeffrey. As part of this role, created to parallel but learn from creation in the USA of a Department of Homeland Security, "he

oversees the Civil Contingencies Secretariat and the Intelligence and Security Secretariat and
leads interdepartmental work on counter-terrorism and crisis management".

According to the Cabinet Office explanation of his role, " The Security and Intelligence Coordinator is the Accounting Officer for the Single Intelligence Account, from which the three Security and Intelligence Agencies are funded. He also acts as Deputy Chair of the Civil Contingencies Committee, supports the Home Secretary in his role as Chair and, in the event of any serious incident requiring central government coordination, acts as the Government's senior Crisis Manager.

Sir Richard also now chairs the Joint Intelligence Committee, whose credibility needed to be reestablished after intelligence reports were apparently "sexed-up" for PR purposes during the chairmanship of John Scarlett. The JIC's role had come under scrutiny in the review of the information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the Hutton Inquiry into the suicide of MoD weapons expert, Dr. David Kelly.

[edit] Other roles

Sir Richard is a Governor and a Member of the Council of the Ditchley Foundation, a Governor of Ashridge Business School, and served as President and then a Board Member of the Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management.