David Normington

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Sir David John Normington KCB is the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office of the United Kingdom.

Sir David Normington became Permanent Secretary at the Home Office in January 2006 having been Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education and Skills since 2001. Before that he was Director General for Schools, responsible between 1998 and 2001 for raising standards in schools.

His career began in the Department for Employment where he was responsible variously for the previous Government’s programme of trade union reform, for measures to reduce unemployment and for youth training. He was Principal Private Secretary to Tom King, Secretary of State for Employment in 1983 and 1984. He was also responsible for coordinating the efforts of central Government to regenerate the seven most deprived London boroughs.

In 1995, when the Department for Employment and Department of Education merged, he played a central role in the creation of the new Department for Education and Employment (DfEE). From there he moved on to become DfEE’s Director General for Strategy and Analytical Services and for the International Division in the run-up to the UK Presidency of the European Union.

He is a graduate of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Those in the know describe Sir David Normington as something more akin to James Bond than a top civil servant. For a start, his nickname in his previous appointment as permanent secretary at the Department for Education and Skills was ‘the smiling assassin’. He is also described as ‘extremely charming’, ‘civilised and urbane’ – and a ‘tough nut’.^[1] One of Normington's lasting legacies in the DfES was his decision to reduce the Department's workforce by approximately a third, made in 2003. This decision came in advance of the subsequent budget announcing a large reduction of the civil service as a whole, leading some to speculate that Normington had made his own cuts early in an attempt to curry favour.

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Preceded by Sir John Gieve	Permanent Secretary of the Home Office 2005-	Succeeded by Current incumbent
Preceded by Sir Michael Bichard	Permanent Secretary of the Department for Education and Skills 2001-2005	Succeeded by David Bell