Mike Fogden CB, who died on October 10, was a career civil servant who was dedicated to public administration and what it could deliver for people. A wide network of friends and colleagues in this country and overseas will miss the presence and warmth of a man who combined acute policy insight with successful – robust and pragmatic– management of large public sector delivery organisations, in particular, the Employment Service of which he was the first chief executive.
Mike Fogden was also the first chair of the executive committee of the Public Management and Policy Association when it was set up under CIPFA’s auspices.
Mike’s civil service career began in 1958 in a local office in the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance (involving a sharp pay cut after what he had been getting working with his father, a master carpenter with a Worthing building firm). This followed National Service in the RAF, partly in Cyprus. He married as a serviceman in 1957 and an early indication of Mike’s determination to get best value from public resources was his use of the travel warrant the forces provided to those marrying in service. He calculated that the longest possible journey from Worthing was to Fort William – which is accordingly where he and his wife, Ann, spent their honeymoon.
Moving from local offices to headquarters, Mike rose quickly in what became the Department of Health and Social Security. He spent three years as ministerial private secretary, first to Richard Crossman, under Labour, then to Sir Keith Joseph under the Conservative administration. His policy responsibilities on health and social security included a project looking at sites for a national hospital building programme – later roles also took him all round the country.
In 1984 he moved as under-secretary to the Department of Employment, where the focus was on programmes to tackle high levels of unemployment, in particular, long-term unemployment. In 1987, it was decided to merge two national networks, the Manpower Services Commission Jobcentres and the Unemployment Benefit Service, into a new organisation, the Employment Service. Mike Fogden was appointed as its first chief executive. When the Next Steps agency initiative was launched the following year, the Employment Service (ES) seemed potentially a direct fit with the agency model. Even so, Mike was determined that the preparations should be thorough and ensure that the agency arrangements were soundly based.
The discussions took two years, but when the ES achieved agency status in 1990, the framework was in place for an effective and resilient policy/management relationship between the department and the agency. This paid off and Mike became one of the leading exponents of the agency model, making full use of the managerial scope he had acquired, while reassuring ministers with his grasp of the policy agenda. The ES had moved out of the department’s office in Tothill Street to a London HQ in Orange Street (with a large presence in Sheffield too) and this, albeit short, physical distance was both symbolic and effective in giving the agency the operational independence it needed.
As chief executive, Mike made regular walks across St James’s Park, arriving at Tothill Street with policy issues and an operational report at his fingertips. Back in Orange Street, he was very much the hands-on manager of a nationwide, local, people-based operation, its doors open to the general public.
The management challenge, to bring together some 40,000 staff from very different organisational cultures, the high-street jobcentres and the altogether more grimy and rule-bound UBOs, was considerable. So too was the policy and operational challenge, of reconnecting receipt of unemployment benefit with the requirement to actively seek work, under a stricter new benefit regime.
Mike succeeded in both. He was a down-to-earth, commonsense and certainly robust chair of his executive board, with a forensic grasp of the operational detail (and a notoriously persistent brought-forward system). He had a high profile around the national network of offices. He listened to staff and built on their ideas, investing effort and energy in internal communications, which very often came directly from him. His own local office experience gave him credibility with staff and his respect for them was clear. He valued outcomes over activity and people over process. He kept a clear focus on what staff were being asked to do – and its impact on the individuals they served. Mike insisted on seeing written complaints from the public and introduced mystery shopping to the Employment Service.
Alongside his strong grounding in the traditional values of public administration, Mike was also an innovator who brought about considerable change. The introduction of competence-based recruitment was a deliberate and innovative shift away from the traditional civil service reliance on a record of academic achievement. This move recognised what the Employment Service actually needed in its interactions with the public.
Changes in pay and grading were also carefully designed to allocate the agency’s resources to the jobs that mattered to the operation and to encourage talented and effective local managers to migrate to the most difficult offices, as opposed to staying put in an easier location more suited to someone less experienced. Mike was clear where the action was and where the results ministers had commissioned would actually be achieved.
Mike had a longstanding wider interest in public administration and in sharing ideas for improving it. He was interested in all aspects of the public sector. In the 1980s, he was chair of the First Division Association, the senior civil service union, and from 1989 to 1993 of the London Council of the Royal Institute for Public Administration. On that institute’s demise, he was one of its supporters who sought to keep alive the idea that there needed to be a forum and network for people across the public sector with an interest in promoting excellence in public administration.
He much valued the opportunities he got as a practitioner (and later in a consultancy role) to share his experience with public servants around the world, especially in Commonwealth and East European countries. His presentations and Q and A were clear, straightforward and good humoured: practical, occasionally avuncular, advice from someone who knew what he was talking about and was enthusiastic to open it up to those who shared his interest in serving their government and citizens.
When CIPFA took the decision to establish the Public Management and Policy Association, Mike was the obvious person to chair its executive committee. He was also instrumental in starting up the series of lectures that became a cornerstone of the PMPA network, supplementing its publications and other work.
Sir Michael Bichard, who was chief executive of the Benefits Agency when Mike was running the Employment Service, and later also chair of the PMPA advisory board, has paid this tribute to him: ‘The public sector can ill afford to lose people of Mike Fogden’s stature at this time. He was a man who filled any room not with bluff but with commitment and determination. He was above all a manager who delivered results with integrity. I was proud to work with him and will miss him.’
CIPFA also had another important relationship with Mike through the role he took on in the accountancy profession's disciplinary scheme for handling major public interest cases. He played a major part in the revision of CIPFA's professional disciplinary scheme in the late 1990s. Commenting on this, Vernon Soare (then CIPFA’s policy and technical director, now with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales) said: ‘He ensured that the scheme was revised in accordance with the requirements of the Human Rights Act, including the appointment of some 30 lay and CIPFA members not involved with the institute's governance to the newly constituted Investigation, Disciplinary and Appeal Committees. His interview style when chairing the appointments panel was typically robust and to the point, but always accompanied by insightful and humorous observations on the process and the issues involved in this aspect of professional regulation. Using this experience, he then went on to become the first chair of the then Accountants Investigation and Discipline Board, part of the Financial Reporting Council, responsible for hearing public interest cases concerning the accountancy profession.’
Forced by civil service rules to retire at 60 from the Employment Service role he loved, Mike was not ready to stop. He was appointed as deputy chair of the Civil Service Appeals Board, and in 1998 he became chair of the National Blood Authority. He served until 2005, including a short period when he had simultaneously to act as chief executive – a combination he relished. This was another chance to lead a dispersed national organisation, to engage with its staff and to renew its focus on its customers and providers, again building up the internal communications and a focus on people as individuals. The idea of sending donors a birthday card, and reminders of their session by card or text, were the sorts of initiative Mike enjoyed. He commented with dry humour, when he became seriously ill with leukaemia this year, on his own experience in benefiting from the improvements in blood supply he had helped to bring about.
Mike was always on top of political and business news; he was a keen reader of public affairs. He loved music (though he never found time to get to grips with the clarinet he had as a retirement present from the Employment Service); watching the England rugby football team and latterly Sussex county cricket; and his family.
Those who worked with Mike recognised his commitment to public service and his huge interest in policy issues and public welfare. Those who experienced him as the chair of a meeting, whether management board, union committee, evening lecture, recruitment panel or hearing or residents’ association, will remember how naturally he took to the role – and the intelligence and insight, as well as the humour and humanity, organisation and common sense he brought to the occasion. He loved life. He was robust and straight-talking; he hated management jargon as much as he enjoyed a full-bodied red wine; and many will testify to his personal kindness and the support he gave them as mentor and friend over many years.
Mike Fogden is survived by his three sons and his daughter, and four grandchildren.
He was born on May 30 1936 and died on October 10 2009.
