Adventures Of A Civil Servant (Part 3):
Working in London in the 1970's!
A few months before I was due to leave Swaziland, Lawrie Levy in the Department of Employment Headquarters in London sent me a letter to say that “it was not in the interests of my career” to stay in Swaziland any longer. This implied that there was a career path laid out for me. What it really meant was that the “Powers That Be” in Personnel (or “Establishments”, as it was still called) did not look favourably on people who went “swanning off” on overseas postings. I don’t think staying on was an option, anyway, as James Nxumalo did not really want non-professionally qualified people in his Economic Planning Unit. I half-heartedly looked at some other similar jobs, including the British Virgin Islands, but did not apply for any.
We left in November 1970 and stopped off in Nairobi on our way back to England. Bob Thomas had told me that David Anderson, the Head of the Ford Foundation’s African office, had a high opinion of me and wanted to see me. I had hoped that he might offer me a job. However, our plane from Manzini was delayed by a day and David had been called away by the time we got there, so I didn’t see him.
Lawrie Levy told me that I would not be going back to the Midlands, but would be posted to Headquarters in London. I was not too unhappy at this, because I felt, rightly, that I was more suited to backroom work than to frontline management. I was posted to the Economic Policy (Manpower) Division in the Department of Employment. (Over a period of ten years or so, the government department had changed from the “Ministry of Labour and National Service” to the “Ministry of Labour”, then to the “Department of Employment and Productivity” under Barbara Castle[1] and finally to the “Department of Employment” under Ted Heath’s new Conservative Government.
[1] Barbara Castle was a feisty left-wing Labour MP, who, as Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity, upset many of her friends on the left by producing a White Paper, entitled In Place of Strife, which was designed to use the law to reduce the power of trade unions .
Once again, I had to learn about a whole new world, peopled by Ministers, Private Secretaries, Senior Civil Servants, PQs (Parliamentary Questions) and Cabinet Committees.
The section I worked in was concerned with Regional Policy. The job was interesting enough, but the Department of Employment (DE) was a fringe player in policies run by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and the Department of the Environment (DOE). Nevertheless, DE was represented on the relevant Cabinet Committees at both ministerial and official level. Before a Cabinet meeting or a Cabinet Committee meeting, papers were sent to ministers, who circulated them in yellow folders to officials for briefing. These were called “yellow jackets”. Dealing with them was obviously a high priority. Assistant Secretaries (AS) were supposed to write the briefs, but if the AS was not available, they went down to the most senior person available, which on rare occasions was me. (Leslie Stuart, my Principal, and Derrick Dawson, my Senior Executive Officer (SEO) were senior to me.)
I had not been working in London very long, before I applied for a two-year sabbatical to work for an MSc degree in Economics. The plan was that I would then become an Economic Adviser (a double promotion). Once again, I didn’t have a good interview and, in spite of a positive recommendation from Lawrie Levy, my application was turned down – with hindsight that may have been a good thing.
A few months later a competition was announced for a “class-to-class” transfer from the Executive Class to the Administrative Class. In salary terms, it involved a sideways move to a new grade called HEO(A) – ‘A’ for Administrative. After about two years in the grade, one was expected to be promoted to Principal, thus skipping the SEO Grade. I was nominated for this after an internal panel which included Geoffrey Holland, to whom I will refer later.
This was followed by two or three days of intensive tests, run by the Civil Service Commission. The first test was to prepare a briefing for a Minister on a proposal for a mining development in an area of natural beauty. I was very fortunate in that I had written a ‘yellow jacket’ briefing on a similar subject, the day before! I was then asked to chair a meeting on the same subject. I don’t think I had ever chaired a meeting before, but I developed the practice of carefully working out my objectives, which I have used successfully ever since. I had to prepare arguments on two topics to present to a single interviewer. One of my topics was about ‘separate development in South Africa’, on which I had a different perspective from most of my competitors. In the second, I argued that the economic case for joining the European Economic Community (EEC) was not proven.
The final interview took place in a large room. The panel consisted of about twelve worthy ladies and gentlemen. At the end of the interview, the Chairman asked me if I would be interested in working for the European Commission, if the current negotiations to join the EEC were successful. I thought this might be a trick question: I was applying for a position in the British Civil Service, but could I be tempted to go and work somewhere else, soon afterwards? I replied: “I’m afraid I will have to do a Harold Wilson on this and wait and see what the terms are.” I had been playing golf on the North Shore golf course at Skegness (my father, who had moved to Skegness in 1969, walked round with me) when I learned that I had been appointed as an HEO(A).
To my surprise – and slight disappointment – I stayed where I was, working on regional policy. I stayed there for nearly two years in total. As part of my training, I was required to work for Brian Martin, who was the Principal responsible for regional and local employment (and more especially unemployment) issues. Much of his section’s work consisted of drafting replies to PQs about unemployment in a particular area. This was my first introduction to PQs, which, I was to discover, are part of the staple diet of Whitehall civil servants. Brian Martin was a very interesting character. He had been an army colonel and had come into the Civil Service as a Principal on retirement from the Army. He was very cultured and was more interested in having long conversations with me about French literature than answering PQs. He was also somewhat frustrated (not to say depressed) at having got stuck at Principal level, after holding such a senior position in the Army. (He was to remain at that level for a few more years, but then was promoted to Assistant Secretary and rapidly to Under-Secretary in the Health and Safety Executive (HSE)).
Lesley Stuart was also responsible for policy on Geographical Mobility. His other SEO, a Mr Clark, ran a scheme to pay allowances to workers to transfer from areas of high unemployment to work in places where there were labour shortages. In the winter of 1971/72, negotiations on the UK’s entry into the EEC were well advanced. In particular, details of the UK’s participation in the European Social Fund (ESF) were being worked out. The ESF was designed to promote occupational and geographical mobility. An informal meeting was arranged in Brussels to discuss this. Mr Clark didn’t want to go and, as I spoke French and was an HEO(A), I was invited to go.
Our leader was Denis Sullivan, who was the AS in the recently formed Division responsible for co-ordinating DE relations with the EEC. Jack Wilde, who was an AS responsible for vocational training (i.e. occupational mobility) was the third member of the team. There was fog in Brussels, so our flight was cancelled. Denis, or his secretary, managed to get us on a flight from Southend to Ostend. The aeroplane had an enormous belly and was designed for transporting motor cars. We arrived fairly late in the evening and were met at the station in Brussels by Mike Rowe. I had been on a training course in Birmingham with Mike Rowe, some nine years earlier. This was the first time since 1966 that I had been to a French-speaking country. Mike took us to a restaurant and I remember that, after the meal, we were served brandy in enormous glasses. We stayed in the Hotel Métropole. At that time, it had seen better days, but the glory had faded. (Its fortunes were to be revived and, some ten years later it was taken off the UK Government list because it was too expensive!) The meetings were not memorable, but I remember thinking that I would like Mike Rowe’s job, a dream that I was to realise six years later.
As an HEO(A) I was invited to go on a statistics course. I don’t remember much of the detail, but some of the concepts, such as probabilities, stood me in good stead. We had a half day on computers. We were taught how to write simple programs in Basic. We were also shown a Government computer. This was housed in a room about 16 foot square. It consisted of three or four parallel banks of metal cabinets, with machinery whirring away inside them.
In June 1973, I was invited to go on a week-long visit to Bonn for HEO(A)s and Administration Trainees. This was the first such visit. The Germans laid out the red carpet for us and we suspected that they were expecting more senior staff. In spite of that, the organisation left much to be desired and there was quite a lot of delay and confusion in the arrangements. For me the highlight of the visit was an evening visit to the Bavarian House in Bonn to eat sausages and drink Bavarian beer. The host explained to us that we were in the Bavarian Embassy to the Federal German Government. The atmosphere was friendly and relaxed.
By contrast, the next evening from 6:30 to 8:00 pm we were invited to the British Minister’s house for drinks. (I learned that the Minister was the number two in the Embassy.) The diplomats who were there gave the impression that they had been told they had to be there, that they were bored to be there and that they didn’t want to meet these inferior beings from the Home Civil Service anyway. At one point, the Minister asked one of my colleagues in a very condescending tone: “What exactly is an Administration Trainee?” Nevertheless, we were not in a hurry to leave. At about 8:15, one of the diplomats came round and said: “The Minister’s wife expects her parties to finish on time!”
An unhappy experience
The Secretary of State for Employment (Maurice Macmillan) had a Principal Private Secretary and two Assistant Private Secretaries. The Minister of State (Robin Chichester-Clark) and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (PUSS) (Dudley Smith) both had Private Secretaries. All these posts, apart from the Principal Private Secretary were at my level (HEO(A)). In the early autumn of 1972 I was in line for the next vacancy which arose. I was called over to Robin Chichester-Clark’s office for an interview, which was meant to be a formality. Norman Tebbit was his Parliamentary Private Secretary. Not for the first (or last) time I fluffed the interview and Steve Loveman was appointed to the post.
A few weeks’ later a vacancy arose in Maurice Macmillan’s office and I was appointed as his Assistant Private Secretary, alongside Kate Jenkins. Geoffrey Holland (later Sir Geoffrey) was the Principal Private Secretary[2]. Sir Denis Barnes was the Permanent Secretary and Bernard Ingham (later Sir Bernard) was the Chief Press Officer – an important post. I had some dealings with Bernard during this period. He was a lifelong Labour supporter. He had been brought into the Department of Employment and Productivity by Barbara Castle and retained by her Conservative successor, Robert Carr, and subsequently by Maurice Macmillan. Maurice was the son of the former Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, and – I think it would be fair to say – he found it difficult to live up to expectations. I was scared stiff of him and I hardly spoke to him during the six weeks that I worked for him.
[2] A Private Secretary is a civil servant, who runs the Private Office of a Minister. In the Department of Employment the Principal Private Secretary was usually a very bright Principal in his early thirties. He was non-political. The main functions were to act as a liaison point between the Minister and the Department of Employment and the Private Offices of Ministers in other Departments.
These were difficult times: inflation was rampant and the Government was drawing up legislation to deal with it. Maurice Macmillan was finding it difficult to cope. I was, frankly, out of my depth in this world of nuance, innuendo, intrigue and high stakes. It should have come as no surprise to me, when, late one Friday afternoon, Ian Hudson, the Director of Establishments (personnel) sent for me and told me that I was being moved to an important job on prices and incomes policy. It was, however, an almighty shock, which took me a long time to get over.
On one occasion I was told to listen in on a conversation between Maurice Macmillan and Ted Heath, the Prime Minister, who was in Paris at the time. I don’t remember what it was about, but I do remember that Ted Heath was monosyllabic in his responses to the extent that at one point Macmillan asked if the Prime Minister was still there!
Incomes Policy and Equal Pay
In 1966 the Labour Government had introduced a prices and incomes policy – a wage freeze followed by “a period of severe restraint”. This had been heavily criticised at the time by the Conservative opposition. Nevertheless, by 1972 inflation was again deemed to be getting out of control. The Conservative government needed to “do something” about inflation, but did not want to be seen to be copying the Labour Government’s policies. Work began on an Inflation (Temporary Measures) Bill. On the eve of publication, the title was changed, following instructions from Ted Heath, to the Counter-Inflation (Temporary Measures) Bill. The Department of Employment and the Treasury were jointly responsible for this bill.
When I left the Private Office, I was posted to the bill team: that is the three or four person unit responsible for briefing and working on the nitty-gritty details of the bill as it passed through Parliament. The main members of the team were Alan Burridge, Assistant Secretary, Norman Mills, Principal, and my predecessor, John White, and then myself. We worked very closely with Hugh Purse in the Department’s legal team. Hugh went on, some ten years later, to become “The Solicitor” in the Department of Employment. Fortunately – because my confidence was very low after my removal from Private Office – I did not have much to do on this bill, because it was enacted a few days after I transferred to the unit.
This move marked an important broadening of my expertise. Remarkably, I had worked in the Civil Service in two countries for ten years, but had very little experience of legislation. The Employment and Training Act 1948 was the basis for most of the Department of Employment’s activities. It was couched in very general terms. The Minister of Labour and National Service was to provide: “Such facilities and services as he considers expedient for the purpose of assisting persons to select, fit themselves for, obtain and retain employment suitable to their age and capacity, of assisting employers to obtain suitable employees, and generally for the purpose of promoting employment in accordance with the requirements of the community.”[3]
[3] Careers Services: History, Policy and Practice in the United Kingdom by David Peck
The Counter-Inflation (Temporary Measures) Act 1972 was followed immediately by a more substantial Counter-Inflation Bill. For the next 16 months, I was working right at the heart of the main Government policy initiative. The Department of Employment established two Incomes Divisions under Donald Derx, who was promoted to Deputy Secretary [4]. Donald was a very dynamic 42-year old. He, along with Ted Heath and the Cabinet Secretary, William Armstrong, was the driving force behind the Incomes Policy. I was in the Division, headed by Geoffrey Brand. We were responsible for the development of policy under Denis Buckley and the development of legislation under Alan Burridge, for whom I worked. The other Division was made up of a large team, who were responsible for monitoring the implementation of the policy. Everyone was extremely busy apart from Norman Mills and me. It was decided in the early days that Alan Burridge would have an office in the Treasury, in order to speed up the reaction to parliamentary amendments to the Bill. This meant that Norman Mills and I received all the papers, but had nothing to do with them, other than read them and file them.
[4] A “Division” in DE was headed by an Under-Secretary.
In September 1973, against all my expectations, I was promoted to Principal and given one of the most high-profile jobs in the Department at that level. I worked for Denis Buckley on the development of incomes policy, mainly on hours and holidays, and for Alan Burridge on equal pay for men and women.
As there was relatively full employment, employers were often looking for ways to improve pay and conditions, without breaching the incomes policy. When I was a boy, New Year’s Day had been a normal working day in England, but as time passed by more and more workers took the day off. In the Autumn of 1973, it was decided to make a concession within the incomes policy, allowing employers to grant an extra day’s holiday on New Year’s Day. It fell to me to write to the Treasury to ask them to arrange for an order to be laid under the Banking and Financial Dealings Act creating a new Bank Holiday.
Sometime later, when I was no longer responsible for this policy, I went to a meeting with Michael Foot, who had taken over as Secretary of State for Employment. The meeting had been called to finalise decisions on a series of detailed matters, which needed to be resolved by the new Labour Government. Michael Foot wanted a May Day Bank Holiday. However, my former colleague in Incomes Division, Clive Tucker, explained that employers had objected to having a new Bank Holiday in mid-week, but would accept a holiday on the first Monday of May. Michael Foot accepted this argument. Thus was created the Early Spring Bank Holiday.
The Incomes Policy was controversial – to say the least – and provoked a hostile reaction from the trades unions, in particular the National Union of Mineworkers under Arthur Scargill. This led to the introduction of a ‘three-day-week’ decreed by the Government in order to save energy during the miners’ strike and then to the calling of a General Election, which the Conservatives lost. As we were working on the policy, we were exempt from the ‘three-day-week’. Indeed, Denis Buckley had a bed put in his office, though I’m not sure if he ever slept in it. During this period, I went to the Houses of Parliament on a number of occasions, usually to the House of Lords.
On one occasion I was walking through the corridors of the House of Lords with a colleague, John Dewsbury, at about 10 o’clock in the evening, when we met Lord George-Brown, who appeared to be ‘in good spirits’. We were carrying our official black Government briefcases. As we passed, he said “Bureaucrats!” burst out laughing and went on his way.
Just before the General Election in February 1974, there were simultaneous debates in both Houses about the miners’ strike. Norman Mills was due to be in the official box in the House of Commons and Clive Tucker was down to go to the House of Lords. Against my better judgement, Clive persuaded me to replace him, as he had a ticket for the opera. My judgement was correct and I had one of the most uncomfortable evenings of my career. Lord Gowrie, the Government spokesman, kept coming to me with questions, to which, as it was outside the matters that I was dealing with, I did not know the answers. However, I survived and the Government didn’t.
When a General Election is called, the Civil Service produces a number of papers setting out policy options for each of the parties or combination of parties, which might form the next Government. This was the first occasion when I had been involved in this process. As the probable outcome was uncertain, the different policy options took on added significance.
In the event there was a “Hung Parliament” and the Labour Party under Harold Wilson formed a minority Government. Developments in my area were of particular interest, because the Labour Party had been opposed to the prices and incomes policy. When they came to power, they obviously had to “do something”. I recall one incident that illustrates the flexibility of senior civil servants. As I have said, Donald Derx was one of the main architects of the Conservative Government’s policy. Shortly after the election, however, he wrote a speech for Michael Foot, the new Secretary of State, criticising “the arid rigidities of incomes policy”.
One of the last achievements of the Labour Government in 1970 had been the enactment of the Equal Pay Act 1970. This provided, inter alia, that it would be unlawful for employers to pay less to a woman than they would to a man doing “the same, or broadly similar work” after the act came into force on 29 December 1975. I first came across the legislation in my early dealings with incomes policy, because some employers and trade unions sought to justify dubious pay increases, as necessary in order to comply with the incomes policy. Part of my job over the next three years was to work with my colleagues monitoring the incomes policy to ensure that the policy was being interpreted correctly with regard to equal pay.
Towards the end of 1973, the Conservative Government decided that it wanted to introduce legislation on Sex Discrimination. One day, my future colleague and friend, Bob David, telephoned me. He introduced himself and said he had been appointed to lead the team on the Sex Discrimination Bill, which would have implications for the Equal Pay Act. His immediate question was: did I want the Equal Pay legislation to apply to oil rigs? At the time, I thought the question was absurd, but it was indicative of the thorough approach that was taken to the drafting of legislation at that time.
After the first election in 1974, the new Labour Government decided it wanted more substantial legislation on sex discrimination. The Home Office, under Roy Jenkins, was in the lead, but the Department of Employment had a very important role to play. I was transferred from the Incomes Policy Division to work solely on equal pay. Dorothy Kent was the Under-Secretary in charge of that and a myriad of other policy areas. Bryan Winkett headed up a new Branch with three Principals. Eve Craske was in charge of Women’s Employment Policy, Bob David headed the bill team and I was in charge of Equal Pay.
As an aside we were housed in a magnificent building: number 32 St. James’ Square. It was said that, at one time, it had been the Bishop of London’s Palace. It had magnificent toilets and Bryan Winkett had a palatial office and the Department’s Solicitor had a better one. Eve Craske and I, however, had offices in the servants’ quarters: there was an (unused) service lift for food and crockery. My office overlooked the well and, until recently, it had been used as a carpenter’s workshop. Nevertheless, I spent one of the most enjoyable periods of my career working in that office.
My main job was to ensure that the Government was seen to be doing its best to ensure that the Equal Pay Act was implemented correctly and on time. In fact, the Government had very little power under the legislation. (The Act gave rights to employees, which were enforceable in Industrial Tribunals (civil courts dealing solely with employment matters).) (Ironically, some ten years later, Eve Craske was the Secretary of the Industrial Tribunals (i.e. she ran them) while I was responsible for policy on the tribunals.)
This was a good job. It was important enough to have a Principal in charge (me), but not important enough to attract much attention from my superiors. Consequently, for much of the work I dealt directly with ministers. It was my job to explain the issues to successive ministers (usually Parliamentary Under Secretaries of State) and the approach we were taking to these issues. This was particularly important when there was a change of Minister. During this period, I told myself, no doubt with a little hubris, that Government policy on Equal Pay was what I said it was.
This was far from being the case with regard to the Sex Discrimination Bill. I was astonished at the intensity of the debates and discussions within the Civil Service that went into the detailed preparation of the bill. Anthony Lester QC, who was an adviser to Roy Jenkins, also had an important input.
The first stage was the preparation of Instructions to Counsel: the detailed policy objectives of the proposed legislation. I have already mentioned an early discussion about whether the law should apply to offshore installations – the territorial scope of the legislation. There was a more important discussion about the breadth of scope of the legislation. Everyone was agreed that it should apply to discrimination between men and women. But it was for debate – and hotly debated – whether it should also be unlawful to discriminate on grounds of marriage and on grounds of pregnancy. Dorothy Kent had a rigorous intellectual approach to the legislation, which let her down on one occasion. In a room full of mostly men, she stood up and said: “Pregnancy has absolutely nothing to do with sex!”
I had a great admiration for Dorothy Kent and generally got on well with her. She had a powerful, quite shrill voice. Her office was in number 8 St. James’s Square – near to the Ministers – and across the square from me. Quite often she would ring me up, though I sometimes thought she didn’t need a phone to make herself heard. She would begin “Mr Mackley…” followed by a short, ominous pause. She would then launch into a long tirade about something which she thought was not quite right. My response usually was: “Perhaps I should come over and talk to you about it”, which she usually accepted. This gave her time to calm down and me time to think what I was going to say.
My involvement in the development of the legislation concerned the relationship between the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Bill.
After the Instructions to Counsel had been agreed by officials and then by Ministers, they were sent to the Parliamentary Draftsman, whose job was to turn the instructions into a draft bill. This draft was again hotly debated by officials and amendments requested. Then the Bill was published and the parliamentary process began. The process was the same as for the Counter-Inflation Bills, but I was much more closely involved on this occasion. Draft amendments were tabled by MPs and officials had a few hours in which to advise Ministers how to respond. There was not, in fact, much opposition from the Conservatives, who had been going to propose a similar bill, but there was considerable opposition from a group of four Labour MPs, led by Renée Short, who thought the bill was too weak.
The main policy issue, as far as I was concerned, was whether the Equal Pay Act should be repealed and incorporated into the Sex Discrimination Bill. Most of the people involved with the Bill favoured the latter course, including my immediate boss, Brian Winkett. I argued, almost alone, that the Equal Pay Act was a complex piece of legislation, which had been agreed by Parliament after lengthy debate, where a compromise had been reached between those who had wanted tougher legislation and many employers, who considered legislation to be inappropriate. Now was not the time to reopen the ‘can of worms’, before the legislation had come into force. The counter-argument was that pay was the most important element in discrimination and it was absurd not to incorporate it into the new Bill. This debate raged for some months within the Civil Service, though I don’t remember it being raised in Parliament. At the end of the day, my line prevailed, partly following the intervention of John Locke, who had been the Under Secretary in charge of the original Equal Pay Bill, but, who was now a Deputy Secretary with responsibilities unconnected with the Sex Discrimination Bill. John Locke was unconventional for a civil servant at that time. He had long hair – well before that became fashionable in men – and wore casual clothes and suede shoes. He had a relaxed style, but the sharpest mind, that I ever came across and a sharp tongue to go with it, whenever the occasion arose.
Soon after I first took over the equal pay responsibility the European Commission invited ‘experts’ from the three new Member States (Denmark, Ireland and the UK to a meeting to discuss a possible European Economic Community (EEC) Directive on equal pay. I went from the UK, in spite of the fact that I knew hardly anything about the subject. I remember receiving detailed (and quite aggressive) briefing from a senior statistician, a Mr Turner, explaining the difference between ‘wages’ and ‘earnings’, a distinction, which can easily be overlooked in discussions about pay, but which I never forgot.
Some months later the Commission made a proposal for a Council Directive on Equal Pay for men and women. This was the first occasion that the Department of Employment had been involved in the process of negotiating EEC legislation and I was at the heart of it – though perhaps not quite as much at the heart of it as I would have been, if Bryan Winkett had not decided to go himself to the Council meetings. It was my job, however, to provide him and the United Kingdom Permanent Representation to the European Communities (UKREP) with detailed briefing. As there were few precedents, I had to invent the form that the briefing would take. (Throughout my career I preferred to work from first principles (others would say to reinvent the wheel) rather than to follow an established formula.) I worked hard on this briefing, often late into the evening.
As well as briefing for the meetings in Brussels, I also had to go to one or two meetings with the House of Lords Scrutiny Committee, which had been set up to examine the Government’s negotiating stance on EEC legislative proposals. There was also a House of Commons Scrutiny Committee, but I don’t recall being summoned to meet them. I also became one of the few people in the world to understand the relationship between Gibraltar, Guernsey and Jersey and the EEC, although I am not sure that I can still explain it 45 years later! These territories were not part of the EEC, but they were required to comply with EEC legislation. I therefore had to write to the authorities in these three dependencies to enquire what steps they were taking to comply with the new Directive, when it was adopted. For some reason, which I can’t explain, the Directive did not apply to the Isle of Man.
A contentious issue in relation to equal pay, both in the context of the original Equal Pay Bill and the proposal for an EEC Directive was the definition of ‘equal work’. In 1951 the International Labour Organisation (ILO) had adopted a Convention (100) on equal remuneration. This provided for equal pay for ‘work of equal value’. The Equal Pay Act had used the formula equal pay for the ‘same or broadly similar work or work to which an equal value has been attributed under a job evaluation scheme’. So, for example, office workers and factory workers could not be compared, unless there had been a formal job evaluation scheme. This definition became central in the discussions in Brussels. That situation was even more confused, because the Treaty of Rome (Article 119) referred in English to equal pay ‘for equal work’, whereas in French it was pour un même travail and I believe in Danish samme arbejde[5] . As all languages are equal under EEC law, this gave the lawyers plenty to argue about.
[5] The words même and samme can be translated into English as same and are therefore, arguably, narrower in scope than the English definition of equal in the Equal Pay Act 1970.
In the negotiations, the argument boiled down to one or two words: ‘work to which an equal value has been attributed’ favoured by Bryan Winkett (correctly, if the Equal Pay Act was going to meet the requirements of the Directive without amendment) and ‘work to which an equal value is attributed’, favoured by most people in Brussels, including John Rimington, who was the Counsellor in UKREP responsible for leading the UK negotiating team. When the Directive came for a decision in the Council of Ministers, John Grant, the UK minister found himself in a difficult position. The Labour Government was not very ‘pro-EEC’, but he did not want to find himself blocking European legislation on equal pay. Council Directive 75/117/EEC was adopted on 10 February 1975 with the formula ‘work to which an equal value is attributed’.
A similar issue was raised by a Belgian air-hostess, Gabrielle Defrenne, who took a whole series of discrimination cases against her employers, SABENA, the Belgian national airline, to the European Court of Justice (ECJ). These cases rested on the interpretation of Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome and whether the article was ‘directly applicable’ in the Member States. The argument was that as the Treaty required equal pay for equal work, workers had a right to equal pay without the need for further legislation either at European or national level. The important thing for the UK would be that, if she was completely successful, women in the UK would have a right to claim retrospectively from the date the UK joined the EEC, that is from 1 January 1973, whereas the Equal Pay Act was only due to come into force on 29 December 1975.
I remember doing detailed, but probably not very sophisticated, calculations of the potential cost to UK employers. I estimated these to be about £1 billion, the equivalent of the whole cost of the Concorde project or the Channel Tunnel project, both of which were being debated at the time and both of which were considered to be prohibitively expensive for Governments to undertake. In a landmark Judgment, the ECJ held that article 119 of the Treaty of the European Community was of such a character as to have horizontal direct effect, and therefore enforceable not merely between individuals and the government, but also between private parties. I think there might have been something in the Judgment, which made it non-retrospective. In any case, I don’t remember the Judgment having huge cost implications for UK employers.
The Equal Pay Act also required the removal of discriminatory references to men and women from ‘collective agreements’. As the deadline for implementation of the legislation approached, Ministers became increasingly anxious about whether this provision was being complied with. I was instructed to find out. For this I was allowed to recruit a Senior Executive Officer to do the research. The task proved to be more difficult than anyone had imagined. The Department of Employment published a book on rates of pay, hours and holidays each year, giving information for some 200 collective agreements and Wages Councils. The Wages Council information was easy to find, because that was published in Statutory Instruments. We asked the people responsible for the collective agreements to provide us with copies of them. In some cases this was straightforward, but most of the agreements had been concluded decades before, with only the amendments, mainly to rates of pay, being agreed each year. In some cases, they were unable to find them. Nevertheless, the exercise fulfilled the policy objective which was to make sure that no collective agreements were discriminatory.
As the deadline approached, it was also decided to launch a publicity campaign to remind employers of their obligations and employees of their rights under the legislation. I had a budget of £100,000 for this purpose. I immediately thought of a television advertising campaign, but I was quickly told that – even then in 1975 - £100,000 would buy only a few minutes of TV advertisements. Instead, with the help of the Department’s Press Office and an outside agency, we produced a series of press adverts, for publication in the national press, which I was quite pleased with.
On 29th December 1975, Michael Foot made a Ministerial Broadcast on television to remind employers and employees that the Act was coming into force. I wrote the text of that broadcast. Michael Foot was a great public speaker and he read my speech beautifully. However, towards the end I had written something which was not grammatically coherent and Michael Foot stumbled over it. I doubt if anyone else noticed it, but I did.
In the spring of 1974, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) invited me to attend a symposium for European ‘experts’ on the application of ILO Convention 100 on equal remuneration. This was held at the beautiful ILO headquarters on the banks of Lake Geneva. I was joined at the colloquium by Marie Patterson, who was to be President of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in 1975. As I was still very new to the subject (and she wasn’t!) she was very helpful. Experts from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) were also present. This was the first (and only) time I came into close contact with officials from the USSR. The meeting had an agenda with one or two items for discussion each day. Each expert was invited to speak about the item on the agenda. On the first day, the Soviet expert said nothing. The following day different points were for discussion. However, when invited to speak, the Soviet expert spoke at length on the subjects that had been for discussion the previous day: by that time, she had received her instructions from Moscow as to what to say! This pattern continued throughout the first six days of the Colloquium.
There was then a break of a couple of days, while selected experts (not including me) drafted the report of the Colloquium. On one of these days I went with Marie on a train to visit Chamonix and the nearby tourist attraction of la mer de glace, a valley glacier located on the northern slopes of the Mont Blanc massif.
One consequence of the successive pay policies was that public sector pay was frozen or increases were kept at a low level for a number of years. Then there was a review and we were given a massive pay increase. With my promotion, my salary doubled between 1973 and 1975. In order to celebrate the pay increase, Bob David, who was brought up in India, suggested that we go with our spouses to Veeraswamy’s a posh Indian restaurant on Regent Street. Guided by Bob’s expertise we had a fabulous meal in a wonderful setting. However, the bill for the six of us was £45. So our share of £15 was equivalent to one week’s housekeeping money!
A pleasant interlude
In the autumn of 1976, I was invited to go on a six-week course at the prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) in Paris. This is the post-graduate Grande Ecole, which most future French Ministers, senior civil servants and heads of nationalised industries go to, including, for example, François Hollande (at about the same time as me) and, 27 years later, Emmanuel Macron. This gave me a wonderful insight into the working of the French Government system. I also met two men, Syd Allman and Brian Smith, with whom, along with their wives, Wendy and Joan, we have been friendly ever since. I also met Barney Smith, from the Foreign Office, with whom I was to work closely in 1990.
At the time I was also friendly with Alyson Bailes. She had a formidable intellect. As part of the hospitality offered by the French, we were all invited to dinner with a senior énarque, i.e. a graduate of ENA. Alyson and I were invitedby a senior person in the nationalised gas industry. It was a very civilised evening, but I remember at one point our host turning to Alyson, either in frustration or amusement, and saying: Dites-moi, Alyson, vous qui savez tout …. (Tell me, Alyson, you who know everything …) I bumped into Alyson some years later in Brussels. At that time, she was working in the UK Embassy to the Netherlands. A short time before, she had been in a car with her ambassador, when he had been shot and killed by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Alyson said she had protected herself with her handbag. As a sad corollary to that story, it was said that the Ambassador’s wife, having lost her husband, was given very short notice to leave her house in The Hague. The Foreign Office could be ruthless on occasions. Following a distinguished career in the Foreign Office and other international organisations, Alyson was H.M. Ambassador to Finland from 2000 to 2002.
While we were on the course we had French language lessons. One day the tutor of my group (the top group) played a tape recording of a traffic accident at a crossroads on the Boulevard de Raspail. We were told to go away and write about what we had heard. We could write in “proper” French or in slang. Sixteen years previously I had spent a year at the lycée at Pontarlier, where I spent most of my time mixing with students and young teachers. I decided to write in slang. It’s not all that difficult: bad language anywhere tends to be very repetitive. Any way my report received fulsome praise at the next full meeting of the course. It was returned to me with compliments and a few corrections, including one phrase which I had spelt correctly, but which the tutor had thought should have been spelt differently.[6]
[6] There is quite a strong expletive which sounds like vain Dieu and which I had always assumed was spelt that way and meant “vain God”. That is what my tutor thought too. However, some years before I had seen the expression used in a novel by Georges Bernanos, where it is spelt vingt dieux. That was the spelling I used.
The course included a week away from Paris studying the French regional and local Government set-up. We were the lucky ones: we were sent to the South of France. We spend the first two days in Marseilles, which was the seat of the regional Préfecture. We had a session with Gaston Deferre. We got our photo in the local paper and I got a mention for asking a question. I asked M. Deferre whether he was going to be a candidate in the next French Presidential elections. His answer was, of course, non-committal. He was a candidate, but he didn’t win.
We were invited one evening to the British Consul’s house for drinks. That was not a pleasant experience. All I remember about it was an “old” woman expatriate earwigging me about the terrible Labour Government and the awful tax system. Subsequently we lived abroad for fifteen years, but, on the basis of that experience, I always tried to avoid one-to-one contact with elderly female expatriates.
After Marseilles we went to Toulon, which is the Prefecture of the Var Département. It is also one of the main navy bases. I spent my 47th birthday there. Brian Smith took me out for lunch. In the afternoon I dreamt that we were sitting in a warm room and a man was talking to us about the French naval defences. I dreamt that Brian was also sleeping.
From there we went to La Londe les Maures a smallish town in the Var. We spent most of the day with the mayor. It was customary for one of our number to give a thankyou speech at the end of each session. On this occasion Syd Allman had been designated to do it. Syd was not the best French speaker in the group, but he was not as bad as he made out. He started off by saying that he spoke French comme une vache espagnole (like a Spanish cow) and proceeded to lace his talk with a number of deliberate mistakes and malapropisms. (He came from the Department of Stealth and Total Obscurity.)
On the Saturday I went to St Tropez for the first time. The Friday had been a glorious day, but the Saturday was a grey November day. I have been back there twice since then. The first time was in August 1979 and St Tropez was at its glorious best: I have never been anywhere where the sea has been a deeper blue. The last time I went there was in the early nineties. Our son, Peter, was living and working on a campsite near Antibes. We went to stay on the campsite over Christmas. On the Thursday after Christmas we decided to go to St Tropez for the day. There was a two-kilometre traffic jam to get into the town - on the 28th or 29th December!
A less pleasant experience
I realised when I went on the ENA course that I was “burning my boats”. I was leaving my job on equal pay and I would be at the mercy of the Establishments people when I came back. Nevertheless, things had improved since I first joined and I did expect to have a say. By this time, parts of the Department of Employment had been hived off to agencies. There were six possibilities: DE proper; ACAS (the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service); Manpower Services Commission (MSC) head office; the Training Services Agency; the Employment Services Agency (ESA); and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). The ESA was my fifth choice. I also expressed a preference for economic policy over social policy. The job I was offered was as Operations Manager with functional responsibility for the DRO (Disablement Resettlement Officer) service. I resisted this, but was told that the alternative was an obscure backroom job in Establishments or Finance. Before I accepted the job I asked for it to be noted that if ever the job in the UKREP in Brussels came up, I wished to be considered. There was also a better job in the same Branch of ESA, dealing with policy on Disabled People, which I said I would be interested in, if ever it came along.
The Operations Manager job was a good job: it was just one that I didn’t want and for which I was not particularly well suited. The MSC was a relatively new organisation. It was based on a more “modern”, brash, go-getting, results-orientated philosophy. It embraced all the latest management planning ideas. Thus there was an MSC Strategic Plan and an ESA Strategic Plan; there was also an MSC Operational Plan and an ESA Operational Plan. There were also personal development plans and there may also have been a specific plan for the employment of disabled people. (I may have got some of the titles wrong, but not the numbers!) I found all this terribly frustrating. (It is upsetting me to write about it forty years later!) At one point I was asked to say what were the constraints on achieving our objectives and I said that we spent so much time drawing up plans that we didn’t have time to do the things we were supposed to be doing.
Nevertheless, I did the job for about six months. It brought me back to the real world of Local Offices, which I had left eight years previously. (It seemed like a lifetime away!) Each month I had to go to Leeds to star in the final session of a DRO training course. I also visited Portland College near Mansfield and I went to a Conference at Weston-Super-Mare, which was a pleasant experience. It was also while I was working on this job that Nottingham Forest got promoted to the First Division!
After I had been there for about six months, Stanley Tolson, my boss, asked me if I was still interested in the policy job and if I was still interested in the UKREP job, both of which, he said, were possibly on offer. I replied “Yes” to both. This put him in a dilemma, because the policy job was coming up and he didn’t really want to give it to me, if he was going to have to find someone else in a few months’ time. To his credit, he did give it to me. This was a much better job for me. It was a traditional policy job, and, in addition, I was Secretary of the National Advisory Council on the Employment of Disabled People (NACEDP). This was a relatively high-powered body chaired by Geoffrey Gilbertson (later Sir Geoffrey) who rode around in a wheel-chair. Its members included John Edmonds, who at the time was an up-and-coming figure in the National Union of General and Municipal Workers.
The policy part of the job included advising ministers on policy. The Minister (PUSS) I dealt with was John Grant, who had been the same Minister as I had dealt with before when working on equal pay and with whom I had a good relationship. This was a busy job and we did a lot of briefing for ministers. I had an SEO (John Grubb) and an HEO(A), first Helen Leiser and then Kate Walker.
One week we were asked to prepare some briefing for another DE Minister, who was going to his constituency in Stoke-on-Trent at the weekend. He was going to talk about employment of disabled people. He sent for me on the Friday morning to talk to him about the briefing we had provided. Someone else had written the briefing, but I had signed it off. So it was no excuse when the minister told me, in no uncertain terms, that it was not very good, because it wasn’t. He had written out what he proposed to say instead. This was the sort of ideological nonsense that politicians produce in opposition, but most definitely was not Government policy. I asked him if he had spoken to John Grant about it and he said he hadn’t. The minister concerned, whose name, fortunately, I can’t remember, had a reputation for being a difficult and unpleasant man to deal with. My experience during this discussion did nothing to contradict that reputation. I held my ground and the outcome was that I was given a few hours to rewrite his speech, which I did.
I also had a “run-in” with Alf Morris, who was Minister for the Disabled in the Department for Health and Social Security (DHSS). At the time three-wheel Reliant cars were available for disabled people to get to work. Alf Morris wanted to introduce what came to be known as the Motability Scheme. For reasons that I can no longer remember the ESA was opposed to this. We had a meeting with Alf Morris, where I got in an argument with him and, much to the surprise and delight of Stanley Tolson, seemed to get the better of him. We won the battle, but not the war: the Motability Scheme was introduced and is still going strong, whereas the three-wheeler Reliant Robin cars are a dim and distant – and largely unlamented – memory.
I also came into contact with the Honours system (for knighthoods, MBE, etc.) Many of the members of NACEDP were in the running for Honours and files came across my desk asking for recommendations.
I was also a member of an advisory committee set up by Dr Vidali in the European Commission in Luxembourg on the Rehabilitation of Disabled People. Managers of rehabilitation establishments were also on the Committee. I have to confess that I don’t remember very much about what we talked about at these meetings and I would be hard-pressed, then and now, to justify the expenditure involved. I had never been to Luxembourg before, but I soon discovered, of course, that it is a beautiful city.
I did have some interesting journeys. I usually travelled by Luxair (the Luxembourg national airline) from Heathrow to Luxembourg. On one occasion our flight home was delayed. We sat in the hotel in Luxembourg city centre until we heard that the plane was ready for boarding. When we got there the plane was full and five or six of us were unable to board. By this time the airport was almost deserted. I managed to find someone, and after a long and acrimonious discussion I persuaded them to provide us with a taxi to a hotel with evening meal and breakfast and a taxi back to the airport for the plane the next morning!
The last meeting of this group I was due to attend was arranged for the morning following a full-day NACEDP meeting. I obviously had to attend the NACEDP meeting, but I wanted to go to the meeting in Luxembourg, as well. I was still young – 38. I decided that I could attend the meeting in London, get a plane to Brussels and then get a train to Luxembourg arriving in time to get some hours’ sleep in the hotel I normally stayed in which was near the railway station.
I booked my tickets and duly arrived at Heathrow airport and into the departure lounge on time. I even telephoned Jennifer to say that, so far, everything was on schedule. The reason for my concern was that there was a strike or go-slow somewhere in the system. The flight finally took off round about 10:00 pm and arrived in Brussels around midnight, local time. Having missed the last train, I had no idea how I was going to get to Luxembourg, other than the vague thought of hiring a car. After the plane had landed, a man boarded the aircraft and announced that if anyone had difficulties getting to their final destination, they were to go and see him in the airport. I did so and he said, straightaway: we’ll get a taxi!
Some considerable time later, a young chap came to me and told me he was to take me to Luxembourg. It transpired that he was a student and the taxi belonged to his girlfriend’s father. I got in the taxi. He asked me if I minded if he stopped for fuel. I replied that, if he was short of fuel, that seemed like a good idea. We spent the next 20 minutes or so driving up and down the Brussels ring road looking for a petrol station that was open. With the possibility of hiring a car in mind, I had already looked at the route and decided the best route was via Namur, Bastogne and Arlon. I was somewhat surprised, therefore, when he set off on the route for Liège. I asked him if he knew the route and he said that he did. The result was that we did two sides of a triangle to get to Namur (about 160 km instead of 65). I was tired and very hungry. I asked him if we could stop somewhere to get something to eat. He didn’t find anywhere until we had crossed the Luxembourg border. There we stopped at one of several brightly illuminated establishments and I ordered a beer and a sandwich. I was served by a well-proportioned, lightly-clad young woman, who seemed somewhat disappointed when I replied in the negative to her offer of further services. When I arrived at my hotel it was closed for the night, but I eventually roused someone and went to bed at about 3:30 a.m.
About nine years later, I had similar travel problems. I was a member of a Council of Europe “expert” working group on employment aspects of data protection. The group met at the Council of Europe’s Headquarters in Strasbourg. Towards the end of one meeting, I discovered that my flight back to London had been cancelled. Jennifer was supposed to be meeting me at Heathrow. This was at a time before mobile phones were in common use. Jennifer was the Librarian at St Helen’s School in Northwood. I managed to get a message to her to say that my flight had been cancelled.
With my Luxembourg experience in mind, I decided to get a train to Brussels and get a flight from Brussels to London. I managed to send another message to this effect to Jennifer, via the school office. Two major potential pitfalls were only narrowly avoided. The first one was that I had read the train timetable the wrong way round – across instead of down (or down instead of across). The result was that the train journey took an hour and a half longer than I had calculated – when the train pulled into Luxembourg station, according to my calculation it should already have been near Brussels. I decided to jump off the train at the station in Brussels called Brussels Luxembourg and get a taxi to the airport. Fortunately at that time the security checks were not as stringent as they are now and I was able to catch my plane by the skin of my teeth.
In my conversation with the secretary of the school, I had said only casually that the plane from Brussels was flying into Gatwick airport, which is 47 miles from Heathrow and about 45 miles further from Watford, where we lived. Jennifer had a long discussion with the secretary as to whether I had really said Gatwick. She would not have been amused if she’d gone to the wrong airport or indeed if she had gone all the way to Gatwick and I had missed the plane!
On another occasion Jennifer dropped me off at Heathrow and I gave her strict instructions to pick me up at exactly the same place when I came back. On the appointed day I went out of the arrival area and crossed the road to where I was supposed to be meeting Jennifer – or so I thought. I waited around for about an hour, but there was still no sign of her - and no mobile phones either. I don’t want to raise Jennifer’s ire even now by asking her what the exact outcome was – we are still married! – but she had also been waiting an hour in the place where she had dropped me, which was just across the road from the departure area.
Continued in Brussels#1