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Permanent Secretary to the Treasury

British civil service position

Summary

British civil service position

The UK Permanent Secretary to the Treasury is the most senior civil servant at HM Treasury. The post originated as that of Assistant Secretary to the Treasury in 1805; that office was given new duties and renamed in 1867 as a Permanent Secretaryship.

The position is generally regarded as the second most influential in His Majesty's Civil Service; Andrew Turnbull (Permanent Secretary from 1998 to 2002) and Gus O'Donnell (2002–2005) were Permanent Secretaries to the Treasury who then became Cabinet Secretary, the most influential post.

Previous incumbents have not always maintained the political neutrality expected of civil servants; in 1909 Sir George Murray was involved in lobbying various Crossbench peers in the House of Lords to reject the Chancellor of the Exchequer's proposed budget. In 2014, during the Scottish Independence referendum campaign, Sir Nicholas Macpherson broke with convention by publishing private advice to Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. The decision to publish was later criticised for compromising the impartiality of the Civil Service.{{cite news | access-date =12 November 2020 }}

Assistant Secretaries to the Treasury

  • George Harrison (1805–1826)
  • William Hill (1826–1828)
  • James Henry Keith Stewart (1828–1836)
  • Alexander Spearman (1836–1840)
  • Sir Charles Trevelyan (1840–1859)
  • George Alexander Hamilton (1859–1867)

Permanent Secretaries to the Treasury

  • George Alexander Hamilton (1867–1870)
  • Sir Ralph Lingen (1870–1885)
  • Sir Reginald Welby (1885–1894)
  • Sir Francis Mowatt (1894–1903) (jointly from 1902)
  • Sir Edward Hamilton (1902–1908) (joint)
  • Sir George Murray (1903–1911) (jointly until 1908)
  • Sir Robert Chalmers (1911–1913) (joint)
  • Sir Thomas Heath (1911–1916) (joint)
  • Sir John Bradbury (1913–1919) (joint)
  • Sir Robert Chalmers (1916–1919) (joint)
  • Sir Warren Fisher (1919–1939)
  • Sir Horace Wilson (1939–1942)
  • Sir Richard Hopkins (1942–1945)
  • Sir Edward Bridges (1945–1956)
  • Sir Norman Brook (1956–1962) (jointly until 1959 and from 1960)
  • Sir Roger Makins (1956–1959) (joint)
  • Sir Frank Lee (1960–1962) (joint)
  • Sir William Armstrong (1962–1968) (jointly until 1963 and from 1968)
  • Sir Laurence Helsby (1962–1968) (joint)
  • Sir Douglas Allen (1968–1974) (jointly until 1968)
  • Sir Douglas Wass (1974–1983)
  • Sir Peter Middleton (1983–1991)
  • Sir Terence Burns (1991–1998)
  • Sir Andrew Turnbull (1998–2002)
  • Sir Gus O'Donnell (2002–2005)
  • Sir Nicholas Macpherson (2005–2016)
  • Sir Tom Scholar (2016–2022)
  • James Bowler (2022–present)

Since March 2009, Sir Tom Scholar had served as the Treasury's Second Permanent Secretary. The post of Head of the Government Economic Service was held by Sir Nicholas Stern until June 2007, then jointly held until 2010 by Vicky Pryce, Chief Economist at BIS, and Dave Ramsden, Managing Director, Macroeconomic and Fiscal Policy Directorate. Dave Ramsden was then sole head from 2010 to 2017.

References

  • David Butler and Gareth Butler, Twentieth Century British Political Facts 1900–2000, Macmillan 2000, p. 306.

References

  1. McLean, Ian. "The 1909 budget and the destruction of the unwritten British Constitution". History & Policy.
  2. Macpherson, Nicholas. (11 February 2014). "Scotland and a Currency Union".
Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

hm-treasury civil-service-(united-kingdom) civil-service-positions-in-the-united-kingdom 1805-establishments-in-the-united-kingdom
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