Television viewers and radio listeners grew used to the former senior civil servant Bob Kerslake, Lord Kerslake, speaking out about successive government iniquities in recent years. If it seemed unusual coming from a mandarin who was the former head of the civil service it was because his time in such a role had been unusually short and he felt free to express his views.
Kerslake, who has died of cancer aged 68, was certainly a public servant but spent very little of his career in the civil service: most of it had been in local government, working for a succession of local authorities including Sheffield city council. As his criticisms of Tory ministers grew closer to the bone after his retirement, ministers attacked him as a Labour stooge, though he sat in the Lords as a crossbench peer. He had actually been appointed to his senior role and the peerage by David Cameron.
Universally known as Bob, he was born in Bath and brought up in Somerset, where he attended the Blue school in Wells, before going to the University of Warwick, where he obtained a first-class degree in mathematics. After training as an accountant, he joined the Greater London council, which was abolished in 1986, and then the Inner London Education Authority, before it too was abolished by the Thatcher government in 1989: both regarded by the then prime minister as dangerously leftwing.
That led to senior jobs, including chief executive, at Hounslow borough council – another Labour-run authority – on the western fringes of the capital before Kerslake was appointed chief executive at Sheffield city council in 1997.
It was an authority in crisis, crippled with debts incurred hosting the world student games seven years earlier in 1991, a dying city centre losing out to the new out-of-town Meadowhall shopping centre and a council-run tram system that was leaking money.
In the 10 years he was there, Kerslake helped to revitalise the city with the help of large injections of private sector cash, including the privatisation of the tram service, and by the time he left in 2008 the city’s finances had been stabilised. The Guardian was sufficiently impressed to describe him as one of England’s most visionary local authority chief executives.
Kerslake had a reputation for working long hours – he was known to phone journalists for interviews at 7am – and came to be called “whispering Bob” because of his quiet way of speaking. Even after he left Sheffield, he kept a house in the city, close to the Peak District where he could take his dog for long walks.
He was lured by the prospect of heading the new Home and Communities Agency, which was intended to be a unifying body, boosting house building, particularly to provide affordable homes. “I immensely enjoyed my time in Sheffield,” he told the Times in 2008. “So it needed something big and exciting to persuade me to leave, but this seemed to me to be a fantastic opportunity. The scale and range is huge.”
Unfortunately the foundation of the agency coincided with that year’s world financial crisis, which plunged some housing associations towards insolvency. The agency also suffered from underinvestment by governments. It did not meet its optimistic targets – Gordon Brown, setting it up, had hoped for an extra 3m homes by 2020 – and would be wound up and replaced by another initiative called Homes England in 2018.
By then, Kerslake had moved into national government under the Conservative administration in 2010 as permanent secretary at the Department of Communities and Local Government. Two years after that the Cameron government decided to split the job at the top of the civil service, between Jeremy Heywood, who would be the cabinet secretary in Downing Street, and Kerslake, who would take the title of head of the service, responsible for the professional and corporate leadership of the bureaucracy, while retaining his departmental post at the DCLG. Lord (Andrew) Turnbull, his predecessor but one, declared it a messy solution, lacking a clear rationale, and indeed it would soon be abandoned.
The division was not a success. Although Heywood and Kerslake, both living in south London, would share a chauffeured car into Whitehall in the mornings so that they could discuss the prospects for the day, very soon whispers began that Kerslake was not achieving the savings and reforms that were intended of him. The rumours emanated from ministers’ aides and advisers, and grew poisonous.
In 2014 he resigned to become chair of the King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and to take on a number of other roles, including chairing the governors of Sheffield Hallam University. In 2015 he joined the board of the Peabody housing association. Two years later he chaired an independent review into the Manchester Arena bombing that had happened earlier that summer, killing 22 people and injuring more than 1,000. His report the following year criticised the city’s fire service for delays and the communications between the emergency services.
Kerslake had been knighted in 2005 while chief executive at Sheffield city council and was given a life peerage in 2015 as he left the civil service. In December 2017 he resigned from the hospital trust in protest at NHS underfunding, demanding a rethink of how the service was organised, only for it to be revealed that he had been asked to resign two days earlier by Dido Harding, the chair of the NHS regulatory service, because of the trust’s financial performance, which she claimed was unacceptable.
Kerslake had always encouraged honesty in public officials and thereafter he popped up regularly for broadcast interviews, criticising the government in general and ministers in particular for a range of failures, including its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Tory politicians such as Jacob Rees-Mogg retaliated by pointing to his voluntary role advising on the reorganisation of the Labour party under Keir Starmer. Kerslake’s point that he was a crossbench peer, willing to help any party that asked him, tended to get drowned out.
Kerslake is survived by his wife, Anne, their son, Michael, and daughter, Eleanor.
• Robert Walter Kerslake, Lord Kerslake, civil servant, born 28 February 1955; died 1 July 2023
