My Career
I have worked for various public bodies, mainly local authorities. However, I started work in 1972 in a New Town: Northampton Development Corporation. I worked there as a trainee accountant for 4 years. The work itself was rather boring to start off with. Basically I was just the office junior, although as colleagues would point out to me, at least I was the graduate office junior. The organisation itself was interesting, its core business being to double the size of Northampton by building homes, shops, offices and factories.
I qualified as a member of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy in 1976, having studied for 4years with a mixture of day release and block release courses. I then got a job as a Financial Planner with West Midlands County Council (now defunct) in Birmingham, where I stayed for over 5 years. The most interesting project in which I was involved was the expansion of Birmingham Airport. I was the financial adviser on the development team and had great fun running computer-based financial models to assess alternative expansion options - quite innovative at the time, and all run on a mainframe - this was before there were any PCs. I often used Birmingham Airport when I lived in the Midlands, and it was nice to think, as I looked around, that I had some small part in its current layout.
In 1982 I moved to the London Borough of Islington, where I was promoted to Assistant Director of Finance in 1983. That was an interesting place to work in the 1980s - Margaret Hodge was Leader, and they were doing some innovative work in the delivery of integrated services at local level. The politics was also interesting. Islington Council was quite left wing at that time, and there were many head-butting sessions with the Thatcher Government. I was often part of a small team that went for consultations with leading QCs to see whether the council could take legal action against the Government. In fact we did a couple of times, but of course the Government always won.
I moved to the London Borough of Enfield as Deputy Treasurer in 1986, and then got the job of Finance Director of the London Borough of Hillingdon. A very minor claim to fame is that one of the unsuccessful candidates for that job was Bob (later Sir Bob) Kerslake, who in 2011 was appointed as the Head of the Civil Service. He retired in early 2015, and is now Lord Kerslake. It occurs to me that two other people I have worked with subsequently got knighthoods. Mine must have got lost in the post.
I was at Hillingdon for over 10 years. In 1998 there was a new Chief Executive, who did what all new CEOs tend to do in my experience - he had a reorganisation. My post was removed and replaced by a different new post, for which I would have had to apply. After a lot of thought, discussion and legal advice, I decided not to apply for the new job. Whichmeant I was redundant, and I left in 1999 with a payoff. Three months later I got a job with the Greater London Authority (GLA) Transition Team, the group which set up the GLA. I moved over to the GLA itself when it went live in 2000, which meant that after the May elections of that year I was working for Ken Livingston. Interesting times!
The GLA job was a fixed term contract and when it finished I ended up back in the Midlands, living in Coventry and working as Finance Director of the West Midlands Passenger Transport Executive, otherwise known as Centro. I was made Acting Chief Executive in 2006 when the previous CEO retired, but they made it clear they wanted to make an external appointment for the permanent role. Fair enough. They duly appointed a new CEO and guess what, he had a reorganisation. I was, as they say, made an offer I couldn't refuse, and took early retirement in 2007, although I did carry on as part-time Treasurer of the West Midlands Passenger Transport Authority for a further year.
Somewhat bizarrely, perhaps, I was made redundant by Centro on a Friday, and returned the following Monday as a non-executive director, "just to help out for 3 or 4 months". This arrangement actually lasted for almost 2 years.
During my career I was the Chief Finance Officer of 4 different public bodies (which may be a record, but I've never been able to find out one way or the other).
I returned to work in 2013 as a part time Financial Adviser to the Gambling Commission in Birmingham. This is the Government Body that regulates the gambling indusrty, including online betting and the National Lottery. My fixed-term contract ended in October 2015, although it was briefly renewed from January to May 2016.
