Francis Maude

Maude was first elected to the House of Commons to represent the constituency of North Warwickshire in the Conservative Party's landslide victory at the 1983 general election. In 1984, he became the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister for Employment Peter Morrison. Maude then became an assistant government whip (1985–87) and Minister for Corporate and Consumer Affairs (1987–89), then part of the DTI. A Thatcherite, Maude was appointed in 1989 the Minister for Europe in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to spearhead the policy outlined in the Bruges Speech, attacking the Delors Plan in order to exclude Britain from an economic and political Union of Europe. In 1992 he acted as deputy for Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont and was one of the two UK signatories to the Maastricht Treaty.[2]

Maude was one of the first "men in grey suits" to hold discussions with Margaret Thatcher in November 1990 after she failed to win the first round of a leadership election. He told Thatcher that he would support her as long as she went on, but he did not believe she could win the leadership contest.[3]

After John Major became Prime Minister, Maude was made the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. However, in the 1992 general election he lost his seat to the Labour Party candidate, Mike O'Brien, and was thus forced to vacate his ministerial roles. According to Daniel Finkelstein of The Times the loss came as a 'terrible blow' to Maude; all his peers had managed to cling on and were together forming a government. In the Dissolution Honours that year, he was made a member of the Privy Council.[4]

In a 2006 interview, Maude stated that the introduction of Section 28 legislation whilst he was in Government (which banned Councils from promoting homosexuality and led to the closure of gay support groups) was "a mistake", adding it might have even contributed to the AIDS death of his brother Charles, who was homosexual, among others.[5] In 2012 he expanded further on his views on Section 28, saying "in hindsight, it was very wrong — very wrong. It was a legislative provision that came out of honourable motives. It took me some time to realise what an emblem of intolerance Section 28 had become for gay people. It was the tip of a deep iceberg — the iceberg below the surface being a host of anti-gay social attitudes."[6]

Out of Parliament after the 1992 general election, Maude began a series of business roles. He worked in banking as managing director at Morgan Stanley from 1993 to 1997. He was also appointed a non-executive director of ASDA Group Plc in July 1992, and served as a director of Salomon Brothers from 1992 to 1993. He also chaired the government's Deregulation Task Force from 1994 to 1997. This was preparation as Cabinet Office Minister from 2010, when he was required to highlight areas of expenditure where savings could be made from streamlining the delivery and implementation of policy goals.

In the 1997 general election Maude was elected MP for Horsham. Almost immediately he was re-appointed to the Conservative front bench, now the opposition in Parliament. He served as Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Shadow Foreign Secretary until 2001.

Maude managed Michael Portillo's unsuccessful bid for the Conservative leadership in 2001, after which he declined a front bench role under the new Party Leader Iain Duncan Smith. He was considered to be a 'moderniser' and on the centre-left of the party, writing in The Daily Telegraph (24 June 2002), he said that the Conservative Party's electoral problems had been caused by its failure to "look and sound like modern Britain". Norman Tebbit's secretary, Beryl Goldsmith, criticised Maude after this, asking:

How many male, white, straight Conservative MPs currently passionately campaigning for the selection of more women, and more men and women from ethnic minorities, would voluntarily relinquish their own seats in order to encourage local associations to follow the policy line they preach from their own smug, safe base? Precious few I would guess – including The Hon. Francis Maude.

Outside the Shadow Cabinet, Maude founded Conservatives for Change, CChange, becoming its first chairman. CChange was designed to promote the modernisation of the Conservative Party. Around the same point he also founded Policy Exchange.

After the 2005 general election, Maude returned to the Shadow Cabinet as Chairman of the Conservative Party. As the so-called Holy Spirit of Conservative modernisation, Maude set the Tory Party on the path to reform which saw David Cameron selected as Party Leader. In his first speech to the Conservative Conference as Party Chairman, Maude presented what he calls his "killer slide". The slide revealed that "voters confronted with the party’s immigration policy neutrally supported it by two to one, but when told that it was a Conservative policy the proportions reversed". The point he was making was not that sound conservative ideas damaged the Conservative Party but that 'The Conservative Party, as it was then seen, was damaging good Conservative policies". During his tenure, alongside newly elected Leader David Cameron, the Conservatives adopted the A-List of parliamentary candidates, with priority being given to women and people from ethnic minorities.

In July 2007, Maude was made Shadow Cabinet Office Minister and Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with responsibility for preparing the Conservatives for government, with some dubbing him the Party's "enforcer". At the Conservative Party Conference in October 2007 he said: "David (Cameron) has asked me to lead an implementation team that will ensure that we are as well-prepared as any incoming government has ever been. Our priorities rigorously sorted. Our teams armed with the knowledge and capabilities that will enable new ministers to start making a difference from day one." Ahead of the 2010 general election, Maude led attempts by the then-Conservative Opposition to work with the UK Civil Service to prepare for government.[7]

Maude supported Republican John McCain in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.[8] He led the Conservative Party delegation to the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Maude in the Cabinet Office in 2013

Maude was appointed Paymaster General and Minister for the Cabinet Office, with the right to attend Cabinet, on 12 May 2010, following the formation of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition. As Cabinet Office Minister, Maude was responsible for: public service efficiency and reform groups, Civil Service issues, industrial relations strategy in the public sector, transparency, civil contingencies, civil society and cyber-security.

In 2010 Maude set up the Efficiency and Reform Group (ERG), in the Cabinet Office to work with HM Treasury with the aim of making government departments more efficient. This work includes stopping wasteful spending; improving the way government buys goods and services; reducing losses from fraud, error and debt; raising money by selling empty buildings and underused properties; and reviewing and reshaping large scale projects.

Savings are difficult to measure, but the work of ERG claims to have contributed to £3.75 billion of savings in 2010–11, £5.5 billion in 2011–12 and an "unprecedented" £10 billion in 2012–13. ERG claims to achieve savings of at least £20 billion in the financial year 2014 to 2015. Cumulatively, by 2015 Maude had delivered more than £50 billion of audited savings during the Cameron–Clegg coalition government.[9]

Maude meeting Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi

These savings included include £3.4 billion by reducing the size of the Civil Service and reforming Civil Service pensions; £3.8 billion by linking together departments to buy goods and services and enforcing controls on recruitment and use of consultants; and £0.6 billion by exiting 500,000 square metres of property. In December 2014 Francis Maude set out plans to make a further £10 billion of efficiency savings between 2017 and 2018 and an additional £15 to £20 billion for 2019 to 2020.[10]

In June 2012 Maude laid out his plans for reforming the Civil Service. The Reform programme was endorsed by leadership of the Civil Service, the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service. The document laid out a series of practical actions including steps to improve the skills, abilities and performance of civil servants; introduce a sharper performance management system; create a modern employment offer for staff; improve IT and flexible working across departments; and tighten the delivery of major projects. A year after the publication of the initial plan, Maude updated Parliament with a One Year On document, setting out successes and failures. This document included various further steps: establishing the principle of Extended Ministerial Offices, and introducing Functional Leadership across Whitehall. However, in November 2013, former Cabinet secretary Lord Butler of Brockwell told the BBC that "Mr Maude and some of his colleagues don't understand leadership."[11] Butler said the relationship between ministers and the Civil Service worked best when there was loyalty on both side and public criticism showed something was wrong. A spokesman for Maude said good leadership required issues to be addressed, not swept under the carpet.[11]

Maude oversaw the Government's groundbreaking transparency policy. This work includes making sure that departments include specific open data commitments in their business plans, regularly publishing open data sets on all central and local government spending over £25,000, senior staff salary details and how the government is performing against objectives. Data.gov.uk contains over 9,000 datasets including local crime statistics, sentencing rates, hospital infection rates and GP performance.

Maude also led the UK Government's work with the Open Government Partnership. This work helped make the British government the most open in the world at the time, and led directly to the creation of services such as the Citymapper app and challenger banks like Monzo.[12]

Following Maude's reforms the United Nations rated the UK government as the most open in world.[13]

Maude was responsible for the creation of the Government Digital Service, with the aim to consolidate internal IT and replace government 1,700 various websites with a single web hub, gov.uk. The new consolidated website won Design of the Year 2013 at the Design Museum awards, beating The Shard and the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics cauldron.[14] Its revolutionary single source model inspired government websites around the world, including in the United States, New Zealand and Australia.[15][9]

The Government Digital Strategy also committed Departments to redesigning all existing government services that serve more than 100,000 users each year. Maude's office estimated that moving services from offline to digital channels could save approximately £1.8 billion a year; at the time digital transactions cost 20 pence each compared to £3 for a phone call and £7 for a physical letter.[16][12] In June 2014 Maude warned that elderly people would have to apply for key benefits including Carer's Allowance online. His remarks were criticized by organizations who work with the elderly partly on the grounds that poorer people may not be able to afford computer facilities and, partly because even computer literate people may lose their skills in old age. Whilst critics estimated that over 5 million pensioners have never used the internet, Maude said that 'refuseniks' could be offered a one-off lesson.[17]

In February 2015, Maude announced he would be standing down at the general election three months later. Following the election, on 14 May 2015 Maude was elevated to the House of Lords and he was created, by letters patent, Baron Maude of Horsham, of Shipley in the County of West Sussex on 26 May 2015.[18] This allowed him to be appointed as Minister of State for Trade and Investment jointly at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, replacing the Lord Livingston of Parkhead.[19] Nine months later, Maude announced his resignation from this post on 10 February 2016, to be replaced by Mark Price.[1]

On 28 March 2012, during the 2012 United Kingdom fuel crisis, Maude "foolishly" advised people to fill up their vehicles and to store fuel in garages in jerrycans.[37] His remarks were widely criticised, queues up to half a mile long formed outside petrol stations[38] and petrol retailers criticised the Government for causing panic.[39] Matt Wrack, General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union pointed out Maude's advice was dangerous and illegal, and could be disastrous in the event of a fire.[40] Brian Madderson, the petrol chairman of the Retail Motor Industry Federation said that the Government appeared to be "intent on creating a crisis out of a serious concern and that drivers should ignore "dangerous advice". Maude denied that it would increase the risk of explosions, however the following day Transport Minister Mike Penning, a former firefighter, confirmed the advice was wrong, saying he didn't think Maude understood how big jerrycans were.[41] On 30 March 2012, the Labour Peer the Lord Harris called for Maude's resignation,[42] after a woman suffered severe burns during an attempt to decant petrol next to a lit gas cooker. Harris believed that Maude's advice helped cause the incident.[43]