Sir Richard Clive Mottram (born 23 April 1946) is a former British civil servant, who retired in 2007 from his most recent senior post as Permanent Secretary, Intelligence, Security and Resilience in the Cabinet Office.
He has served on the boards of a number of private and public sector organisations, including chairing the boards of Amey from 2008-17 and of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) from 2008-2014. He was a Governor of the Ditchley Foundation from 1996-2019 and served on its Council of Management. He was a visiting professor in the department of government at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) from 2008-21. He is chair of the advisory board of the LSE's foreign policy think tank (LSE IDEAS) and lectures on its Executive Masters course and other LSE courses. He is a trustee of the Royal Anniversary Trust, which oversees The Queen's Anniversary Prizes for Higher and Further Education.
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Education and early career
Mottram was educated at King Edward VI Camp Hill School in Birmingham. He entered the central government civil service in 1968 aged 22 with a first class degree in International relations from Keele University. From 1975 until 1977, he served in the Defence and Overseas Secretariat of the Cabinet Office. He was then the secretary of two study groups on the rationale for and system options for a successor to the UK's strategic nuclear deterrent which led subsequently to the decision to adopt Trident. He was then appointed private secretary to the permanent under secretary, MOD: Frank Cooper. From 1982 to 1986, he was private secretary to a succession of Secretaries of State for Defence - John Nott, Michael Heseltine and the late George Younger. He was Heseltine's Private Secretary at the time of his resignation in 1986 over the Westland affair.
In 1985, as private secretary to Michael Heseltine, the Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence, he was a witness for the prosecution in the trial of Clive Ponting, who was later acquitted of an offence under section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911 for passing information to Labour MP Tam Dalyell about the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War. When asked whether answers to parliamentary questions should be truthful and not deliberately ambiguous or misleading, there was a long silence before he replied: "In highly charged political matters, one person's ambiguity may be another person's truth".
From 1986 to 1989, he was the Under-secretary responsible for the defence programme, and from 1989 to 1992, the Deputy Secretary with responsibilities for UK defence policy and strategy, and defence relations with other countries at the time of the end of the Cold War. He was the architect of the "Options for Change' Defence Review.
Multi-purpose Permanent Secretary
After this, in 1992, he was appointed as a Permanent Secretary, first at the Office of Public Service and Science in the Cabinet Office. His responsibilities there included public service change, Civil Service management questions, and science and technology policy and the science budget.
In 1995, he became Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence, where he worked on, among other things, the Labour Government's Strategic Defence Review.
In 1998, he became permanent secretary at the Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions. Mottram's tenure at DETR saw important developments in environmental policy and the publication of White papers on Urban and rural policy. A 10-year transport plan was developed building on the 1998 White paper on Integrated transport. One aspect of transport — railways — tended to dominate in the media. New institutional arrangements were introduced with a Strategic Rail Authority alongside the Rail Regulator but the appointments by John Prescott of Sir Alastair Morton as chairman of the Strategic Rail Authority and Tom Winsor as Rail Regulator proved an unhappy partnership, which ended in 2001 when Morton resigned and was replaced by Richard Bowker. Mottram's term also saw the rail crashes at Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield and Potters Bar. The national railway infrastructure company Railtrack got into serious financial difficulties after the Hatfield rail crash in October 2000, and on 7 October 2001 was put into administration on the petition of the Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions Stephen Byers MP in very controversial circumstances. Mottram was closely involved in the preparations for the administration of Railtrack and in July 2005 was called as a witness in the largest class legal action ever brought in the English courts, when 49,500 shareholders of Railtrack sued the Secretary of State for Transport for damages for misfeasance in public office. The case was lost because the shareholders could not prove targeted malice on the part of Stephen Byers, that is an intention maliciously to injure the shareholders. Mottram's evidence was not contested by the claimants. In his summing up the judge referred to him as a "direct, accurate and truthful" witness.
On 11 September 2001, after both World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon were hit in the day's terrorist attacks, a special advisor in Mottram's department, Jo Moore, sent an email to the press office of her department which read: "It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors' expenses?" The suggestion caused severe criticism for its insensitivity, callousness and political ineptitude. As the administrative head of the department in which Moore worked, Mottram was asked by Stephen Byers to consider whether disciplinary action should be taken against Moore.
Other roles
Sir Richard served as a Board Member and then from 2002 to 2004 President of the Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management. He was a Board Member of Ashridge Business School from 1998- 2015.
Styles and honours
Mottram was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in the 1998 New Year Honours and promoted to a Knight Grand Cross of the same Order in the 2006 New Year Honours.
Mr Richard Mottram (1946–1998)
Sir Richard Mottram, KCB (1998–2006)
Sir Richard Mottram, GCB (2006–present)