Genie Turton

Genie works as a non executive director of Rockpools and of a number of other organisations in the private and voluntary sectors. These include the Wates Group, the family owned construction company, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, Horniman Museum, Pilgrim Trust, the Edward Heath Charitable Foundation and the Historic Houses Association. She has also just become a lay member of the Chapter of Salisbury Cathedral. Until 2004 she was a Director General in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister responsible for Housing and Planning and also Board member for Diversity.

She joined Whitehall in 1970 from Cambridge where she read classics and then did research into the social status of actors in the Roman Empire - a conventional background for civil servants at that time. But, though she followed the core values, she never saw herself as a conventional civil servant.

Early in her career she ran Ministers' offices during crises - first Keith Speed's in 1973/4 (the 'brushing your teeth in the dark' months when Ted Heath challenged the miners), then Bill Rodgers' in 1978/9 during the winter of discontent. In the early 1980s she was seconded to Midland Bank and spent a year working with British and French banks on ways in which a Channel crossing could be financed by the private sector. She then spent three years in the Cabinet Office working on government machinery for the then Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, Robert Armstrong, before she moved to the Department of the Environment as Under Secretary in Housing where she started the first pilot of private funding of social housing. Then, after the Hampton Court fire, she was asked to look at the management arrangements for Hampton Court, which led to a three year job running the government's policy on heritage and bringing the management of the Royal Palaces and Parks into the 20th century. She combined this role with her first non executive job on the board of the Woolwich Building Society.

In the 1990s she developed the City Challenge programme and Single Regeneration budget, the latter designed to simplify the multiplicity of government programmes directed at inner city deprivation and regeneration, led John Major's Charter Programme which was the first programme to seek to reverse the producer focus of public services, and then worked with Nick Raynsford to establish new government and Mayoral leadership for London. In her last Whitehall job she led the work, first under Charlie Falconer and then John Prescott, on the new sustainable communities programme and the reform of the planning system. But she sees her main role as having helped put in place key people in the delivery agencies.

Genie is passionate about public service that serves the public not its providers, about results in real time not process for the sake of process, and about choosing, using and developing the right people at the right time to do the right job.