John Manzoni

John Manzoni
Permanent Secretary of the Cabinet Office
Incumbent
Assumed office August 2015
Preceded by	Richard Heaton
Chief Executive of the Civil Service
Incumbent
Assumed office 13 October 2014
Prime Minister	David Cameron Theresa May
Preceded by	Bob Kerslake
Chief Executive, Major Projects Authority
In office February 2014 – 13 October 2014
Preceded by	New role
Succeeded by	David Blackall
Personal details
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Imperial College, London and Stanford University
Occupation	British businessperson and civil servant

John Alexander Manzoni (born 1960) is a British civil servant and business executive. He was the responsible board member at BP at the time of the Texas City Refinery explosion, and now serves as Chief Executive of the Civil Service and the Permanent Secretary of the Cabinet Office.^[1]

Early life and education

Manzoni read for a BSc in Civil Engineering and an MSc in Petroleum Engineering at Imperial College, London before joining BP in 1983. He later undertook a Master of Science in Management as a Sloan Fellow at Stanford University in 1994.

Career

Business career

Manzoni was Chief Executive for Refining & Marketing at BP at the time of the Texas City Refinery explosion in 2005, in which 15 people were killed and 170 injured, and was thus the responsible board member.^[2] An internal BP investigation cleared him of "serious neglect or intentional misconduct" but said he should have taken more steps to consider and mitigate the risks long before the disaster occurred.^[3] The investigation found Manzoni had paid insufficient attention to safety and failed to spot clear warning signs. It accused him of failing to perform his duties in the run-up to the explosion and of engaging in a "simply not acceptable" standoff with a colleague. Regulators levied a then-record fine of $21m (£13m) on BP for breaching safety rules.^[4]

Shortly after the release of the BP report in 2007, Manzoni left BP after 24 years to be the Chief Executive Officer of Talisman Energy, an oil and gas exploration and production company.^[5] He replaced James Buckee, who had headed the company for 14 years.^[6] During his time at Talisman the company focused on shale gas, selling a non-controlling stake in its North Sea business to Sinopec in July 2012.^[7] In July 2015, the United States Environmental Protection Agency reported that it had fined Talisman Energy $62,457 for more than 50 health and safety violations at sites in Pennsylvania.^[8] Manzoni resigned from Talisman and was replaced by Hal Kvisle in September 2012.^[9]

Civil Service career

In February 2014, Manzoni joined the British Civil Service in a senior role as Chief Executive of the Major Projects Authority, a role under the remit of the Cabinet Office.^[10] His former BP boss John Browne, Baron Browne of Madingley, who had also left BP in 2007 and to whom Manzoni had been second-in-command, sat on Manzoni's appointment panel.^[11]

On 13 October 2014, Manzoni was appointed to be the first Chief Executive Officer of the Civil Service, after the position was split out from that of the Head of The Home Civil Service when The Lord Kerslake retired.^[12] A number of leading executives who had been approached for the role were reported to have turned it down,^[13] with one commenting that the job was "un-doable", and the FT reported a Cabinet Office source saying that the government had drawn up a 'plan B' to appoint Manzoni^[14] As of September 2015, Manzoni was paid a salary of between £230,000 and £234,999, making him one of the 328 most highly paid people in the British public sector at that time.^[15]

Until he took up his post as Chief Executive of the Civil Service in October 2014, Manzoni was chairman of the Leyshon Energy exploration company, which is headquartered in Tortola, British Virgin Islands, and an adviser to an energy private equity firm, Adamant Ventures.

Criticism and controversy

Mismanagement of digital government

A major part of Manzoni's remit as Chief Executive of the Civil Service is "the digital transformation of public services and the way government works".^[16] However, he has been criticised for 'undermining digital progress in Whitehall'^[17] and of not 'getting digital',^[18] particularly since his leadership has coincided with the departure of two successive Directors of the Government Digital Service within 9 months.^[19]

The criticism comes from a difference in philosophies of the delivery of digital projects. Manzoni has publicly asserted his belief in a small centre of government and getting departments to take on as much capacity as possible.^[20] This distributed approach to government technology is widely considered to be a retrograde step, returning UK government to a pre-2010 era^[18] of frequent major IT disasters.

Questions have also been raised about Manzoni's grasp over the Civil Service itself: in the words of one critic, "it now looks like he is being toyed with by the Civil Service's most experienced turf warriors in HMRC and DWP".^[21]

Accusations have also been levelled that due to Manzoni's approach to digital government, lower-quality digital services are now being allowed to ship to the public. Specifically, a tax website that was deemed not good enough to be named a 'beta' has taken on that status, despite failing a gateway review.^[22] In the words of Civil Service World, a magazine for civil servants, "the Government Digital Service shake-up is a victory for senior officials at the expense of citizens^[19]".

Conflicts of interest as a civil servant

As of 2015, Manzoni continues to be a non-executive director for SABMiller, for which he is paid £100,000 a year.^[23] This has been criticised by MP Sarah Wollaston and others who say it undermines his credibility as an impartial official. SABMiller was one of the drinks firms that opposed the introduction of minimum alcohol pricing, a policy which was considered by the Department of Health at the time.^[11][24]

References

External links

• John Manzoni's page on gov.uk
• John Manzon's page on Bloomberg.com