Profile: Juliette Healey

JULIETTE Healey is explaining to me how her parents met.

Her Swiss-German father electrocuted himself while studying stained glass in Germany and was sent home to England to recuperate for three months.

He met her mother who was building a house next door to her parents. The rest, as they say, is history.

“My parents did quite a lot of things that are unusual. He was 10 years younger than her. He was a sculptor and stained glass artist and she was a businesswoman.

“He was the one who took us to school, picked us up and gave us supper and she was the one who worked in the city, came home late at night and we saw her at weekends.”

Several years later, Healey took over the running of her elderly mother’s company, an international academic publisher, and successfully negotiated the sale of its assets.

It was a break in her career at the Bank of England, a career which has taken her from the Treasury to the International Monetary Fund and which today finds her in Yorkshire as agent for the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, working as the eyes and ears of the rate-setting quantitative easers at the Monetary Policy Committee.

Healey first came into contact with the Bank of England during the milk rounds at Sussex university, where she was studying mathematics and European studies.

“They gave the careers office some feedback. The comment for me was ‘very impressive candidate, but does not fit the Bank mould’.

“I don’t know if that was red rag to a bull or not but I did think the Bank was a unique institution and it was an opportunity I couldn’t resist.”

She only expected to do two years to add to her CV and then help solve Third World debt problems, but she found the people were “extremely good, very capable, but also very committed and there’s a really cooperative, collegiate atmosphere”.

Healey adds: “There’s a really strong public service ethos there that creates a really positive working environment. There’s a lot of integrity. That meant it wasn’t somewhere I had to compromise any of my morals or values.

“And I kept having opportunities to do interesting work. So I stayed. And I think the Bank mould has changed, happily for me. I’m sure I have changed as well.”

When she joined, managers would govern an individual’s career trajectory within the institution. But soon after she started, the Bank introduced internal job advertising and individuals were expected to manage their own career, which introduced a lot of proactivity and flexibility. “The culture has continued changing from thereon in.”

She says the first job she really loved was working on building societies in the late 80s when they were a significant force in the housing market. Next, she went to the Treasury for a year where she worked on monetary policy in the days when the Chancellor set the interest rates.

“John Major took us into the exchange rate mechanism while I was there. After I left the Treasury, I came back to the Bank to foreign exchange division and of course I was there when we were forced out of the exchange rate mechanism. A fascinating insight into that particular bit of history.

“The key lesson was you can’t have monetary union without economic convergence and that’s still a lesson that’s applicable today.”

Next came the press office, where she specialised in financial markets and economy. The coming years saw the evolution of monetary policy, the transfer of responsibility from the Treasury to the Bank (“the Ken and Eddie show”), Barings going bust and the collapse of the stock exchange’s paperless trading system.

“It was a good job because in the Bank you were very closely attached to the coalface and you had to understand all the detail, all the technical issues to be able to answer the questions yourself,” she says. “There was an awful lot of personal responsibility for the things you were covering and you had access to the top of the Bank.”

The International Monetary Fund in Washington DC was the next port of call, which chimed with her youthful plan to work for one of the global institutions. “It was good to see what was good and what was bad about those organisations,” she says.

She spent two years working with developing countries and saw their challenges in dealing with politics, corruption and poverty. She visited Sierra Leone, Bangladesh and Kazakhstan.

“It was very sad. Countries like Sierra Leone have got significant natural resources, but weren’t able to manage the economy to support the people.”

In 1998, Healey came back to Britain and the new regulatory environment ushered in by New Labour.

The Bank had gained monetary policy, but lost banking supervision with the creation of the Financial Services Authority.

She worked with the new MPC members on establishing their policy framework, spent time alongside representatives from developing and advanced economies at the Bank’s centre for central banking studies, helped produce monetary policy statistics, had her career break and returned to the press office to help with the transition to the Bank’s new responsibilities for financial stability.

The financial crash coincided with her having a baby, her second.

“The key lesson for central banks from the crisis is that as well as responsibility for monetary policy they need oversight of risks across the financial sector and tools with which to tackle imbalances – and that’s why the Bank now has the Financial Policy Committee,” she says.

Asked if the Bank could have done anything differently, she says: “I think the Governor and others have said plenty about that. I don’t think I can add anything.”

When the Yorkshire agency became available, Healey did lots of research on the region; her family had no connections to God’s Own Country.

“From a job point of view it has really interesting economy, it has critical mass in lots of different sectors, there is a lot of potential for growth here and it is quite a good barometer for the UK as a whole because not only is it geographically in the middle of the UK, but also if you put it on a spectrum of areas that are doing well to areas that are not doing well it is broadly in the middle.

“It highlights a lot of the issues that the UK is experiencing. From a work point of view it was a really good option.

“From a personal point of view it had good schools, it’s a beautiful place, it has lots of history, it has rivers and trees that my husband wanted and it basically ticked all the boxes.”

She replaced Paul Fullerton at the end of January 2012.

Juliette Healey: Factfile

Name: Juliette Healey

Date of birth: May 8 1964

First job: I worked in the office at Waitrose when I was 16.

Favourite holiday: National parks in America or travelling somewhere new.

Last book read: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Favourite music: Kate Rusby was the last person I saw in concert, but I listen to all sorts of upbeat music when I’m driving.

Favourite film: The History Boys.

Car driven: VW Golf blue motion

Hobby: Sailing. I’ve done a fair bit of racing including three Fastnets, the 650-mile race off southern Ireland

Most proud: My family.