I want Yorkshire's voice to be heard louder by national government, says Sheffield City Council chief executive Kate Josephs

Kate Josephs has held major roles in government on both sides of the Atlantic, but has returned to her Yorkshire roots. She spoke to Rob Parsons.

Her two decades at the heart of central government in the US and UK saw her pull together policies alongside the finest minds in Whitehall and take meetings in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House.

But Halifax-born Kate Josephs found herself "blown away" by the qualities shown closer to home by the staff of Sheffield City Council during the long haul of the pandemic as their resilience was put to the sternest of tests.

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Sheffield city council chief executive Kate Josephs. Pic: Scott MerryleesSheffield city council chief executive Kate Josephs. Pic: Scott Merrylees
Sheffield city council chief executive Kate Josephs. Pic: Scott Merrylees
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"This is an organisation that cares deeply about the city and the work it does," she says. "That's been writ large time and time again over the course of the last year where you've just seen staff go above and beyond and over and over again."

Since the start of 2021 Mrs Josephs, a mother-of-two who grew up in Doncaster as the daughter of two social workers, has gone back to her roots as the chief executive of the council in a city she viewed as an "amazing metropolis" when she was younger.

She took on the role after a six-month stint in the high-pressure environment of Downing Street's Covid-19 taskforce, where as Director General she helped coordinate the work of myriad government departments as they put all else on hold to tackle the pandemic.

It's a "bit of a career shift moment" for someone who didn't see themselves returning to Yorkshire after leaving to go to university at Oxford in the 1990s and rising rapidly through the ranks of the Civil Service.

Sheffield city council chief executive Kate Josephs. Pic: Scott MerryleesSheffield city council chief executive Kate Josephs. Pic: Scott Merrylees
Sheffield city council chief executive Kate Josephs. Pic: Scott Merrylees
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Between 2007 and 2010 she was Deputy Director of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, reporting to Gordon Brown and later leading a strategic review of the Treasury.

And by 2014 she'd joined the US Performance Improvement Council responsible for managing the performance of the federal government in Washington DC.

Reflecting on her US experience in an interview with The Yorkshire Post, she says little of it resembles the "fairy tale" version UK viewers might be familiar with from TV drama The West Wing.

American government, she says, is "incredibly bureaucratic" and "really inefficient", much more centrally controlled than in the UK because of the relationships government agencies have with Congress and the Senate to get their budgets passed. And unlike in Whitehall, the top echelons of the civil service are political appointees, with a high rate of turnover.

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"So the equivalent of the job I just finished in the taskforce would never have been done by an objective impartial non-political civil servant, it would always have been political.

"At the end of the day, all of this work comes down to the politicians having a vision, they have a strategy, and the job is to find ways to implement it effectively, so there's lots of similarities."

Conceding to being a "bit chippy" about being from Yorkshire with a northern accent, she was surprised by the way she was treated by Americans.

"They were just like 'everything you say is so smart, you sound like you're from Downton Abbey'," she says. "And it's a total cliche but Americans are so positive, they just think everything is possible.

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"The number of times I've been in meetings with really senior people talking about a really complex problem, and they're like 'yeah we can do this' and I'm thinking 'what, why would you do that, no you can't', but it really challenged my natural British cynicism about what it takes to get stuff done.

"And I try and hang on to a bit of that 'let's have some ambition, let's have some drive and hope' because the stories you tell yourself become self-perpetuating. What I saw in the States was that sometimes that can really move things forward."

Returning to the UK, she took on a couple of senior education roles before joining the Cabinet Office Covid-19 Taskforce in July 2020. Leading a "pretty small team of incredibly committed civil servants", she helped pull together the work being done on Covid-19 policies by many different government departments and taking the lead on set-piece moments like the presentation by the Prime Minister of 'roadmaps' describing a path out of lockdown.

It hardly needs pointing out that many of the public pronouncements made by Boris Johnson, who set out in July his "strong and sincere hope" that social distancing will be able to come to an end by November, proved to be ill-founded. And bound by the Civil Service code, Mrs Josephs is unable to talk in much detail about her time on the taskforce.

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"History and hindsight will judge all sorts of things about this last period but what I've taken from it is a lot of people across the whole system working really, really hard to do the best they can," she says. "I can't think of a better way to have finished my 20 year career.

"What this last year has required of the civil service, of the public sector, of the NHS or the voluntary sector is just a massive massive effort. And there are stories, everywhere of just inspiring commitment and hard work in the face of a really uncertain challenge."

Explaining her return to Yorkshire to lead Sheffield City Council, she says she became more and more concerned during her time in London "about the fact that I think the voice of the North, the voice of Yorkshire isn't perhaps heard as much as it needs to be nationally".

"I think this is an incredible city, and I want to be part of making sure it's punching its weight, that we're building and growing out of the back of this pandemic and beyond and that we're ambitious for our future", she says. "I think we need it but I also think the country needs all of the North to be thriving.

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"It is just a feature of this country that London is an incredible capital city and we should be proud of it but London and the South East does suck in a huge amount of investment of wealth and attention.

"Successive governments have tried with good intention to think about how to tackle regional economic disparities and to represent the whole country. And let's not forget the Government's made up of MPs who represent these areas.

"But I do think the locus of power and thinking, it just sort of sucks into London. So there's a lot of opportunity as well around the ambitious plans which we must hold the whole government to account for to relocate a lot of the civil service out of London.

"I was always felt like I had a bit of a link back to Yorkshire having grown up here but it's very easy if you're living in London and living in the South East and working in Whitehall to forget what it feels like because the lived experiences is of the people working in the Civil Service, it's not in those communities."

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Her eldest child has "already started shortening her vowels" since moving to Sheffield from London, and though lockdown is a "bit rubbish" the spectacular green spaces of Yorkshire's 'outdoor city' are providing some consolation.

Assessing the state of the Labour-run authority she points to services that are "good overall" and a balanced budget "which is no mean feat given the challenges we faced in Covid". There are positive projects to get behind, like the Heart of the City II scheme creating a "dynamic and vibrant mixed-use district in the heart of the city centre".

"That all being said, as a city and as a council, we can't aspire to just be OK we're a big city, let's shout about the fact that we are a big city, we have got huge assets in terms of our people, the creativity, our communities."

Mrs Josephs hesitates before making her next point, as she suggests the huge controversy which engulfed the city over the felling of healthy street trees - which prompted fierce opposition from local campaign groups - may be something Sheffield can turn into a positive.

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"I see to some extent the level of community engagement, which has been the cause of some challenges and some difficult history as a potential asset," she says. "We've got people that care about the city enough to want to do stuff and get involved so we need to harness that.

"And let's think of more current examples, the stuff that we're seeing during Covid where we've got individual communities and voluntary groups really stepping up and building support mechanisms for their communities and for other parts of the city that stuff is a real asset.

"So I guess what I'd be saying is we can't just aspire to be OK and good enough, we have to aspire to be better. There's two elements to that I suppose, one is about what we as a council need to start to think about, how we as a council approach the work we have.

"And the other is the need to develop that ambition, that story for the city and that's not something the council will do on our own, and indeed it's not something that should ever just be the job of the council.

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"It's about how we work with partners with communities to develop that ambition and galvanise that, provide a bit of that leadership which perhaps hasn't been there, perhaps has been something that we could do more of."

She has already set out her priorities to council staff, which include aspiring to excellence in the critical services delivered across the city and connecting with local citizens, getting them engaged and involved.

And in building a confident and outward-looking city she believes Sheffield should start shouting about the great things it's doing, something leaders have historically been reluctant to do.

"And we need to be learning from others as well so and building relationships across the city region, across the North, being at the table when there are conversations happening with national government, and making sure that we're being creative, and bringing in new ideas to think about how we might respond to how we will come out of this."

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While she doesn't want to say she would never return to central government, she would insist on staying in Sheffield to do it. She says she is "taking government at its word" that as part of the promises to relocate large parts of the Civil Service to northern England, there will be opportunities.

"That being said, I'm not in any rush, I've got a big job to do," she says. "I'm really excited about it and I'm in it as long as I can be and as long as it's right for me to be here to take the council and the city forward."