Shadow Cabinet posts 1997–2010

Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office
In office 2 July 2007 – 11 May 2010
Leader	David Cameron
Preceded by	Tim Collins (2002)
Succeeded by	Tessa Jowell
Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
In office 2 July 2007 – 11 May 2010
Leader	David Cameron
Preceded by	Oliver Heald
Succeeded by	Rachel Reeves (2020)
Shadow Foreign Secretary
In office 2 February 2000 – 18 September 2001
Leader	William Hague
Preceded by	John Maples
Succeeded by	Michael Ancram
Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer
In office 2 June 1998 – 1 February 2000
Leader	William Hague
Preceded by	Peter Lilley
Succeeded by	Michael Portillo
Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
In office 11 June 1997 – 2 June 1998
Leader	William Hague
Preceded by	Virginia Bottomley
Succeeded by	Peter Ainsworth

Ministerial offices 1987–1992

Financial Secretary to the Treasury
In office 14 July 1990 – 11 April 1992
Prime Minister	John Major
Preceded by	Peter Lilley
Succeeded by	Stephen Dorrell
Minister of State for Europe
In office 25 July 1989 – 14 July 1990
Prime Minister	Margaret Thatcher
Preceded by	Lynda Chalker
Succeeded by	Tristan Garel-Jones
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Trade and Industry
In office 13 June 1987 – 26 July 1989
Prime Minister	Margaret Thatcher
Preceded by	Robert Atkins
Succeeded by	John Redwood

Parliamentary offices

Member of the House of Lords
Lord Temporal
Life peerage 28 May 2015
Member of Parliament for Horsham
In office 1 May 1997 – 30 March 2015
Preceded by	Peter Hordern
Succeeded by	Jeremy Quin
Member of Parliament for North Warwickshire
In office 9 June 1983 – 16 March 1992
Preceded by	Constituency established
Succeeded by	Mike O'Brien

Personal details

Born

4 July 1953 (age 71)
Abingdon-on-Thames, Berkshire, England

Political party

Conservative

Spouse

Christina Hadfield

(m. 1984)

Children

Alma mater

Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
University of Law

Francis Anthony Aylmer Maude, Baron Maude of Horsham, PC (born 4 July 1953) is a British Conservative Party politician who served as Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General from 2010 to 2015. He also served in several posts while the Conservatives were in opposition, notably as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Shadow Foreign Secretary and Chairman of the Conservative Party. Maude was Member of Parliament (MP) for North Warwickshire from 1983 to 1992 and then for Horsham from 1997 to 2015.

Having served over 25 years on the frontbench in the House of Commons, he stepped down at the 2015 general election and became a life peer. He served as Minister of State for Trade and Investment from 2015 to 2016, before stepping down from government service to run his own business; Francis Maude Associates, or FMA, a consultancy specialising in government efficiency.

Early life
Political career
Career outside of Parliament: 2016–present
Personal life
See also

Early life

Abingdon School

Maude is the son of Angus Maude (1912–1993), a life peer and one-time Conservative cabinet minister. He spent part of his childhood in Sydney, Australia, while his father edited The Sydney Morning Herald. On the family's return to the UK, he was educated at Abingdon School, at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and at the College of Law. He was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1977, and practised criminal law. He served as a member of Westminster City Council from 1978 to 1984.

Political career

In government, 1983–1992

Maude was first elected to the House of Commons to represent the constituency of North Warwickshire in the Conservative Party's landslide victory at the 1983 general election. In 1984, he became the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister for Employment Peter Morrison. Maude then became an assistant government whip (1985–87) and Minister for Corporate and Consumer Affairs (1987–89), then part of the DTI. A Thatcherite, Maude was appointed in 1989 the Minister for Europe in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to spearhead the policy outlined in the Bruges Speech, attacking the Delors Plan in order to exclude Britain from an economic and political Union of Europe. In 1992 he acted as deputy for Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont and was one of the two UK signatories to the Maastricht Treaty.

Maude was one of the first "men in grey suits" to hold discussions with Margaret Thatcher in November 1990 after she failed to win the first round of a leadership election. He told Thatcher that he would support her as long as she went on, but he did not believe she could win the leadership contest.

After John Major became prime minister, Maude was made the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. However, in the 1992 general election he lost his seat to the Labour Party candidate, Mike O'Brien, and was thus forced to vacate his ministerial roles. According to Daniel Finkelstein of The Times the loss came as a 'terrible blow' to Maude; all his peers had managed to cling on and were together forming a government. In the Dissolution Honours that year, he was made a member of the Privy Council.

In a 2006 interview, Maude stated that the introduction of Section 28 legislation whilst he was in Government (which banned Councils from promoting homosexuality and led to the closure of gay support groups) was "a mistake", adding it might have even contributed to the AIDS death of his brother Charles, who was homosexual, among others. In 2012 he expanded further on his views on Section 28, saying "in hindsight, it was very wrong — very wrong. It was a legislative provision that came out of honourable motives. It took me some time to realise what an emblem of intolerance Section 28 had become for gay people. It was the tip of a deep iceberg — the iceberg below the surface being a host of anti-gay social attitudes."

Out of Parliament, 1992–1997

Out of Parliament after the 1992 general election, Maude began a series of business roles. He worked in banking as managing director at Morgan Stanley from 1993 to 1997. He was also appointed a non-executive director of ASDA Group plc in July 1992, and served as a director of Salomon Brothers from 1992 to 1993. He also chaired the government's Deregulation Task Force from 1994 to 1997. This was preparation as Cabinet Office Minister from 2010, when he was required to highlight areas of expenditure where savings could be made from streamlining the delivery and implementation of policy goals.

Shadow Cabinet, 1997–2010

In the 1997 general election Maude was elected MP for Horsham. Almost immediately he was re-appointed to the Conservative front bench, now the opposition in Parliament. He served as Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Shadow Foreign Secretary until 2001.

Maude managed Michael Portillo's unsuccessful bid for the Conservative leadership in 2001, after which he declined a front bench role under the new Party Leader Iain Duncan Smith. He was considered to be a 'moderniser' and on the centre-left of the party, writing in The Daily Telegraph (24 June 2002), he said that the Conservative Party's electoral problems had been caused by its failure to "look and sound like modern Britain". Norman Tebbit's secretary, Beryl Goldsmith, criticised Maude after this, asking:

How many male, white, straight Conservative MPs currently passionately campaigning for the selection of more women, and more men and women from ethnic minorities, would voluntarily relinquish their own seats in order to encourage local associations to follow the policy line they preach from their own smug, safe base? Precious few I would guess – including The Hon. Francis Maude.

Outside the Shadow Cabinet, Maude founded Conservatives for Change, CChange, becoming its first chairman. CChange was designed to promote the modernisation of the Conservative Party. Around the same point he also founded Policy Exchange.

Following the 2005 general election, Maude returned to the Shadow Cabinet as Chairman of the Conservative Party. As the so-called Holy Spirit of Conservative modernisation, Maude set the Tory Party on the path to reform which saw David Cameron selected as Party Leader. In his first speech to the Conservative Conference as Party Chairman, Maude presented what he calls his "killer slide". The slide revealed that "voters confronted with the party’s immigration policy neutrally supported it by two to one, but when told that it was a Conservative policy the proportions reversed". The point he was making was not that sound conservative ideas damaged the Conservative Party but that 'The Conservative Party, as it was then seen, was damaging good Conservative policies". During his tenure, alongside newly elected Leader David Cameron, the Conservatives adopted the A-List of parliamentary candidates, with priority being given to women and people from ethnic minorities.

In July 2007, Maude was made Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office and Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with responsibility for preparing the Conservatives for government, with some dubbing him the Party's "enforcer". At the Conservative Party Conference in October 2007 he said: "David (Cameron) has asked me to lead an implementation team that will ensure that we are as well-prepared as any incoming government has ever been. Our priorities rigorously sorted. Our teams armed with the knowledge and capabilities that will enable new ministers to start making a difference from day one." Ahead of the 2010 general election, Maude led attempts by the then-Conservative Opposition to work with the UK Civil Service to prepare for government.

Maude supported Republican John McCain in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. He led the Conservative Party delegation to the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Return to Government, 2010–2016

Maude in the Cabinet Office in 2013

Maude was appointed Paymaster General and Minister for the Cabinet Office, with the right to attend Cabinet, on 12 May 2010, following the formation of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition. As Cabinet Office Minister, Maude was responsible for: public service efficiency and reform groups, Civil Service issues, industrial relations strategy in the public sector, transparency, civil contingencies, civil society and cyber-security.

Efficiency and Reform

In 2010 Maude set up the Efficiency and Reform Group (ERG), in the Cabinet Office to work with HM Treasury with the aim of making government departments more efficient. This work includes stopping wasteful spending; improving the way government buys goods and services; reducing losses from fraud, error and debt; raising money by selling empty buildings and underused properties; and reviewing and reshaping large scale projects.

Savings are difficult to measure, but the work of ERG claims to have contributed to £3.75 billion of savings in 2010–11, £5.5 billion in 2011–12 and an "unprecedented" £10 billion in 2012–13. ERG claims to achieve savings of at least £20 billion in the financial year 2014 to 2015. Cumulatively, by 2015 Maude had delivered more than £50 billion of audited savings during the Cameron–Clegg coalition government.

Maude meeting Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi

These savings included include £3.4 billion by reducing the size of the Civil Service and reforming Civil Service pensions; £3.8 billion by linking together departments to buy goods and services and enforcing controls on recruitment and use of consultants; and £0.6 billion by exiting 500,000 square metres of property. In December 2014 Francis Maude set out plans to make a further £10 billion of efficiency savings between 2017 and 2018 and an additional £15 to £20 billion for 2019 to 2020.

Civil Service reform

In June 2012 Maude laid out his plans for reforming the Civil Service. The Reform programme was endorsed by leadership of the Civil Service, the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service. The document laid out a series of practical actions including steps to improve the skills, abilities and performance of civil servants; introduce a sharper performance management system; create a modern employment offer for staff; improve IT and flexible working across departments; and tighten the delivery of major projects. A year after the publication of the initial plan, Maude updated Parliament with a One Year On document, setting out successes and failures. This document included various further steps: establishing the principle of Extended Ministerial Offices, and introducing Functional Leadership across Whitehall. However, in November 2013, former Cabinet secretary Lord Butler of Brockwell told the BBC that "Mr Maude and some of his colleagues don't understand leadership." Butler said the relationship between ministers and the Civil Service worked best when there was loyalty on both side and public criticism showed something was wrong. A spokesman for Maude said good leadership required issues to be addressed, not swept under the carpet.

Transparency

Maude oversaw the Government's groundbreaking transparency policy. This work includes making sure that departments include specific open data commitments in their business plans, regularly publishing open data sets on all central and local government spending over £25,000, senior staff salary details and how the government is performing against objectives. Data.gov.uk contains over 9,000 datasets including local crime statistics, sentencing rates, hospital infection rates and GP performance.

Maude also led the UK Government's work with the Open Government Partnership. This work helped make the British government the most open in the world at the time, and led directly to the creation of services such as the Citymapper app and challenger banks like Monzo.

Following Maude's reforms the United Nations rated the UK government as the most open in world.

Government Digital Service and GOV.UK

Maude was responsible for the creation of the Government Digital Service, with the aim to consolidate internal IT and replace government 1,700 various websites with a single web hub, gov.uk. The new consolidated website won Design of the Year 2013 at the Design Museum awards, beating The Shard and the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics cauldron. Its revolutionary single source model inspired government websites around the world, including in the United States, New Zealand and Australia.

The Government Digital Strategy also committed Departments to redesigning all existing government services that serve more than 100,000 users each year. Maude's office estimated that moving services from offline to digital channels could save approximately £1.8 billion a year; at the time digital transactions cost 20 pence each compared to £3 for a phone call and £7 for a physical letter. In June 2014 Maude warned that elderly people would have to apply for key benefits including Carer's Allowance online. His remarks were criticized by organizations who work with the elderly partly on the grounds that poorer people may not be able to afford computer facilities and, partly because even computer literate people may lose their skills in old age. Whilst critics estimated that over 5 million pensioners have never used the internet, Maude said that 'refuseniks' could be offered a one-off lesson.

Elevation to the Lords

In February 2015, Maude announced he would be standing down at the general election three months later. Following the election, on 14 May 2015 Maude was elevated to the House of Lords and he was created, by letters patent, Baron Maude of Horsham, of Shipley in the County of West Sussex on 26 May 2015. This allowed him to be appointed as Minister of State for Trade and Investment jointly at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, replacing Lord Livingston of Parkhead. Nine months later, Maude announced his resignation from this post on 10 February 2016, to be replaced by Mark Price.

Career outside of Parliament: 2016–present

Since leaving his role as Minister for Trade and Investment in March 2016, Maude has begun a number of new business roles, including serving as an advisory board member at OakNorth Bank which deals with business and property finance, and specialises in supporting the UK's growth businesses since September 2016. He has been an advisory board member at Anvest Partners, a real estate investment company since May 2016, and a Senior Adviser with Covington & Burling LLP, a business and corporate law firm since November 2016. He has also been a Non Executive Chairman at Cogent Elliott Group Ltd, an advertising agency, since November 2016.

Maude's primary occupation since leaving politics is his role as the co-founder and chairman of Francis Maude Associates, which he runs with his former special advisor Simone Finn, Baroness Finn. It is a consulting firm specialising in government efficiency and reform around the world, with its work based on Maude's experience as Minister for the Cabinet Office.

Following the resignation of Dominic Raab, Lord Maude suggested the UK Civil Service should alter its rules on impartiality and continuity under different governments.

Lord Maude endorsed the campaign of Kemi Badenoch in the 2024 Conservative Party leadership election.

Personal life

Maude married Christina Jane Hadfield in 1984, and they have five children. He was on the governing body of Abingdon School from 1988 to 2006 and was Chairman of the Governors from 1995 to 2003.

Francis Maude facts for kids

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