Interview with Liam Maxwell

Liam Maxwell was born in Nairobi, in Kenya in 1968. His mother was a nurse with the Flying Doctors, and his father was a health officer with the Government in Nairobi.  Shortly after his birth, the family moved to the UK and Liam grew up outside Southampton. Liam has a sister.

Liam went to Christ’s Hospital school in Horsham, which he describes as “a wonderful place to go to.” While there, Liam enjoyed the amateur dramatics working on the production side, and sport. He adds: “It was a wonderful time, I had a lovely time at school, I loved it.”

With the idea of being a doctor, Liam chose to study physics, chemistry and maths. He says: “I did that, got offered a place at medical school, and then stopped and didn’t go to medical school because with a sister who’s a nurse, and a mother who’s a nurse, they both came to me and asked ‘are you really going to be a great doctor?’  I looked at it, thought about it, and thought they’ve probably got a point, I’m probably going into this for the wrong reason. I took a deep breath and I withdrew.”

In 1986, having withdrawn from medical school, Liam decided to take a year out and taught in Zimbabwe where he had a “completely life-changing time” teaching A levels to a group of sixth formers who had just survived the Chimurenga war.

Upon his return to the UK, Liam secured a place at Oxford to read chemistry and then moved into human sciences, which he describes as “a degree that fashions animal behaviour and ethology and demography.”

As well as studying, Liam took part in sport and theatre activities and set up and helped run a scholarship programme for students from the developing world to visit Oxford.

Liam learned to programme a BBC Micro in his physics and chemistry classes at school. He says: “We were using it in class to program it. There was a very enthusiastic computer teacher at school called Mr Wolstenholme who was trying to convince people this was the future and the way to go, and he was on the right track.” Liam also recalls the impact of watching how a capacitor expanded, with another teacher; Chris Vincent-Smith. He adds: “He was a real shaper of what I then did.”

Having worked in jobs in marketing for GE and ICI while at university, Liam’s first job was with Andersen Consulting. He says: “I joined them in the milk round.  I had a choice between them and Bain, the consulting company. Bain had just gone through the Guinness affair and they pulled back in their recruitment. I was tossing the coin and they made the decision for me; I went to Andersen.”

Of the Andersen culture, Liam says: “I didn’t like it. It was very good for them. They had a really good model, and a really good business going.  They were employing huge numbers of consultants, it was great, but for somebody at my level in that firm, and what we were doing, it just didn’t work for me. I was too independent for it.  So, so I left, and did a couple of start-ups, both of which failed, but both of which were really exciting to do.”

After leaving Andersen, Liam got involved with start-ups, one of which was an energy company which had a contract with BT. Liam explains: “We realised it would take too long to fulfil the contract. We were looking at experimenting with building energy sources in decommissioned telephone exchanges.  Great idea, but the cash flow just didn’t add up. We worked out that I’d have to borrow a lot of money to keep going, and it wasn’t going to work out. So, I took the decision to cut and run at that point and went back into employment. “

Next, Liam went to work at Office Angels creating an office automation platform as well as IT function to help them build their sales business. A role he stayed in for six years. He says: “The office automation platform enabled you to assess and build the skills of people that wanted to come and work with you in an employment agency. It was a really fascinating job, really fascinating set of skills. We trained and assessed about three million people in three years, worked out whether they could use the products to enable us to build an entire company in Germany around office help.” This was the early days of computing in offices as Liam explains: “All of this stuff was single instals on single computers and the old days of shrink-wrap software. I remember thinking wouldn’t this be great if we could hook this up to some form of utility computer in the centre where we could share this all and make it run.  It was too early days for that.”

Liam was working at Office Angels as the new millennium dawned. He describes the experience, saying: “It was interesting.  There was a flurry just before Y2K.  I remember flying around Europe making sure everything was OK, and then when it happened it just flew past.  Nothing happened, we were OK. There are many times when you’re dealing with tech where if nothing happens it’s a massive success and nobody notices it, and that was one of those; it was the great success because nothing really went wrong.”

After six years with Office Angels, Liam started Huntress, an IT and secretarial recruitment company. He describes it as “bricks and clicks”, an online and branch-based recruitment company. He says: “It was really exciting, really good experience.  I found some fantastic people who worked with me at that stage, but when the dotcom bust happened, there was a huge move to go back to just bricks and mortar rather than the online stuff. Investors didn’t want to go that far with some of the online stuff we were building and developing and so we took the decision to take a step back.  It was a growing company, it had already opened four branches, it was going great guns.”

Under the shareholders’ agreement, Liam, as founder was not permitted to work with the IT team he had brought in. He continues: “They were all obsessed with travel and how you could get to Val d’Isère for the cheapest price, and working out how flight prices could work, and hotel prices. They went off and built something called Skyscanner. … It was wonderful working with them on Huntress to see how we could make that work, but you always knew they were destined for much, much greater things.”

In setting up Huntress, Liam says that Laurance Rosen was the impetus and a mentor. He adds: “He had run Alfred Marks, then had founded Office Angels, and then asked me to come with him to set up Huntress. He was just an amazing mentor to help me through that. At that stage in my career, the main thing was finding someone who would be a fantastic mentor, which he was and remains. I still ask Laurence for advice. He taught me to think bigger.  Always try and work out is someone really interested in what you are building and what you are going to do?  Is it really going to make a difference to them?  Also, can you do it in a classy way? If you’re going to do something, don’t do half measures.  Do it properly.”

After a year with Huntress, Liam moved to Capita. He says of the company: “Capita was a really, really interesting company. The thing I loved about it was the way that it was run.  Capita was like going to business school for three years, because you were given master of your own destiny.

“You got your own budget to go and deal with and as a leading manager you had to run your own P&L. Every month you had to demonstrate what your profit and loss was and forecast for the next six months.  Instead of having a budget which you went through for the year, you got a budget at the beginning of the year but you could change it by changing your forecast, and the board that you went to every month would enable that to happen. Each month the board that you reported to would look at the forecasts you have for the next six months, and then they’d compare that to the forecasts you had in the next six months last month. There was the ‘common five; which was the way that they judged whether you were a good manager or not. If the common five went up and down all the time, you didn’t really know what your business was, and you couldn’t predict.

“What this did was to build a huge amount of financial discipline around the way that it did things.  We took over the former Civil Service recruitment; we built a recruitment and HR company around social care. Capita was a place where we could really help people deliver the change they wanted in Government.”

Liam says he was lucky to work alongside two inspirational people while at Capita; Pete Kelly and Rebecca Ramsay. He learned “to be completely straight and honest with the numbers.  Don’t try and gild the lily, just tell us what’s there, because if it’s bad news, let’s talk about it, and let’s work it out. Plus, how do you motivate people to come and work with you, and work with you effectively? That’s what I learnt in those three years. Capita delivered a lot of good stuff at that point.  I know they got a bad reputation in different areas of the business.  I was really proud to work there at that point.”

Asked about his management style, he says: “I like helping people build and lead the functions that they run by giving them the capability and the ability to do that. I also really like arguing with myself or with members of the team about whether this is really the right thing to do based on what customers want you to do. That’s why I love where I work now (Amazon Web Services, AWS). It’s embedded inside that, it really suits me, it’s my style.  I’m peculiar in that way.  I’m really task-focused, I really like finding a goal, moving towards a goal, but I also, I really like working with people who debate and come back and say, ‘I’d like to do that a different way.’  My style of leadership is that I’m not the smartest guy in the room.  I like having people who are smarter than me in the room who can fashion it and make it move in a different way.”

He adds: “The culture of innovation is really important, it’s about being able to spin up ideas and test them with customers quickly so that they can identify what really works for them, and helping people express what they really want. It’s the same culture that we brought into Government when I was there; you build things around the user.”

After leaving Capita, Liam joined Eton College as Head of Computing. A move that he describes as “a dream job”. He stayed there for six years, firstly fixing the technology, then building an academic computing department, and then becoming “a proper beak.”

He says: “It was a wonderful job. I loved it.  Absolutely loved it.  Would go back to that instantly.  … I learnt a lot. Some of the best teachers in the world are at that school, and it was fascinating to just understand how they worked, and how you could help them improve the educational outcomes for children by using tech.  It was great.”

While teaching at Eton, Liam became an elected politician for the Conservative Party as a councillor for the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. He says: “It was a really reforming time, we became the petri dish for David Cameron’s Big Society project.  We tried out fairly radical policies to try and see whether they would work, and whether you could move the needle in local and then central government, and by trying them out we were able to demonstrate that things could work.

“The famous one was paying our residents to recycle because we wanted them to recycle more. We arranged a points scheme where the more recycling residents did, the more points they got.  The points could be redeemed in local restaurants for discounts and so it helps the local economy get moving. It also meant that we collected much cleaner recycling and much more recycling which reduced the costs enormously. It was a really good win-win Big Society project about changing the relationship between the citizen and the service they had.

“We also changed the social care model, reduced the Council Tax, so we were the lowest Council Tax outside London in the UK, and still delivering great services.  The really big thing was transparency, forcing the Council to publish all of the spending and that became the regulation for all local authorities.”

 Liam was also involved in the writing of the Conservative Manifesto for the 2010 General Election with proposals to move away from the oligopoly of large IT providers, start delivering services that worked for citizens and for the Civil Servants that were using them, and start building technology that delivered, in the same way that it would work and deliver for an insurance company, or for a professional services company. He says: “We wanted to stop thinking that Government was super-special because most of Government service delivery is rather like the service delivery of an insurance company, or a great professional services company.  So we need to start building the technology around that, get rid of the silos that had operated for many years, and those big, long-term outsourced IT contracts, and start being able to build and bring in the capability to build the services and put them together in-house.  That was the approach.  There was a book we put out called Better For Less, which outlined how to do that and that’s what we then implemented when we went into Government.”

The election resulted in a coalition Government with the Liberal Democrat party. Liam adds: “When it started out, everyone thought that it was going to be dreadful.  However, it turned out that the coalition was really helpful, it was a really, really good way of doing government.”

Following the election, Liam was invited to a chat with Ian Watmore, the Chief Operating Officer for the Government in the Cabinet Office. The discussion ended with Liam agreeing to take a sabbatical from Eton to do nine months of work with the Cabinet Office. He explains: “It was focused on trying to sort out spend control, understand the future strategy and build that with and for, Francis Maude. After about, two months, Francis asked me to come on permanently, and I applied for and got a job as a proper civil servant, resigned from Eton, and started work for the Government in 2012.” Liam was initially Deputy CTO, later becoming CTO after Joe Harley moved on.

Asked about the state of the Government’s technology at that time, Liam says: “Francis famously described it as, in a competitive field, the worst in the world. But it was very, very expensive.  We were paying way over the odds for what we were getting.  We were not getting a good service, the citizen was not able to access the services they needed.  It was costing about one per cent of GDP, and there was a definite drag because growth wasn’t growing by one per cent.”

At the time, the Government was mainly supplied by large companies who were seen to be making a lot of money. Liam says: “Quite a lot of the systems integrators, who were being painted as the dreadful oligopoly who were doing the wrong thing, were shouting out, saying ‘We don’t want to do this either this way; we want you to change.’

“So there was a great opportunity to change what was in place, and some of the more forward-thinking technology companies really wanted to move to a new model, a model that was more effective, quicker, simpler and faster, and that’s where we managed to get the momentum behind that.

“At the same time the Government was trying to move forward really quickly and started to develop new tools. David Freud was bringing in Universal Credit, with Iain Duncan Smith, and that was a really challenging programme.  The Revenue were trying to make sense of their Aspire contract that they had been in for many years.  The Home Office were running a series of contracts which really were not generating the return for what they were meant to be doing and were costing huge amounts of money.  All the way through Government there were these things. The classic was IBM’s contract in the DVLA, which was very, very expensive, they felt uncomfortable even doing it.  Everybody wanted to change. It a target-rich environment if you wanted to move the needle, change it and bring in different things. If you like change and disruption, it was perfect and I like change and disruption, so for me it was a really great experience.”

Liam explains what their plan was: “Build common infrastructure and then leverage that so that you can focus on building the services that you need to build. That was the plan.”

He says that the best partners were the companies that really wanted to engage, adding: “Companies like Kainos and BJSS, which were at the smaller end of the market, but were really, really capable and had huge amounts of delivery capability.  Later on, as things changed, some of the old-established systems integrators became really interested in working with us. The one company that really spotted that big change was coming and that they’d need to work with us on that, was Capgemini. Of all of the companies we worked with, they were the bravest, because they had had a model which was going to generate revenues for them forever running the Aspire programme, and they stopped and realised this is going to change.”

Liam also highlights IBM as another large company who embraced and helped drive change. He adds: “For a small business coming in, you’re always going to grow; for a large business where your market is going to shift underneath your feet, that’s going to be difficult.”

On the image that public sector IT projects usually fail, Liam says: “There were some major issues with quite a lot of programmes. I don’t think I was backward in pointing that out as we got our things to move, because there were things that weren’t working.  It was the Augean stables we had to clear out and bring in proper and effective ways of delivering IT by simplifying what was going on, and focusing on sharing common infrastructure.  If you can leverage what’s common and what’s secure and what can work, that’s what makes the difference.  A lot of that was about reforming the security estate, changing the way that people bought and delivered the IT, but a lot of that was also about the culture of transparency and being open about what you’re doing. That’s why spend control was so important at driving the reform, because it meant that you could really understand what was there and you have the situation awareness to make the change possible.

“The thing that shocked me when I went into Government first was the lack of situational awareness about what was actually going on.  Francis Maude made the remark many times that the only way they found out what we were spending on the tech was by asking the tech companies.

 “It’s one of the reasons why when we built the performance dashboard in Government it was a fantastic tool to show what was actually going on. You could see how many people were actually using the services.”

Liam credits Tom Loosemore and Mike Bracken and the team with creating huge changes to the way Government worked and thought. He adds: “One of the fundamental elements was being transparent about what was being used, how many people were using it, who was using the website and where they went. We used that information as the fundamental parts of service design.”

He adds: “Government is for everybody, it’s not a market segment or anything and therefore you’ve got to be open and transparent and accountable with it. You’ve got to serve everybody because Government is for the people.  The fundamental right of a citizen to receive the benefits for which they have contributed in taxation, that’s the fundamental right of Government service delivery.”

Liam highlights that today, the system is a joined up process that is able to link things such as driving licence and passports together to utilise the same photo for example. He also highlights that during the COVID 19 crisis, the furlough scheme and HMRC’s IT never “fell over because it’s now built properly. DWP and HMRC have got great teams, they’ve got great people, and they’ve got a great capability to deliver. We’ve seen that through the pandemic, that they stood it up and it worked.”

Liam was also involved in the formation of the D5 group. He explains: “It was a time when GDS itself was under significant budget pressure, and we could see that there was an issue coming where we needed to prove our worth comparatively with other governments. We also felt that there was a need to share best practice amongst governments that had actually bitten the bullet and started to reform and so we created the D5 as a way of sharing capability and expertise between five governments who had taken that decision to make change happen within them.”

The criteria for D5 was willingness to share, work collaboratively and be committed to the modern approach to technology of open systems, open source, open data, open markets, and open standards.

Liam adds: “For the first four years of working for the government there was a campaign to make sure that we had open standards at the heart of Government. If you were going to use a common resource such as the internet to deliver your services, you’re going to need to have open standards so that you build things, systems, services that people can use and share.  Those were the criteria that the D5 was built on and that was the criteria that countries applied to join.”

The group included Estonia, Israel, New Zealand and Korea. Liam adds: “Estonia were way ahead of the curve, building citizen services digitally really effectively, and we shared with them a lot of code, and also a lot of experience.  People from the Estonian government came and worked in my team.  We made a huge effort to make really close connections with them and their expertise, intelligence and understanding, and being able to think things through properly.” Of the programme overall, Liam adds: “It was a good comparator; we could see where the UK was in comparison to the rest of the world, which helped us.”

Of his mistakes, Liam says: “I think if I had my time again and I went in to do spend controls, I would have gone in and been much more collaborative after the first couple of months.  You needed to be fairly bulldog-like in the first two months and that would have helped.  I think we should have been much stronger on pushing for common tech standards, the use of more common tech across Government, and offered more across local government in the centre. I should have thought bigger and done more when I was in Government, to be honest.  I think there were many projects we just didn’t get the time, energy et cetera to do, and I should have taken a step back and really gone in much more strongly than we did on the reform that we were doing.”

Liam says that he would return to Government, adding: “When you work in the Government, everyone is your customer, it’s for everybody. You learn so much because it’s a completely different field to working in a corporate place where you’re segmenting your market and you’re dealing with people. You work with incredibly bright people in Government, many of whom are very unsung, and you also find real pockets of genius and people who really make a difference because of the mission. It’s working in an organisation where the mission is the thing, it is tremendously powerful and attractive to me.”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley