Has staff morale collapsed at the SFO?

It was a nasty case of déjà vu in WC2 this time last week. Another big leaving do at the Serious Fraud Office packed the ground floor of the Apple Tree pub in Farringdon, barely 100 yards from the fraud prosecutor’s Elm House headquarters. Among the leavers this time was senior financial investigator and former acting assistant director Paige Rumble. That there is no place for Paige in the new and improved SFO is very much a sign of the times, and a worrying one.

This time last year we were all in the basement of the Bung Hole Cellars on High Holborn. The bunker-like subterranean gloom suited the occasion perfectly. Very nearly the whole SFO board had been summarily dismissed; people like Helen Garlick, the prickly but brilliant head of the BAE investigation, and Graham More, who had given up a doubtless lucrative career in private practice to lead the division responsible for all three of the SFO’s huge, ‘blockbuster’ cases.

That night the fear, anger and confusion was palpable. Almost no-one had a good word to say about the new management team or its ‘vision’. The exception, I recall, was Paige. She’d already met the soon-to-be appointed chief operating officer and been impressed by her. Certainly there had been big mistakes, but the SFO needed a shake-up and it was too soon to reject the new director’s ideas. I’m still hopeful, said Paige.

That’s vintage Paige. Clear-headed, professional, measured. With a law degree from Trinity College, Oxford and chartered accountancy training with Grant Thornton, she used to be considered the very personification of the SFO model; expert legal and accounting skills brought together in a single, fearsome, fraud-fighting force. Her outstanding casework and trial testimony played a key role in putting Virendra Rastogi, leader of the £350 million Allied Deals conspiracy, behind bars for almost a decade.

When I interviewed Paige for the SFO’s 2005-06 annual report she told me about her original job interview. The panel wondered if she had any questions of her own. Most candidates take the opportunity to ask when they’ll know the outcome. Not Paige. “Do you get much political interference?” she asked. The question provoked gales of laughter from the three panel members and an assurance that “even if we did, we’d ignore it”. (Those were the days.) For Paige it was exactly the right answer. She was hooked for a decade.

She briefly found favour with the new regime and was elevated to acting AD, a position commensurate with her great skill and experience. But Paige is a woman of principle who takes her role as a public servant very seriously indeed, and I am told that there is little room for the independent-minded in Elm House these days. By the time the AD’s job was to be filled permanently, earlier this year, Paige wasn’t even interviewed.

In December 2009 the Cabinet Office published its baseline assessment capability review of the SFO. It found the organisation “well placed” in just two of the ten assessment points. In another four it was classified as in need of “urgent development”. After almost two years of upheaval the review team still found that: “… staff are not engaged in the new change programme and do not feel valued by the organisation.”

I wonder why? In the Apple Tree pub – with perhaps half the SFO’s staff squeezed into the downstairs – the talk was not of ‘engagement’ but of sackings by email, case controllers learning that their cases have been closed only when the news flashes up on the office intranet, teams working pointlessly for weeks because no-one told them their case had been plea-bargained away to a trifling fine, and unproven probationers promoted over the heads of their expert lawyer/managers.

All gossip you say? Let’s hope so. For ten years I worked with these people, interviewing them in detail about their work and their motivations. I found them to be talented, highly motivated and utterly committed to the mission of the SFO. But now? I cannot recall the last time I saw so much resentment and despondency among the past and present professional staff of so important an organisation. And what if the gossip is true? Just as fraud, deception, greed and wilful corporate mismanagement reach epidemic proportions – all but crippling the UK economy and undermining public services – we are gifted an under-funded, under-staffed fraud prosecutor, demoralised from within by a callous management seemingly more interested in chasing cash than convictions?

Say it ain’t so.