Michael Bichard, Baron Bichard
British civil servant (born 1947)
Michael George Bichard, Baron Bichard, (born 31 January 1947) is a former public servant in the United Kingdom, first in local and then as a civil servant in central government. He was director of the Institute for Government, currently serves as one of its first fellows, and was chair of the Design Council. He was a created a crossbench life peer on 24 March 2010. He is an advisor to The Key Support Services Limited, which provide leadership and management support to school leaders and governors. He became chair of the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) in 2013.
Career
Bichard served as the chief executive of Brent Council between 1980 and 1986, and then of Gloucestershire County Council between 1986 and 1990, when he was appointed chief executive of the Benefits Agency.
In 1995, Bichard was made Permanent Secretary of the Department for Employment. When it merged with the Department for Education (DfE) to form the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE), he became Permanent Secretary of the combined department, under Gillian Shephard, and then, post-1997, David Blunkett. He became extremely close to Blunkett, even at one point intervening personally – according to the National press – to ensure that details of an affair that Blunkett was conducting with his Private Secretary should not become public.
During his time as Permanent Secretary, he introduced several modernising reforms to the department, notably in bringing its use of information technology and new media up to date.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Michael Bichard, Baron Bichard” is british civil servant (born 1947). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Michael, Bichard and Baron, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1926972. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1947, 2010, 2013 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michael Bichard, Baron Bichard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.