Norman Glass

An encounter with Norman Glass, who has died of cancer aged 63, was a ready antidote to both the Treasury "mandarin" stereotype of the senior civil servant and the cynical picture of officialdom propagated by The Thick of It. Witty, intense, Leopold Bloom-like in his range of interests - he shared a Dublin Jewish background with Joyce's hero - Glass was fascinated by what government can and cannot do to ameliorate the lives of its citizens. But he was no "do-gooder" either, for he was ever ready to apply the sharp edge of the economic analysis in which he had been professionally trained to problems of social policy.

After leaving the civil service, with a tinge of disappointment that his career peaked just below the top, for the past eight years he led a remarkable institution, the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), where he pushed NatCen's reputation as a reliable gatherer of data for government on health, housing, crime and family formation.

Glass took a broad European perspective; he had studied in the Netherlands, his wife, Marie-Anne, is French and he often went to Brussels on the government's behalf. But at the same time, he was committed to a very English place; he was a longtime resident of Croydon and three years ago stood, unsuccessfully, as a Labour candidate in the borough elections.

A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, where he won a scholarship in economics and political science in 1966, Glass worked for Shell, then lectured at the University of Newcastle. His career in the British civil service from 1975 was marked by his mastery of big systems - social security, housing and local government finance. Starting at the Department of Health and Social Security, he was soon involved in the Tories' social security reforms. As chief economist at the Department of the Environment, he had to sweep up after poll tax failed.

But it was in his next job that his reputation as a policy innovator was made. In 1995 he became deputy director of public services and chief micro-economist at the Treasury, where he was frustrated by Whitehall's lack of analytical rigour. He had a sense, piqued by his ability to look at British affairs through Irish eyes, that the public schoolboys and Oxbridgians would never find him entirely comfortable as a colleague. That slight sense of exclusion made him a sympathetic figure for senior women civil servants in Whitehall.

The three years after Labour's arrival in power in 1997 saw Glass in his element. From his base in the Treasury he pulled together a network of officials, academics, ministers and charities around a British version of the American Headstart project. Sure Start was meant to focus money, nursery staff and health visitors on preschool children in poor areas, in an attempt to get them to the starting line for formal schooling. Gordon Brown, as chancellor, backed the plan but, as Glass wrote in a regretful piece in the Guardian in 2005, within a short time his idea of heavy concentrations of effort on limited numbers was diluted as Labour ministers spread the money thin and lost focus.

His Whitehall reputation made NatCen a favoured supplier of social surveys to the government, and, under his leadership, it grew and took on the trappings of a modern social enterprise, with a turnover approaching £40m, an Edinburgh subsidiary and academic links with the LSE. Glass had long been a not-for-profit activist. I first met him on the housing research committee of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation; he was a patron and chair of local Sure Starts; a member of the governing bodies of the Pensions Policy Institute and Longview, a thinktank promoting studies of how social conditions change over time; a visiting fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, and a member of the Countryside Commission.

Glass had announced he would step down from the chief executive's job at NatCen this year but was determined that he would decide the timing of his departure, not the cancer with which he was diagnosed last summer. He is survived by Marie-Anne, and their two children, Jerome and Sophie.

Naomi Eisenstadt writes: I first met Norman early in 1998 when he was leading the Comprehensive Spending Review on Services for Children Under Eight and Dame Gillian Pugh suggested he talk to me about child poverty. I was charmed by him; here was an intelligent man who knew very little about young children and was keen to learn. Having spent most of my working life trying to convince civil servants about the importance of early childhood, being sought out by one from the Treasury who really wanted to listen was a new experience. And Norman was like the little boy in the sweet shop. He clearly enjoyed both listening to what academics had to say about young children, but even more, enjoyed visiting local projects, where he met wonderful people working with families.

I took him on one such trip to visit the east Birmingham family service unit (FSU), which was mainly used by Pakistani and Bangladeshi families. I had arrogantly assumed that a Treasury mandarin would be completely unaware of the kind of communities in which FSU worked, but Norman asked both staff and parents lots of questions, talked about his own childhood in Dublin, and afterwards, in the taxi, we reflected on our own parents' experience of immigration, compared with the experiences of the families we had met.

That visit led to friendship over the next 10 years, as well as a working relationship developing what came to be Sure Start. Norman's intelligence, along with his warmth, humour and creativity, led to the most radical programme of service development for young children ever seen in Britain. Rarely has a civil servant had such an opportunity. And rarely has one taken it with such enthusiasm and energy; young children for many generations to come will benefit from Norman's achievements.

Norman Glass, civil servant and social policy campaigner, born 31 May 1946; died 13 June 2009

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