Former Birmingham chief executive lands plum civil servant job

Dec 7 2010 by Jonathan Walker, Birmingham Post

The woman who presided over Birmingham’s “banana republic” vote-rigging scandal has landed a plum job as one of Britain’s top civil servants.

Lin Homer, former chief executive of Birmingham City Council, is to be the new Permanent Secretary at the Department for Transport, earning £155,000 a year.

Ms Homer ran Birmingham from 2002 to 2005, when she was responsible for 57,000 council staff.

But her period at the council was marred by the postal voting scandal which led a judge to order fresh elections in two Birmingham wards.

Election judge Richard Mawrey said fraud in the city “would have disgraced a banana republic” and warned Ms Homer, who was the city’s returning officer in her role as chief executive, had “thrown the rule book out of the window”.

Among other things, he described her decision to allow postal ballot papers to be transported to the count in plastic shopping bags as “the direst folly”.