He trained as a historian (at St John's, Oxford and at Bristol, completing a PhD on British public expenditure policy, 1919-1925). His first publications were on historical topics and on the use of evidence by historians. While the Gwilym Gibbon Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford in 1996-97 he began to work on information policy. In 2005-06 he was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, researching a book on constitutional reform and national identity in liberal democracies. More recently, he has begun to work on questions of disability and ill health.
He has written on modern British history, information policy, constitutional reform and national identity. He has edited three books:
- Open Government. Freedom of Information and Privacy, with Greg Terrill (Macmillan, 1998)
- Electronic Records (ICA, 2005)
- Reinventing Britain. Constitutional change under New Labour (Politico's and University of California Press, 2007)
He joined the Civil Service in 1986 and has worked in a number of departments. In the last decade he has worked in strategy, change and leadership roles, with a particular focus on constitutional reform. He was the first CEO of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, leading its establishment on appointment in 2009. He retired, on medical grounds, in 2014.
He is chair of Scope, the disability charity and is an associate of the Institute for Government.