Tony Blair's Prime Minister's Delivery Unit (PMDU) is one of the most successful and imitated UK civil service reforms. But it wasn't until the arrival of ex-civil servant Zina Etheridge at Haringey LBC in 2013 that any one tried to imitate it in UK local government.

I joined PMDU in 2002 in its early days. When the PMDU's founder Sir Michael Barber left in 2005, I became the interim head of the unit.