charged political matters, one person's ambiguity may be another person's truth". From 1986 to 1989, he was the Under-secretary responsible for the defence programme, and from 1989 to 1992, the Deputy Secretary with responsibilities for UK defence policy and strategy, and defence relations with other countries at the time of the end of the Cold War. He was the architect of the "Options for Change' Defence Review. Multi-purpose Permanent Secretary After this, in 1992, he was appointed as a Permanent Secretary, first at the Office of Public Service and Science in the Cabinet Office. His responsibilities there included public service change, Civil Service management questions, and science and technology policy and the science budget. In 1995, he became Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence, where he worked on, among other things, the Labour Government's Strategic Defence Review. In 1998, he became permanent secretary at the Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions. Mottram's tenure at DETR saw important developments in environmental policy and the publication of White papers on Urban and rural policy. A 10-year transport plan was developed building on the 1998 White paper on Integrated transport. One aspect of transport — railways — tended to dominate in the media. New institutional arrangements were introduced with a Strategic Rail Authority alongside the Rail Regulator but the appointments by John Prescott of Sir Alastair Morton as chairman of the Strategic Rail Authority and Tom Winsor as Rail Regulator proved an unhappy partnership, which ended in 2001 when Morton resigned and was replaced by Richard Bowker. Mottram's term also saw the rail crashes at Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield and Potters Bar. The national railway infrastructure company Railtrack got into serious financial difficulties after the Hatfield rail crash in October 2000, and on 7 October 2001 was put into administration on the petition of the Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions Stephen Byers MP in very controversial circumstances. Mottram was closely involved in the preparations for the administration of Railtrack and in July 2005 was called as a witness in the largest class legal action ever brought in the English courts, when 49,500 shareholders of Railtrack sued the Secretary of State for Transport for damages for misfeasance in public office. The case was lost because the shareholders could not prove targeted malice on the part of Stephen Byers, that is an intention maliciously to injure the shareholders.