Theresa Banks obituary

Senior civil servant who was appointed director of the Office for Population Censuses and Surveys in 1986

Terri Banks, who has died aged 91, was one of a pioneering generation of women admired for fighting their way to senior positions in the civil service. She worked mainly in health finance and later became director of the Office for Population Censuses and Surveys, and with that, registrar general, the first woman to hold the position in its 150-year history.

The main part of her career in the civil service, between 1972 and 1985, was spent in the Department for Health and Social Security (DHSS). She introduced programme budgeting for health finance, an approach that uses routine management information to link costs to measurable results, and gathers services into programmes for different groups of users.