Days after meeting CSW at Heathrow to talk about her priorities for the Home Office, Dame Antonia Romeo became cabinet secretary. Here, she reflects on both roles and explores how her experience of leading large departments will shape her leadership of the civil service
On a quiet Friday morning in February, a steady flow of passengers moves through passport control at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. At this time of year, some 24,000 people will arrive here each day; up to 40,000 at peak times. Most are moving through a bank of 24 eGates, pausing for just a few seconds while the machines process their information and approve them for entry to the UK. A few yards away, Border Force officials monitor screens to spot and resolve any problems flagged up by the machines, while their colleagues observe the passengers for security concerns or indications of modern slavery. Several more officials are checking passengers’ passports manually, and yet more are working in control rooms behind the scenes.
Amid this calm scene of industry, Dame Antonia Romeo is moving between desks and control rooms. She is here, in her final weeks as Home Office permanent secretary, to learn more about the operations at this part of the UK border, and how they will be changing later this year as new technology is rolled out.
Romeo is asking officers a constant stream of questions: “What are you looking for here? What sorts of things would worry you? What is this data telling us?” She’s clearly fascinated by the tech, asking for detailed explanations of the e-Gate process, and pointing out a display that shows recent examples of remarkably accurate fake passports that were picked up by the gates.
She’s also fascinated by the complexity of their work and the smoothness with which they manage it – remarking on the fact that almost all passengers pass through the border within agreed maximum wait times, even though officials have no control over the flow of arrivals (which is entirely down to airlines and flight scheduling).
At the end of each discussion, the perm sec thanks the officers for their service, often asking how long they’ve been working for Border Force. Usually, the answer comes back in decades. Romeo jokes with one official that he’ll soon receive a card from her to mark 25 years with the organisation.
After our tour of the border control area, as we sit in a quiet meeting room away from the screens of operational updates and passenger flow data, Romeo describes how important “getting out to the front line” is to her. “The thing that’s most energising, I think, about any job in leadership in the civil service, is actually talking to the people who are doing the work,” she says. “How are they feeling? What are they worried about? What are they focused on?”
Less than two weeks after this visit to Heathrow, Romeo’s own focus will change and broaden dramatically. Her role at the Home Office, where she worked with 51,000 colleagues delivering the home secretary’s priorities, will come to an end and she will become the leader of more than 550,000 civil servants across the country, as well as the prime minister’s confidante and adviser on the biggest decisions of the day.
Romeo’s appointment as the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service marks a number of milestones, including the first woman to hold the role in its 110-year history and the first person to have led three different departments before becoming cabinet secretary. She also steps into the role in circumstances unlike most of her forerunners. Her immediate predecessor, Sir Chris Wormald, left suddenly in the wake of a political crisis that had also threatened to topple the prime minister. His sudden departure sent shock waves through the civil service and was described by FDA union head Dave Penman as a “new low” for the relationship between this government and its officials. Yet writing for this magazine, Penman said Romeo’s appointment was cause for optimism, an opportunity “for the government and the prime minister to reset the relationship with the civil service”, and for the new cabinet secretary to become a more prominent champion for civil servants.
Former cabinet secretary Simon Case – who also stepped into the role at a point of political turmoil – told the Observer that he believes Romeo has a “big opportunity” to make a difference in and for the civil service. “People have called her a disruptor or a reformer,” he said. “Personally, I hope she will lean into that.”
The initial messages the new cabinet secretary has sent out to her workforce – and her answers to a series of questions from CSW after she took on the role – indicate that she will. She speaks of innovation, of curiosity and of driving change to improve delivery for the government and the public.
“I’m fond of saying that leadership is about taking organisations to places where they wouldn’t otherwise have got to,” she tells CSW a week into her new role. “That’s the role of leadership: to support our people through times of change, setting the direction with energy and positivity.”
The direction she is setting is clear: she wants the civil service to become an organisation defined by delivery, driven by purpose, and fuelled by the “pride that comes from performance”. And digital transformation sits at the heart of that ambition. “Innovating to deliver better public services isn’t just a ‘nice to have’,” Romeo says. “It’s incumbent on us to take the whole public service into this new world, and obviously that’s a big challenge. But I see a huge amount of opportunity too.”
Romeo on performance management
“One of the issues of performance management in big organisations can be the link between what people are actually doing, what they think they’ve been asked to do, what they think good looks like, and how that delivers the [minister’s] priorities and for the citizen… there can be quite a big gap between those things.
“So the first job of a performance framework is to make sure everyone understands what their job is and to incentivise things that will drive delivery of politicians’ priorities and delivery for the public.
“A good performance framework should also incentivise people to flag risks. How do you make sure people are flagging things up that the leadership needs to know? It can be really easy to have cultures where people aren’t rewarded for identifying risk, so it’s crucial that we do have that. So how do you build that into the performance framework?
“But finally, if you’re holding people to account, you’ve got to be helping them build the skills – that’s essential. So show them what good looks like, but also help them get there.”
Indeed, it was to share the opportunities of digital transformation that Romeo had invited CSW to join her at Heathrow in February. Thanks to the curse of long magazine lead times – and no access to a crystal ball – our February interview focused extensively on her priorities at the Home Office. But though she is no longer personally driving those priorities, her reflections on leading that organisation, and the changes she had already implemented in the 10 months she was at its helm, still offer rich insight into how she might lead – and reform – the civil service at large.
It’s not hard, for instance, to imagine her excitement over those e-Gates extending to any number of innovations across the civil service and wider public sector. Innovations that she is now in a position to champion from the very top of government.
The gates are, she says, “a brilliant example of how you use technology to deliver a more efficient service, which is absolutely the heart of what we’ve got to do”. The UK has some 270 eGates across its air and rail ports, which support 76 million border crossings each year – more than any other country in the world.
The introduction of contactless automation, and several other new capabilities mean the UK border is already one of the most advanced in the world, as the quietly effective operations at Heathrow Terminal 5 show: combining technology, data-led operations and human skills to maximise security, with minimal disruption for legitimate visitors.
The Home Office has committed to take this even further, aiming to have “frictionless UK border crossings with minimal human checking” by 2030. The new technology in Terminal 5’s eGates will combine improved automation, using the information stored in modern passports so that more people can pass through the border without intervention from a member of Heathrow’s staff.
As one official put it to CSW on our tour: at the moment, officers must see everyone who arrives at the border, but the new technology will allow them only to see the ones who present security or legality concerns. Where there are no such concerns, people will simply move through it. Eventually, they may not even need to pass through an e-Gate but will walk through the space, checked on the way by a combination of advanced technologies and intelligence.
“It is going to be world leading,” Romeo says, before citing a string of other areas where the Home Office is driving innovation, including pilots exploring how AI can be used to support officials making asylum decisions by taking over much of the processing work. If proven, it could also extend beyond asylum decisions. Romeo says she sees no reason why the department shouldn’t be “famous” for rolling out the tech on a much wider scale to the numerous other teams whose work involves processing.
To facilitate such changes, one of Romeo’s first moves as perm sec was to appoint a director general for digital and innovation – a step she also took in her previous department, the Ministry of Justice, reflecting the importance she places on making sure organisations are thinking explicitly about, and “leaning into”, digital change.
And all of this, she says, will not only drive efficiency and performance but build pride among staff. “The work those teams are doing – they know it’s world leading,” she says of the e-Gate staff. “They know it’s incredibly difficult. They know they’re implementing technology that is going to help them run an incredibly complex operation, one of the busiest airports in the world. You can hear the pride that they have from doing that.”
“What makes people proud isn’t just telling them they should be proud. What makes people proud is feeling like they are high-performing”
“I’m a big believer in pride from excellence, pride from high performance,” she continues. “What makes people proud isn’t just telling them they should be proud. What makes people proud is feeling like they are high-performing.”
Romeo will restate all of these beliefs in a new context when she becomes cabinet secretary, drawing on her years of leading large departments to write the following in an all-staff memo: “What you have told me is that you want to change the things that get in the way of you doing your jobs. You want us to be more productive, to do things differently. You want to be proud of what you achieve. Civil service modernisation needs to embrace your ideas and have innovation at its core.”
The promise of change is not new to the civil service, and Romeo is the first to acknowledge this. “When a new leader arrives and says, ‘I will make all these changes,’ before they’ve made any changes… that’s a moment of risk,” she reflects during our Heathrow trip. In the Home Office, she chose to mitigate that risk by setting in place a number of reforms to demonstrate that she would drive change, before speaking more broadly about transformation plans.
Those initial reforms included the creation of new posts and structures to improve accountability; the introduction of efficiency controls; and changes to the risk-management process. Since the department had been on limited internal audit for eight years, she knew these changes were essential. She also prioritised a review of performance management and whistleblowing cultures.
The changes began to make an impact, she says. For example, departmental spending on travel expenses between September and December 2025 – the three months after the controls were introduced – was £10m less than it had been in the previous year.
“I’m a big believer that healthy organisations are healthy everywhere,” Romeo says. “If you don’t feel like expenses are being run in a value-for-money way, that is normally an indication that the department as a whole isn’t focusing ruthlessly on value for money. And, obviously, that’s our job as public servants.”
Those controls, if the balance isn’t right, can easily combine with other “hygiene factors” like tech or process problems to get in the way of delivery. And she is determined to enable her team to deliver by removing things that get in their way.
This is one of the aims of the Future Home Office programme, she says. As well as embracing digital innovation and new ways of working, the work is also “essentially about getting the basics right for people”. Not fixing those basics makes people feel the leadership isn’t listening to them, she says, “so there’s a lot you’ve got to sweep out of the way”.
“One of the most important things in delivering change is that people believe you’ll keep going; that how you talk about what you want the department to be is authentic”
“One of the most important things in delivering change,” she says, “is that people believe it will happen. They believe you’ll keep going; that how you talk about what you want the department to be is authentic and that you can take the department there.”
“Obviously,” she adds, “that is about the whole top team, which is also why I focused a lot on the top team, because that team is essential to lead the department into where we’re going to get to.”
She’s referring here to changes she made at the Home Office top team, including creating that digital and innovation DG role, but also other measures aimed at improving accountability in the department. “The thing I’ve learned running three departments is: accountability is king,” Romeo says. “So, the thing I always look at in a department is: of the top priorities of the secretary of state, who is the person on the executivecommittee who is responsible for that? Do they have all the levers they need?”
Getting the top team right, she adds, not only means the department is better set to deliver, but builds personal resilience for leaders. “I often say that your meeting with your top team should be the best meeting of your week. If it isn’t, then you’ve got to ask yourself some questions. And one of the reasons why I spend a lot of time with my top team is because that is the place where you get organisational resilience as well as personal resilience.”
“Leading big, difficult organisations is hard,” she continues, “and you’ve got to have somewhere where you’re getting your resilience from. I’ve got three kids and lots to do outside of work – I get a lot of my resilience from what I’m doing when not at work. But equally with jobs like this, they’re not nine-to-five jobs. They are 24/7 jobs. So in order to deliver that resilience, you’ve got to have people you can lean on and you’ve got to have organisational resilience, which can’t come from one person.”
Romeo on her first day as cabinet secretary
“It was back-to-back!” Romeo says of her first day in post. “The first call I made was to my predecessor, outgoing cabinet secretary Chris Wormald. I then gathered my top team together – the permanent secretary heads of departments, who are the people I will be working with most closely to deliver the government’s agenda. We talked about my priorities for the leadership of the civil service: delivery, innovation and productivity.”
There were several meetings with ministers, the political team in No.10 and the Cabinet Office top team, and Romeo also kicked off a series of one-on-one calls with each of the permanent secretaries, discussing “the priorities and challenges in each department and how we will work together on them”.
She also made some personal touches to her new work space: “First to go up on the wall were two framed photos of all the living female permanent secretaries. The first was taken in 2017, when I had just been appointed to lead a department for the first time (I was the 35th woman to be appointed to a perm sec role), and the second in 2024, when there were nearly 60 of us.”
“At the end of the day,” she says, “I wrote my introductory message to the whole civil service, focused on my pride in the remarkable institution for which we work, and some things I would like to change. I’ve come from running big operational departments, so I know the importance of communicating with the whole team – from the operational front line to policymakers and corporate services.”
In Romeo’s new role, there are several “top teams” she will be thinking about to take the civil service where it needs to go. The first is the cadre of permanent secretaries who lead government departments. It was this team – “the people I will be working with most closely to deliver the government’s agenda” – that she gathered together on her first morning as cabinet secretary to talk through her priorities of delivery, innovation and productivity.
As she tells CSW shortly after her appointment, she also set in motion a series of one-to-one calls with each of these perm secs to “discuss the priorities and challenges in each department and how we will work together on them”.
Alongside this team of perm secs is the Cabinet Office top team, who will support her responsibilities as head of the civil service, leading cross-government functions as well as whatever change programmes she puts in place. And finally, there is the 7,000-strong senior civil service, with whom she may not meet as often as she does with perm secs, but on whom she is placing clear expectations to support the drive for change.
In her first message to the SCS as cabinet secretary, Romeo described them as “the team that leads the almost half-a-million civil servants charged with delivery of the government’s agenda and services to the public”.
“We set the tone, the culture, the values and the example,” she wrote. “We translate priorities into action and impact. Every day, every single person in the country depends on our leadership.”
To support the responsibility of this leadership role, Romeo places great importance on the connection between senior officials across government and the civil servants they are leading. At the Home Office, alongside her regular visits to operational teams around the country, she operated the modern-day, large-organisation equivalent of an open-door policy. Anybody within the department who emailed the perm sec address would get a reply written by Romeo herself.
CSW recounts having spoken to a Home Office official who had done just that while Romeo was perm sec: raising a concern and receiving a response that they knew had come directly from her.
“People do actually tell me a lot of stuff,” Romeo says, explaining why it’s so important to her to maintain that relationship with colleagues. “They are working really hard, in incredibly difficult jobs, and they need to feel that the official leading that team is somebody who they have a direct connection to. Because we’re all doing it together.”
As cabinet secretary, the scope may change but the principle remains. Her message to the SCS cadre includes the assurance: “We will do this together. I will regularly be in touch with you and you can contact me anytime.”
Romeo on... risk registers
“The biggest risk with risk registers is the register becomes something that sits alongside the actual work.
“When you’re running a big operation… you know that managing risk is an essential part of the delivery of the job, and that is really true in the whole of the Home Office.
“There’s always a number of red lights going off at any one time, and being able to scan the landscape and spot the red lights which are actually going to turn into something more significant, something you’ve got to get on top of early… being able to do that is an essential part, I think, of being a senior civil servant.
“It starts with the signals that the executive committee are sending. So if we’re not talking about risk and strategic risks, we’re not sending the signal that that matters to us.
“There’ll be different numbers that matter for different parts of the business. And you have a conversation at the beginning of every executive committee meeting as a discipline about those because that is what you’re focused on. I find that if you have a meeting where you’re not starting with that, the risk of not framing everything within what you’re trying to achieve is quite high.”
Back in 2015, when she was heading up the Economic and Domestic Affairs Secretariat under David Cameron, Romeo told CSW that one of her faults was a failure to career plan. Instead, she said, she had “ended up doing interesting jobs just by spotting things that happen”.
The civil service has “the most complex and difficult jobs to do,” she said, including the job she was in at the time, and she saw “a lot of road ahead [with] a lot of really great jobs on that road. I’m just hopeful at some point to luck out and get one.”
Reflecting on that comment in 2024 – when she was permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice – Romeo said she still believed the civil service offered some of the most complex and rewarding jobs out there. Two years on, she has made her way into perhaps the most complex and rewarding job in government – but also one of the most demanding – at a time of immense challenge, with a strong imperative for change.
None of this will be easy, but officials who have worked with her tell CSW that Romeo is someone who is energised by challenges. And that energy, according to someone who worked with her in the Home Office, remains consistent whether in an early-morning meeting or at the end of a long day. Romeo herself speaks of the importance of leaders having a positive attitude and being conscious of the tone they set for their staff. In our email exchange, CSW asks if the move to a new role has changed how she thinks about this aspect of leadership.
“As I said to you that day at Heathrow,” she replies, “I’m a huge believer that mindset matters. Positivity is contagious and leadership means being positive and fostering a positive culture of pride that comes from high performance. I’ve often said that courage, resilience and positivity are the most important characteristics of a great leader. It’s an incredible privilege to lead and motivate nearly half a million civil servants to deliver for the government, and I don’t take that responsibility lightly. There’s a lot to do, and I’m excited to do it.”
This article first appeared in the spring 2026 issue of Civil Service World. Read the digital magazine here