What was your highlight of 2025?
In April we launched the NAO’s new five-year strategy. In the last few years, we’ve worked on our audit quality and specialist expertise, and the new strategy builds on that to set outcome-focused ambitions. These are to help improve the productivity and resilience of public services and support better financial management and reporting in government. This means increasing our influence with decision-makers and exploiting data analytics and AI to increase our analytical power and efficiency. The impact of the strategy is showing in this year’s NAO outputs, such as the recent end-to-end analysis of the asylum system and our growing library of good practice guides.
A close second as highlight of 2025: the announcement of a return to live performance in 2026 by the band Rush, 11 years after their last concert and something we fans had long assumed would never happen.
What was the hardest part of being a leader in 2025?
A big challenge in the last year has been judging the continuing pace of change for colleagues who have delivered major transformation in recent years. Our strategy requires a shift in approach, and we are working through a growing stack of compelling AI use cases. We’re asking a lot from our brilliant teams. Getting the level of ambition right has been a critical judgement all year. Our work on staff wellbeing and resilience stepped up in the last year and we will be developing that further in 2026.
What are the main challenges facing your organisation in the coming year?
Our work programme will reflect the priorities in the Spending Review, meaning an enhanced focus on the capability planned to be delivered for higher levels of defence spending, and the impact of reforms in the NHS among others. We will also be examining departments’ implementation of the published efficiency plans built into their settlements. Our financial audit teams will be working with departments and ALBs to complete more audited accounts before the summer recess in 2026, finally restoring the timetable to its pre-pandemic position.
Which celebrity or historical figure would you choose to turn on the Christmas lights in your town – and why?
Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson of Rush of course. In the hope that the Christmas lights switch-on is followed by an impromptu three-hour gig.
Read all the entries to this year's perm secs round up here