What drew you to this role?
A strong sense of mission and purpose is really important to me in any role. And I can’t think of many senses of purpose which are more important than keeping our country, our citizens and our way of life safe and protected from threat.
What is the Homeland Security Group?
We’re part of the Home Office and of the broader national security system. I think about our role as providing system leadership around three types of threats: terrorism; state threats and cyber; and economic crime including fraud, which is the single most common crime type in the UK. The first two – terrorism and state threats – I describe as apex threats, so really high threat, high harm. Economic crime is a bit different because it’s a volume threat. I don’t think there’s any one of us who hasn’t been targeted by online fraud, for example.
How do you work with other parts of the Home Office?
As a department, we’re trying to make sure that national security isn’t a secret thing that’s hidden behind a load of extra doors, but it’s embedded across the broader department. Keeping the UK safe requires us to have a strong border, for example. So I’m thinking about how we partner better and differently with the migration and borders part of the Home Office to deliver our shared objectives.
Our previous permanent secretary, Antonia, was driving a culture of DGs being responsible for leading the whole of the department. So, for example, a DG owns a cross-cutting risk for the department, rather than just the risks in their area. One risk I own is the extent to which technology is enabling threat and harm, which is a cross-cutting departmental priority.
I’m also working really closely with Mike McCarthy, our DG for digital and innovation, because some of how you mitigate technology-enabled harm is basically to adopt technology more quickly than your adversaries or criminals. So some of the problems we’re facing have a technology solution.
What are some of those problems?
Fraud accounted for 44% of all crime in the last crime survey of England and Wales and it is being enabled at pace and scale by the online environment – fraudulent advertising, for example. So we’re thinking about how, with industry, we might be able to design out some of the harm and criminality. We’ve seen massive improvements from banking and financial services and our voluntary charter with the telco sector has seen them blocking scam texts before they reach customers. We need to build on that success by engaging the technology sector on the next stage of that journey to get ahead of the threat.
What are your priorities for the coming years and how do they align with the National Security Strategy?
I’m the system-wide SRO for counter terrorism and one of the challenges that system is facing is the extent to which young people are being drawn into extremism in the online environment. This demonstrates how important it is for national security to be woven through the whole of the government system.
It’s just as important for me to partner with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Department for Education and Department for Health and Social Care as it is for me to partner with counter-terrorism policing. Leading that whole system, including our response to the Southport Inquiry, will be a really important priority.
We’re really trying to harden the UK as an operating environment for state actors. A good example of a recent development is the new National Security Act legislation – that is starting to have a deterrent effect against criminal actors and proxies who might work on behalf of state adversaries. So we’ll continue to build that operating system, harden the environment against those threats and work with industry to reduce online harm.
What are some of the biggest homeland security threats facing the UK and how is your team responding to them?
Terrorism has not gone away. We continue to see threats from international groups like Islamic State and Al Qaeda, but there’s also domestic, self-initiated terrorism and violent attacks – last year we saw the terrible attack at the Heaton Park synagogue. Since 2018, 67% of attacks have been from Islamist terrorism. The geopolitical context really matters to UK homeland security.
If you think about the Russian illegal invasion of Ukraine, threat is materialising from that conflict on the streets of the UK and Europe in Russian sabotage campaigns against UK targets, for example. I think the world is much more dangerous than it’s ever been and these threats sometimes intersect – by which I mean state actors are using the online environment to recruit criminals to carry out those acts of sabotage. So the line between peace and conflict seems to be becoming increasingly blurred.
How are you tackling the threat of online harms?
I’m really interested in the consultation that DSIT is doing on children’s social media use because I worry about the extent to which the online environment exposes young people to really damaging material, to violent or extreme pornographic content – and in a way that is sometimes challenging for parents and educators to identify. So we will be feeding into the consultation.
What are some of the ways you work with international partners?
We have extremely strong, well-established partnerships, including with the Five Eyes and with other European partners. The conflict in Ukraine has driven, in my view, a very welcome commitment across Europe to an increase in defence spending and recognition that these threats are transnational in nature so they require a transnational, collaborative response. I also lead, on behalf of the UK system, a counter-ransomware initiative with around 70 countries participating. They’ll come to the UK in April in the margins of CYBERUK [the UK government’s flagship cybersecurity event] to think about how we try to reduce the threat and risk from ransomware.
What opportunities do you see for supporting UK security exports?
The UK has a brilliant and growing security industry, including cybersecurity, with exports worth £12.9bn in 2024. The way that the National Cyber Security Centre partners with industry is really pioneering. Part of what we’re trying to achieve at Security & Policing is to give companies the opportunity to demonstrate their latest innovations, how they’re responding to the threat environment, and how we can support them in exporting tools that we hope will equip our allies to tackle threats upstream, helping to keep them, as well as the UK, safe. It also means that through S&P, we play a role in the government’s economic growth agenda.
What are your priorities for this year’s Security & Policing event?
I want the problems that we have in national security and policing to be better articulated and understood by industry so they can help us solve them. So I really want some practical, mission-focused partnership and collaboration to emerge from S&P.
Are there any particular technologies or innovations that you’re excited to see at S&P?
We should all be thinking about AI, which provides both threat and opportunity. I know policing colleagues will be thinking about how facial recognition might support their mission. I’m also really interested in the lessons Ukraine is teaching us around the importance of drone technology. One of my teams is looking hard at how we might develop counter-drone technologies and counter measures, which is applicable to both aviation and protective security of premises, for example.
It’s also a real issue for colleagues in HM Prison and Probation Service, given the utilisation of drones in prisons. So it’s a good example of a technology and countermeasures with broad applicability across national security, policing and other parts of our system.
You’re one of only a few women in very senior security leadership. What’s your experience been like and do you think there are barriers remaining for women in this sector?
I actually think the UK has a much more gender-balanced national security community than many of our allies, and that’s a real strength. Some of the people who have most helped me during my brilliant 26, 27-year career in national security have been male line managers who’ve encouraged me to put myself forward, step out of my comfort zone and do roles that perhaps I was not confident I could do. I was encouraged and supported to apply and to push myself.
I don’t think there are barriers but there are stereotypes and perceptions that might put women off. I think part of my role is to demystify and to debunk those myths – so national security careers do not equal being James Bond. There are tons of jobs in national security that are being done really successfully by women – and by men who don’t want to be James Bond either, who have families and caring commitments. So for me, this is not just a question about women. This is about making national security careers really attractive to the diverse talent we have in this country, so that nobody feels that a job in national security isn’t for them.
How are you fostering diversity in your leadership of the Homeland Security Group?
I think about diversity from a mission-effectiveness perspective. The evidence base shows very clearly that we take better decisions, we achieve better outcomes, if we can have diversity of skill, thought and experience around the table when we’re wrestling with really difficult problems.
One of the things I want to do, which I’ve done in previous roles, is to bring technologists and data scientists much closer to some of the operational policy problems. Civil service structures don’t always enable us to do that, but S&P is another really good example of looking at how you can break down barriers and bring people together to work on a problem. The biggest intelligence failures in history have come about because we had groupthink, because we did not have challenge and we didn’t have diversity of thought in the room.
What has been the proudest moment in your career?
I’m really proud of what the UK government is doing in Ukraine. I think it’s the right thing for us to do to support the Ukrainian population in combatting Putin’s illegal invasion. Visiting Kyiv and hearing from Ukrainian counterparts how much the partnership matters to them was a high point of my career, humbling and moving.
And can you share a challenging time in your career?
In one job that was totally outside of my comfort zone, I was working on a technology programme, which was one of the most difficult but also most developmental jobs I’ve done. I thought I had to learn and understand all of the technology and to learn and understand all about projects and programmes and agile and waterfall – and I did all of that, and it was really helpful. But fundamentally, I was trying to bring together people from different organisations to do technology in a different way. And ultimately, it wasn’t about the technology.
All of the objections were very human – and so [it was a good reminder about] not forgetting that the role was actually about people, not technology. In leadership, the challenges are usually about change and people, rather than the technical aspects of the problem.
Looking ahead, what would success look like for the Homeland Security Group in five years’ time?
We would be more technically literate and tech enabled. That will mean doing more of what we’re doing at S&P and partnering differently with industry to solve our problems at pace in a really agile way. We should continue to be bearing down on the threats that I talked about. I would like that fraud figure to be lower than 44% – I’m really passionate about that. More broadly, I’d like to see that the public has confidence in both the Home Office and the broader national security system and understands what we’re doing to keep them safe and crucially, what they can do to keep themselves safe, whether that’s online or in the real world.
This article first appeared in the spring 2026 issue of Civil Service World. Read the digital magazine here