What was your highlight of 2025?
My professional highlight has been bringing together our brilliant teams to begin DWP's biggest and most significant transformation in a generation. We are fundamentally reshaping how we deliver our services, making it easier for our colleagues to prioritise people who most need their expert support and making it simpler and easier for customers to interact with us. Our plans are ambitious, and it won’t all be easy, but they will deliver a more sustainable DWP which is better equipped to improve opportunity and reduce poverty for millions of citizens for years to come.
Personally, it was climbing the St Bernard Pass on the Swiss-Italian border in October. This is a wonderful pilgrimage route in the summer, but my friend and I managed to time our visit after an unseasonal massive snowfall. Arriving at the monastery wearing our snowshoes, we surprised the staff who told us that everyone else had cancelled, and they had assumed our reservation was a mistake! Fortunately, we were well looked after.
What was the hardest part of being a leader in 2025?
Leading through sustained change and economic uncertainty. Not just for DWP, but across the civil service and for the millions of people we serve. The transformation ahead of us is significant, and the pace will be challenging at times.
What makes it manageable for me is remembering why we're doing this – the better outcomes we'll deliver for people across the country – and the extraordinary commitment I see from colleagues every single day. That sense of shared purpose, those core values we hold dear, that’s what carries us through. Leading alongside 90,000 dedicated colleagues who continue to deliver brilliantly for the public makes even the toughest days feel worthwhile.
What are the main challenges facing your department in the coming year?
During 2026 we have to be at our best simultaneously on several fronts – all of which are critically important in their own right. We must continue to implement the important ministerial priorities which put us at the heart of the government’s growth and opportunity missions. We need to accelerate organisation-wide transformation of our services, while delivering the vital day-to-day services our customers rely on, up and down the country.
The key to success will be evolving in step with what our customers actually need – doing this efficiently and sensitively, enabled by technology but ultimately powered by colleagues who understand our customers’ needs, and supported by partners within and beyond government. Get this right, and we will deliver tangible improvements for both the people we serve and our colleagues working right across the country. I'm genuinely excited about what lies ahead. This is change for the better, and I am confident we will deliver it.
Which celebrity or historical figure would you choose to turn on the Christmas lights in your town – and why?
Claudia Winkleman. We really enjoyed the way she brought drama and suspense to the Celebrity Traitors. There’s not a lot of drama and suspense to the Christmas lights in my hometown in Surrey!