'More responsibility, more accountability, but more control': What's it like leading a charity as a former civil servant?

Joanna Rowland wasn’t job hunting when she was approached by a recruiter about becoming the RSPCA’s next chief executive. At the time, she was director general for the Home Office’s Customer Service Group, overseeing 23,000 people working on visas, asylum and immigration, following multiple DG roles at HM Revenue and Customs.

“It was just one of those opportunities that came up and I couldn’t say no,” she says. Before becoming its new boss in December, she hadn’t been formally involved with the charity, although she had donated. And, she adds, “animals are never very far away from me. All my animals have been rescues”. (CSW is introduced to Charlie, a relaxed-looking black cat snoring at her side.)

Rowland says she did “a lot of soul searching” during the application process because taking the job would mean leaving the civil service earlier than she had planned. In particular, she would have liked to have seen through the Home Office’s plans to move asylum seekers out of hotels. “That said, as I got deeper into the process, the more excited I got at the prospect of running a charity. And I definitely sleep slightly easier at night not being in the throes of today’s politics.”

Rowland is one of a handful of people who have left the upper echelons of the civil service to lead a charity in recent months. So why is making the switch so attractive?

Michelle Dyson had been in the civil service for 27 years – the last five as a director general at the Department of Health and Social Care – before becoming chief executive of Alzheimer’s Society in November. She hadn’t been gunning for a perm sec role – “because you have less direct impact [than in some other roles] and that’s the thing that really motivates me”. She was DG for adult social care at the height of the Covid pandemic – an “absolutely awful” time during which she felt she was making a real difference. “So I was looking for another role like that in terms of that real impact.”

"One of the lovely things about going into the third sector and being a CEO, as opposed to a permanent secretary, is the much greater sense of having your own fate – and the fate of your organisation – fully in your hands" Shona Dunn, St John Ambulance

Dementia was an area where she could see this impact: “It’s one of the big problems of our time, I’ve got family experience of it and the sense that things are really moving now from a science perspective makes it quite exciting.” Since joining, Dyson has relished “deploying all the strategic skills” she honed in the civil service: “That’s what I feel I bring to the role.”

Rowland thinks DGs and perm secs make “very credible candidates” to lead charities. “Once you’ve done scale and complexity in government, you can do scale and complexity [anywhere]… and that complexity also is drawn from the fact that trust and reputation is everything.”

For Shona Dunn, who left her job as second perm sec at the Home Office for St John Ambulance in September 2024, scale and complexity were part of the appeal. She had always wanted to lead an organisation outside government and, in early 2024, with an election and her 55th birthday approaching, Dunn felt it was now or never.

“St John is a very, very old, really quite complicated and very large organisation, and post-Covid, it was in a tough spot and needed a bit of a reset. That was a really interesting prospect.” She says large charities are a “recognisable context” for senior civil servants “because you’re working with people who are clearly mission and purpose driven – but it’s a whole new set of relationships and dynamics to work within, and that’s just absolutely fascinating”.

For Dyson, the leap between sectors felt less jarring than she expected. While her career started in the private sector, she was a civil servant for nearly three decades – “so I thought I would feel very counter-cultural and they would find me really strange.

“It really has not felt like that. And my biggest reflection is that leadership is leadership, and so much feels familiar to me: the way in which I work with my executive team and reach out to an organisation of almost 2,000 people; the things that we talk about – risk, people issues, tech, performance.”

Another familiar part of the role is also one of her favourites: visiting service users. She says it has been “so instructive” joining dementia advisers on home visits, seeing firsthand how they support people and their families. “That has always meant so much to me, right from the beginning of my career,” she says.

Madeleine Durie is now in her second charity chief exec role since leaving the then-Department of Business, Innovation and Skills in 2012 for Minstead Trust, a small charity that supports people with learning disabilities. In 2021, she moved to the children and young people’s charity Youth Options.

She was a director when she left BIS – but machinery of government changes meant that to progress in the department, she would need to change policy areas. “There was a lot of discussion – as there is now – around the size of the civil service, and I felt it was time for me to make a positive move,” she says. “I wanted to have that same ethos that people have within the civil service, which is about your public duty and making a difference.”

She says her new workplace was a stark contrast to the civil service, largely because of its small scale. When she joined, it had around 35 staff and a turnover of about £1.5m. Teams shared email accounts, there was no proper HR system and while policies existed, they focused on service delivery rather than organisational structure. “So there was a whole load of change that needed to happen,” she says.

And there were none of the civil service’s clear hierarchies. Durie took over as chief exec from one of Minstead Trust’s founders and many of the staff “had grown into the roles because they happened to be in the right place at the right time”, she says. One early mistake she made was assuming she understood job titles she recognised – and only realising after six months that a “team leader” didn’t lead an entire team.

"My biggest reflection is that leadership is leadership, and so much feels familiar to me" Michelle Dyson, Alzheimers Society

And she no longer has such a wide range of experts to hand. Last year, she oversaw a £1m building refurbishment – “I’m not a facilities expert, but there isn’t anyone else in the organisation who is” – and lately she has been setting Youth Options’ hybrid working policy. “You have to be prepared to put your hand to anything and do the best you can with the skills and experience you and the rest of your team have got,” she says.

Even much larger charities can be a culture shock. “I thought that a charity would be more similar to the civil service than it turned out to be,” says Clare Moriarty, who became chief exec of Citizens Advice in 2021. She had spent her last year in government leading the Brexit department (her second perm sec role after four years leading the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), leaving when DExEU closed in 2020.

While there were some “quite fundamental” similarities – she names complexity, people and purpose – she says “you have to be up for a big unlearning and relearning, and a lot of repeated humility… you can’t just come in and say, ‘Well, this is how we used to do things in the civil service, let’s do it like that,’ because the cultures are very different.”

For one, Citizens Advice is a federated charity: the organisation Moriarty runs is the membership body for around 235 local branches, each with its own trustees and strategy. “We don’t have the power to direct them; we provide a lot of the infrastructure and we set direction,” she says.

And if there’s one thing Moriarty misses from her civil service days, it’s “the quality of work that people produce and the smoothness with which things happen”. Like all the chief execs CSW has interviewed, Moriarty speaks glowingly of the staff and volunteers she works with – praising their dedication, innovation and tenacity. But, she adds: “There’s a kind of rigour that you do in the civil service without noticing. And the quality of process, business planning, risk management and performance management are just baked into how the system works.”

She recalls Keir Starmer telling the Liaison Committee last year that he was “frustrated” with the time it takes between “pulling a lever” in government and delivery. “But in my experience,” she says, “if you pull the levers in a government department, stuff does happen, because of the political environment and the imperative and just the way that the civil service works; whereas within a charity, partly because you don’t have the same number of people at the same level of seniority, and you tend to be very strapped for resources, [it might not].”

Moriarty also found herself facing a new and difficult level of financial precarity. “Sitting in the civil service, I thought we were terribly short of money,” she says. “It was only when I came to the charity sector that I realised what it really means to be very short of money.”

Dunn faced a similar wakeup call. “The civil service is a very cash-constrained environment. But if there is a clear and pretty unarguable business case for investing in core systems that will make a difference to the long-term effectiveness of the department or the services it’s trying to deliver, as a permanent secretary, I would have always argued very strongly for prioritising the investment... You don’t always have that luxury in the third sector,” she says. “It is a much more precarious existence. The margins of error are much, much smaller.”

"Sitting in the civil service, I thought we were terribly short of money. It was only when I came to the charity sector that I realised what it really means to be very short of money" Clare Moriarty, Citizens Advice

But “operating always at the margins of doability” means charities are often “much more viscerally commercial than you might think”, Dunn adds. Most of St John’s funding comes from its commercial workplace training, “so if the market changes on commercial workplace training, we have to change with it – or we have to change ahead of it, ideally – because otherwise we won’t continue to succeed”, she explains.

Funding for many charities is complex and short-term. Citizens Advice gets most of its money via local and national government and other charities: “You can go through entire commissioning cycles for just one year’s worth of funding. You have to upend your business model,” Moriarty says. And because a lot of this funding is tied to specific grants or projects, there is very little flexibility to move resources around. “So you can have a really good conversation, everyone can agree that something is a big priority… but a combination of the culture and the sheer availability of resources means that it doesn’t quite happen.”

Charities like the RSPCA present another challenge: fundraising. “That’s a real art,” Rowland says. “People can be hugely brand aware, really bought into your cause. But translating that into a motivation to actually donate… I’ve loved learning about that.”

However, she draws a parallel with her work on customer experience and digital transformation at HMRC, where she was considering people’s motivations to get their taxes right and how to design services to encourage them to do so. “In fundraising, it’s very similar. What makes somebody a lifelong supporter of the RSPCA? It draws on the same skills and insight techniques.”

The last few years have been especially tough for charities as costs have risen. “It’s not just about maintaining your funding levels,” Rowland says. “You’ve got to get them higher or you have to cut expenditure.” But it’s “exactly that challenge” that drew her to the job: “It doesn’t mean I’m not apprehensive about it… you take a deep breath facing into those challenges. But I wouldn’t have wanted a nice, easy ride.”

All the interviewees CSW spoke to said that while they loved their civil service careers, having more agency has been a welcome change. “One of the lovely things about going into the third sector and being a CEO, as opposed to a permanent secretary, is the much greater sense of having your own fate – and the fate of your organisation – fully in your hands,” Dunn says.

Becoming a chief exec means “you’ve got more responsibility, more accountability, but more control”, Rowland says. “In the civil service, you are responsible for some of it, never all of it – especially in the bigger departments. And even if you’re perm sec of a smaller department, there’s still No.10 controlling your grid slots, or the Cabinet Office telling you how you can recruit and how much you can pay people… Sometimes, as a very senior civil servant, all of that can be quite difficult to navigate.”

Dyson shares a recent anecdote in which she wanted some analysis done, so she commissioned it. Alzheimer’s Society then published it and promoted it in the media. “It just felt so easy,” she says.

The job I now do is probably harder than anything I did in the civil service, and I had quite an array of quite hard jobs" Clare Moriarty, Citizens Advice

With greater agency comes fewer constraints on what chief execs can say publicly, now they are not beholden to ministers. “You have your own voice, which is really rather nice,” Moriarty says. In particular, being able to speak out on problems that stem from the implementation of government policies, share what Citizens Advice is seeing on the ground and suggest solutions “is quite liberating”.

This can take some getting used to, however. “The two things you never, ever do as a civil servant are media and going to party conferences. Quite quickly after arriving here, I found I needed to do both of those things,” Moriarty says. “Doing media still makes me slightly nervous. But it’s about the opportunity to articulate what’s important.”

Likewise, Rowland says that while it’s “refreshing” to have her own voice, she’s “having to grow into” it. And she is aware that she must still be thoughtful about how she expresses herself, “especially at a mainstream charity that is, I like to think, a bit of a national treasure… you cannot afford to alienate a certain amount of your support base”.

And there are new governance structures to navigate. Governance of UK charities is entirely non executive, while chief execs advise the board. The chief exec-trustee relationship is “very different from the civil servant-secretary of state relationship, or even civil service NEDs”, Rowland says. “It’s got different rules of engagement and when that runs really well, it bodes well for the success of the charity. So you’ve got to get that right.” That means giving the board all the information they need to make decisions in a way that makes good use of their time (trustees must be volunteers) and doesn’t overload them with unnecessary operational detail – “because that’s my job”, Rowland says.

When CSW asks what other advice the charity chiefs would give senior civil servants considering a similar career move, a clear theme emerges: don’t think it’s an easy job. “I do think they’ve got to be passionate about the cause that they’re joining,” Rowland says. “People have asked, ‘Is it about taking a step back from some of the ferocity of the civil service and central government?’ But these are not easy rides. These are big organisations, they’re very complex and it is a full-on job. It’s not a sunsetting job either.”

Moriarty agrees: “The job I now do is probably harder than anything I did in the civil service, and I had quite an array of quite hard jobs.” When people tell her they want to move to the charity sector to “make things happen”, she warns them it’s a trade-off. While having the freedom to speak up is refreshing, she says “sitting outside when you have been accustomed to sitting inside the tent” can feel hard. “Some of the time, you get amazing hits and policy is actually changed for the better – but you can have absolutely all of the right answers and all of the evidence and all of the sophisticated techniques and actually, if the policy is not for turning, the policy won’t be turned... it’s tiring.”

Despite these warnings, the move comes highly recommended. “What I’m getting in abundance is loads of energy from that real sense of purpose,” Rowland says.

Ultimately, Dunn says, anyone thinking of applying to a top charity job should make sure it’s the right time for them to make the move: “Don’t leave thinking you’ve got some unfinished business – and run towards something rather than away.

“But if the time is right for you and you are looking for that kind of new challenge, I would absolutely recommend going into the third sector… It’s hugely rewarding, exciting, interesting, different and if you’re ready for a change, it’s a great one to make.”