Government has decided to axe the role of Whitehall-wide chief digital officer, with the duties of the role largely being taken on by the permanent secretary of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
The previous GCDO Joanna Davinson left government in September after completing a fixed-term nine-month contract. Given that she held the role on an interim basis – having been brought to oversee the establishment of the new and expanded Government Digital Service – ministers had indicated several months before her departure that a permanent digital chief would be recruited via an open competition.
However, by the time of her exit there was less clarity regarding government’s future digital leadership plans. It was understood at the time that oversight of the work of GDS and the civil service’s wider digital and data function was to be taken over by Emran Mian, the perm sec of DSIT – the tech unit’s home department.
Digital government minister Ian Murray has now confirmed that this will be a permanent arrangement.
During a recent appearance before MPs on the Public Accounts Committee, Murray was asked to provide an update on the intended timeline for hiring a new GCDO – only to respond: “As I understand it, there will not be one”.
“I think the decision was just taken that we were not planning to have a new CDO… [because] the transformation of the department and modernising government did not require us to have that,” he added. “GDS and DSIT are doing the work through the permanent secretary, and the permanent secretary is taking the lead on that. We thought it was far better for the department to take the lead than to have a CDO.”
When asked by the committee whether Mian – whose career has taken in a range of government and civil society leadership roles, covering policy areas including housing and education – possessed the right skills and experience to, effectively, replace the government chief digital officer, Murray suggested that there would be benefits to having a different kind of leader.
“It is also a governmental processes issue,” he said. “Keeping these issues at permanent secretary level is the way to get a cross-government approach to it. That is the decision that has been made.”
As well as Mian taking on direct oversight of GDS and digital government operations more widely, DSIT has also created two new tech-focused roles at director general level in recent months.
It was first announced that government was to create a cross-departmental role as overall chief digital and information officer in 2019 – an announcement which was followed by two failed attempts to recruit someone for the post. By the start of 2021, rather than launch an identical process for the third time, government decided to install then Home Office tech leader Davinson as executive head of the then newly established – and now defunct – Central Digital and Data Office, a role in which she held many of the same responsibilities as the planned GCDO.
A little over a year later, government did reopen applications for a cross-department digital head and, five months after that, former HMRC digital senior leader Mike Potter was appointed to the position of government chief digital officer. After two years in post – during much of which he was being treated for cancer – Potter left government in September 2024 to focus on his health and recovery.
In December of last year, Davison came out of retirement to take the digital top job on an interim basis. Her return to government came as the new Labour government implemented its revamp of GDS, which saw the unit being greatly expanded and moved from its long-term home of the Cabinet Office and into a newly established ‘digital centre’ of government in DSIT.