The Cabinet Office has appointed a director from the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs as director general of civil service reform and efficiency.
Janet Hughes will move to the Cabinet Office from her current post as director of Defra's Future Farming and Countryside Programme in June.
She succeeds Elizabeth Perelman, who left government in March to lead former prime minister Rishi Sunak’s office. She spent only six months in the role, having been principal private secretary to Sunak throughout his premiership and briefly PPS to Keir Starmer during his first few months as PM.
Hughes has been at Defra since 2019, first as a portfolio director working on the department’s Brexit portfolio, including a stint as senior responsible owner no-deal readiness and border operations. She then had a short stint as delivery director, leading a team tasked with designing and delivering services to provide access to food for vulnerable people early in the Covid pandemic.
She moved to her current role, where she has overseen the introduction of the department's Environmental Land Management scheme, in 2020.
In a statement on social media, Hughes said she was “massively grateful to everyone I've had the pleasure of working with over the last five years and hugely proud of the progress we've made together”.
“I'm also really excited to have the chance to help make public policies and services work better at scale in my new role,” she said.
Hughes's civil service career has included a year as director of major projects and head of the project delivery profession at the Department for Education; and a number of positions at the Government Digital Service, including as programme director for identity assurance between 2015 and 2016. In this post, she sat on the spend controls board that assessed all IT and digital spending proposals on behalf of the Cabinet Office and the Treasury.
Writing for CSW in 2016, while at GDS, Hughes wrote about the need for civil servants to be "bold" as well as following the core civil service principles of being honest, impartial and objective and acting with integrity.
"I’ve always been drawn to boldness. I find boldness in others inspiring, infectious, empowering, creative and meaningful. I want to spend time around bold, honest, open people. I want to be inspired and empowered to boldness myself. I know I am at my best when I can feel the weird whoosh of terror and relief that comes from real, heartfelt boldness. And I don’t think you can lead a great team, or transform organisations or services without a healthy amount of boldness," she wrote.
Interviewed for CSW's Directors' Cut series in 2023, she said doing her Defra role required "the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Defra will appoint Hughes's successor at Defra “shortly”, she said.