Commissioner for public appointments Sir William Shawcross is planning to step down from his role early, the Cabinet Office has informed MPs.
Shawcross, who turned 80 at the end of last month, had been due to serve in post until September but has decided to leave before then.
According to a letter from chief secretary to the prime minister Darren Jones – published by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee – prime minister Keir Starmer’s preferred candidate to succeed Shawcross is Fiona Cannon.
Cannon is currently chief strategy and sustainability officer at Yorkshire Building Society. She previously served as the sustainability lead for the Royal Household and prior to that was inclusion and diversity director at Lloyds Banking Group.
Her appointment as commissioner will be subject to a hearing in front of members of parliament’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. It is likely to take place before MPs break for summer recess on 16 July.
A recruitment campaign to find a successor for Shawcross ran between November last year and February this year.
According to Jones’ letter, 71 applications were received and four candidates were interviewed last month.
Although the letter to PACAC describes the appointment process for Shawcross’ successor as “ahead of schedule”, appointments overseen by the commission have not been made in a timely fashion in recent years.
The current Governance Code for Public Appointments says that chair-level roles are supposed to be finalised within four months of a competition closing. For appointments as a member of a public body, the timeframe for conclusion is supposed to be three months. The code states that a competition is considered to have “concluded” when an offer of appointment has been accepted.
Just 16.7% of public-appointments recruitment campaigns concluded within the target of three months in 2024-25, which is the latest year for which performance statisics are available. While the figure is an improvement on the 13% achieved in 2023-24, it is significantly down from the 50% recorded in 2019.
“Slow campaigns have a real impact on candidates and public bodies alike, seriously undermining the efficacy of government,” Shawcross noted in his annual report, which was published in December last year.
In January 2025, Shawcross observed that evidence from some departments suggested that the need to consult with No.10 on many appointments was a particular issue and could delay the process by several weeks.