Dame Helen Ghosh, a former permanent secretary at the Home Office and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has been named as the preferred candidate to become the next chair of the Office for Environmental Protection.
Ghosh spent six years as director general of the National Trust before becoming the first female master of Oxford University’s Balliol College in 2018. Her term as master will end in July. In this role, she has held a number of senior governance roles and chaired the university’s Conference of Colleges.
She previously had a long-running civil service career that began in 1979 as an administration trainee at the then-Department for Environment. She worked in several departments, including the Department for Work and Pensions and the Cabinet Office, where she spent two years as head of the Central Secretariat.
Ghosh was appointed as director general for corporate services at HM Revenue and Customs in 2003 before taking on Defra’s top job in 2005 – at which point she was the only woman to be leading a major department. She became Home Office perm sec in 2011.
Ghosh has also had a “wealth of experience” as a non-executive, according to Defra, including seven years as a trustee on the Board of Action for Conservation.
She has been a vocal advocate for female leaders in government, telling CSW in 2016 that the civil service had lost an entire “generation” of female talent. She described a fall in the number of female perm secs from eight in 2009 to three in 2016 as “very disappointing” and suggested it could be partly due to a failure to promote women to senior roles at the Treasury.
Speaking a decade before Dame Antonia Romeo’s appointment as cabinet secretary, Ghosh said: "The relationship between No.10 and the Treasury is such an absolutely important one that any prime minister is going to look for that kind of connection in their choice. Until you get more women at the Treasury at senior positions, it will be a rare woman who could get to be the cabinet secretary.”
If she is appointed, Ghosh will succeed former HM inspector of probation and Ofqual chief executive Dame Glenys Stacey, who has chaired the environmental regulator since 2021, on 1 June.
When she announced that she would not seek reappointment at the end of her five-year term last May, Stacey said she had found the job “stimulating and extremely worthwhile”.
“I have hugely enjoyed being the inaugural chair of the Office of Environmental Protection, and I am proud of the organisation. I think it is well-established and already having notable impact. It is set fair,” she said.
Environment secretary Emma Reynolds and Northern Ireland agriculture, environment and rural affairs minister Andrew Muir put Ghosh’s name forward after a “rigorous process” conducted in accordance with the Governance Code on Public Appointments, Defra said.
The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee and the Environmental Audit Committee will hold a joint pre-appointment hearing and to report on Ghosh’s suitability for the post.