Members of parliament’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee have endorsed Fiona Cannon as the new commissioner for public appointments.
Their decision follows a pre-appointment hearing with Cannon, who is currently chief strategy and sustainability officer at Yorkshire Building Society.
She is due to replace current commissioner Sir William Shawcross, who will step down from the role in July.
Despite giving Cannon their backing to succeed Shawcross, PACAC members used the formal report on her pre-appointment hearing to criticise the amount of time the hiring process has taken.
“It is disappointing that this appointment has taken almost seven months,” they said. “And the irony that the appointment process for the commissioner for public appointments has taken much longer that the expected four months is not lost on the committee.”
During his time in office, current commissioner Shawcross has repeatedly expressed concern about the impact of excessively long recruitment processes on public appointments.
“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.
The Governance Code for Public Appointments states 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 says a competition is considered to have “concluded” when an offer of appointment has been accepted.
Only 16.7% of member-level public-appointments recruitment campaigns concluded within the target of three months in 2024-25, which is the latest year for which statistics are available. Although the figure is an improvement on the 13% achieved in 2023-24, it is significantly down from the 50% recorded in 2019.
Nevertheless, PACAC members acknowledged that ministers had launched the recruitment campaign to find a public appointments commissioner “in good time” – and that Cannon had applied ahead of the deadline.
“It remains unclear why the deadline was extended,” they said. “While it may be necessary for deadlines on exceptional occasions to be extended, we urge the government not to make this a regular practice.”
Before joining Yorkshire Building Society, Cannon was sustainability lead for the Royal Household. Prior to that she was inclusion and diversity director at Lloyds Banking Group.
She plans to continue working for Yorkshire Building Society while serving as public appointments commissioner, but will “reduce her existing responsibilities and working days to give the commissioner role her full attention”.
At her pre-appointment hearing, Cannon said she also plans to remain as chair of the board of trustees of charity Surviving Economic Abuse – but will undertake all responsibilities in her own personal time.
Announcing Cannon as the government’s preferred candidate for public appointments commissioner earlier this month, chief secretary to the prime minister Darren Jones said she was an “excellent candidate” with a “wealth of experience” to offer.
“I am sure she will do a fantastic job driving confidence in the system,” he said.