Public Accounts Commission
Oral evidence: Appointment of National Audit Office Board Member 2022
Tuesday 10 January 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 10 January 2023.
Members present: Mr Richard Bacon (Chair); Peter Grant; Dame Meg Hillier; Jerome Mayhew.
Questions 1-26
Witnesses
I: Dame Fiona Reynolds, Chair, National Audit Office, and Alistair Conner, Candidate for appointment to the NAO Board.
Witnesses: Dame Fiona Reynolds and Alistair Conner.
Q1 Chair: Welcome to this meeting of the Public Accounts Commission on Tuesday 10 January 2023. Happy new year to everyone. We are joined by Dame Fiona Reynolds, chair of the National Audit Office, and by Mr Alistair Conner, a candidate for the role of non-executive board member of the NAO. You are both very welcome. I will start with you, Dame Fiona. The recruitment that the NAO established was chaired by you. Can you briefly talk us through the process?
Dame Fiona Reynolds: Yes, indeed, and happy new year to all of you. It is lovely to be here. I am delighted to present Alistair to you. The process we followed was best practice in our field. We are not obliged to follow every detail of the public appointment process, but we do. We established a panel, including an external member, Cindy Butts, who was brilliant. I was chair of the panel, as you say. Dame Clare Tickell is another non-executive member of the board.
We defined our needs first of all. You will have seen from the information that we were very clear that we needed somebody with digital and business transformation experience. This is something we are dealing with repeatedly in our work, and we felt that the board would be enhanced by somebody with that experience, so we defined needs. Of course, the non-executive director also works across the whole of our work, so it is not somebody who is exclusively focused on that, but we were definitely looking for that area of expertise.
We then recruited our search partner, GatenbySanderson, with whom we have a contractual relationship. They conducted a wide search, advertised widely, talked to many people and came up with a really impressive longlist, then a shortlist. We interviewed before Christmas and unanimously and with great pleasure selected Alistair as our preferred candidate.
Q2 Chair: Why did you choose Mr Conner? What unique skills does he bring to the board?
Dame Fiona Reynolds: He certainly meets our No. 1 criterion, which is digital and business transformation experience. I will leave Alistair to talk to you about that. That is his experience and his area of expertise. In the interview process it became clear that he has a lot to offer besides that. He has wide experience from both his careers in the RAF and in the financial services sector. He is an interesting, well-read, articulate and engaging person. We were impressed by the way he answered our questions and by his absolute passion for public service, which came across very strongly indeed. That is why we recommended him to you.
Q3 Chair: What regard, if any, did you have to the overall diversity of the board, as well as the skills and experience?
Dame Fiona Reynolds: We had a great deal of attention focused on that. We asked GatenbySanderson to look particularly for candidates with a diverse background. A number came forward in the process and interview. At the end of the day, though, we were looking for the person who best met our criteria, and that, without any doubt at all, was Alistair. We still have a need to seek greater diversity, but we have other appointments to make in future and that will also be part of our process.
Chair: I am going to bring in Dame Meg Hillier, Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, who has to leave early for another meeting, so I will apologise on her behalf. We are very grateful that you are able to be here.
Q4 Dame Meg Hillier: Thank you, Chair. I will turn to Mr Conner himself to explain to us what motivated him to apply to be a board member of the NAO.
Alistair Conner: Thank you very much. Can I start by thanking you for coming this morning on my behalf? I appreciate it. I assume you have read my CV and my cover letter, so you will know my background. Initially, my aspirations when I left school were to join the military. I was temporarily thwarted by an inability to get into the Royal Air Force, but I soon sorted that out. I then spent approximately 15 years or so on the Tornado in various roles. It is quite a natural tendency to become quite ingrained in the idea of national service, obviously, when you are part of the military. It was with regret that I left when I was 34.
I moved to London and I joined a bank and spent the next 15 or so years working in the banking industry. It was very stimulating, but I always felt that I was missing that dimension of public service, and an ongoing contribution to the nation, so when I decided it was time to conclude my banking career, I decided I would try to come back to something that had more of a public dimension.
When I saw the National Audit Office opportunity arise, and then started to read into it—not just into the basic task of auditing that it fills, but also the much more diverse and interesting elements of value for money identification and holding the Government to account—I felt it was incredibly stimulating, actually, and very attractive.
The brief answer to your question is, simply as a component of public service, because I want to get back to that. At the same time, without becoming too broad in my answer, when you look at where we are in the country at the moment and what the challenges are that face us and what the external crises are that are affecting us, I don’t think there has ever been a more important time for us to scrutinise public expenditure and to make sure that it is done in the correct way, and I really want to be part of that.
Q5 Dame Meg Hillier: There are quite a lot of restrictions to being an NAO non-executive director. There are other bodies that you can’t then be part of.
Alistair Conner: I understand that.
Dame Meg Hillier: And the remuneration isn’t perhaps what you would want as a whole remuneration. Is this going to be your main public sector thing, or will you be looking at other portfolio roles to go alongside your role as a non-exec director of the NAO?
Alistair Conner: I am at the very beginning of what I hope will be a non-executive career—perhaps the third part to the three thirds of my career, if you like. I have done what I can to set myself up for this one. I studied with the Institute of Directors. I got a diploma in chartered directorship and am hopefully going to become a chartered director. I have done the training that I think I need to do.
I think becoming a non-executive director and developing a portfolio is not necessarily an opportunistic thing, but it does depend a lot on timing and also how you develop your skillset.
I am also sensitive to the fact that I have not been a non-executive director before. I have sat on boards in a variety of different capacities and am comfortable with the process, and I have had some great non-executive role models to work together with, but my approach at the moment is to take it as slowly as I need to in order to develop that skillset and do the best job that I can.
Q6 Dame Meg Hillier: As you say, you have had an interesting career in banking—I am looking at quite a lot of change processes. The National Audit Office is going through some change. It is quite a dynamic organisation. What do you think you can contribute to that discussion as a board member?
Alistair Conner: The obvious activity that is happening at the moment, which has a direct read-across with the day-to-day or year-to-year life in a bank, is the audit transformation programme, which has been in place for a short while. It is theoretically going to transform the way in which the National Audit Office works and bring it more into line with its peers in the private sector. It has recently transitioned in its status from red to amber/red. I think an experience of working in large-scale programmes of delivery and having that ongoing oversight of those is, in that dimension, probably the most important experience that I’ve got. That has been a characteristic of my life in banking for the last 15 years, on a pretty much continuous basis, whether that has been for commercial gains, whether it has been driven by regulatory change, and so on—those sorts of things. It is something that I am extremely familiar with; change is almost the normal, which is the cliché, of course; and it is something that I am enthusiastic and passionate about, and frankly just very interested in as well.
Q7 Jerome Mayhew: Mr Conner, looking at your CV, it stops in July 2021 when you left the Bank of Ireland. Can you explain to me what you have been doing in the last 18 months? Is it to develop a portfolio career? I just want to understand better where you are in your career.
Alistair Conner: Perhaps I can contextualise it with the whole of my career to start with. I left the Royal Air Force for a variety of personal reasons when I was 33 or 34. I took that decision because there was an opportunity to complete my commission at that stage. It was an unusual decision, which was not met by many of my colleagues, because it required stepping outside the military at a time when I was only at that age; I did not have immediate access to a pension or anything, which would have been the case if I had stayed on for another five years. But for me at the time, for, as I said, a variety of personal circumstances, it felt like the right thing to do, so I took that step without any—no, that’s not true—with an awareness of the risks I was taking on. I think it is important to note, though, that I took the step not knowing what was going to happen next.
Let me turn to the end of the Bank of Ireland job. The Bank of Ireland job was particularly interesting to me, because to an extent it was a skillset that I had not energised previously. I was invited to go and do it. It was an incredibly interesting job. It was an acquisition of an organisation into the Bank of Ireland. The information that I had to share, I think, was considered to be of value by that organisation. At that point, I felt that I was at a bit of a crossroads with what I wanted to do next. I enjoyed the giving of advice. I had enjoyed sitting on boards in various places. I was keen to get involved more perhaps in the governance of organisations, rather than the direct running of them. If you combine it with my answer to the earlier question about national service, it kind of makes sense that it would bring me here.
My preparation for non-executive roles, as I said, has involved doing a diploma with the Institute of Directors. That is something that I have been doing over that period. Also, my spouse happens to work in a large hospital trust in London. She is an A&E specialist there. She had a sabbatical while the pandemic was happening, and she then went back to work. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable balance for me to stay home and look after our three children while doing this qualification. The reason I mentioned the earlier decision about moving from the RAF into the civilian world was that I had no problem effectively replicating that step again. I am not sure what is going to happen—I will try my very best to achieve what I want to set out, and I will put all the building blocks in place to achieve it—but at the end of the day I am going to take that step and see how it turns out.
Q8 Jerome Mayhew: I will just pick up on a point that Dame Meg Hillier made. I am sure you are aware of the significant restrictions that being in this role place on your ability to develop a wider NED portfolio career. Are you fully cognisant of those restrictions? Is it something that you are nevertheless prepared to take on?
Alistair Conner: Yes, in summary. I have been briefed on that by the recruitment partner and the head of regulatory affairs at the National Audit Office. It is something of which I have been aware all the way through and with which I am very comfortable.
Q9 Jerome Mayhew: What about fit? I understand your motivation for coming to this place. We have all read your CV and there are some very interesting parts, particularly about IT programme transformation, but what do you bring to the party? What is your key skill that you will bring to the board?
Alistair Conner: Let me answer the question on a slightly more generic basis, before I talk about the specifics. If you look at the ongoing strategy that the NAO has at the moment, there was an update, with which I am sure you are familiar, that was written this year to say how far the strategy is progressing. The fifth point on that is to continue to develop skills for the NAO that are aligned with the Government’s skillset requirements. On those are listed business transformation, risk management, people management, digital awareness and overall business leadership. As I said a few moments ago, those are skills that have effectively been my pedigree, if you like, for the last 15 years.
Working in banking for the last 15 years, as I am sure you guys will all be aware, has been incredibly tough. There have been a lot of huge changes. Being in the thick of it—often at an operational level—those skillsets have been truly exercised. I would say that my greatest skill in circumstances like this is actually my passion and energy. I am very keen to get involved in these things and to make a contribution. Take the skills that I have developed underneath that; my role in banking for at least the last 10 years has involved leadership of large IT teams, and of correlation and collaboration with their output along with change management teams, which are subsequently aligned with the development of the business output of whatever the business is trying to achieve. That challenge in itself requires a great deal of passion and energy to be focused on it in order to make it successful. While you might say, “Hang on a minute, passion and energy are very generic skills that many people have”, I mean—in this environment—focusing on these skills that I think are incredibly valuable publicly, these days. I have demonstrated that I can focus what I have got and create the correct output.
Jerome Mayhew: There is a difference, of course, between an executive role and a non-executive role. Will you be able to resist the temptation to try to—
Chair: That was going to be my question! Rolling up your sleeves and getting involved—
Q10 Jerome Mayhew: You have got energy; you’ve done it before—“Get out of the way; I am coming in.” How are you going to restrain yourself?
Alistair Conner: I will not hide the fact that this was an opening question in my board interview. I think I stumbled through it by talking about my chief operating officer skillset. I will try again, actually, because I am not sure that I made the best job in that circumstance.
The point I was trying to make then was that in order to oversee and advise somebody on how to make progress and do a good job as a board member, my understanding is that you have to have sympathy and an understanding of the challenges that they face. Somebody who understands those things has the best opportunity to advise them appropriately and with credibility and direct them in the right direction. That is the point that I was trying to make.
All this operational experience that I have gives me a very good idea of how difficult it is to sit in a programme that is red rated, with a number of executives breathing down your neck, and take a step back and identify what the true critical path is in order to achieve success and move it back to green. I recognise very strongly that I am not here to roll my sleeves up per se—I recognise that. The awareness that that is not my role is probably my most important strength. As I said, I am trying to make progress here in my career, in as much as I want to take the skills that I have developed so far and make a contribution on an advisory and governance basis for the future.
Q11 Chair: I want to bring in Peter Grant, but I want to first follow up on Mr Mayhew’s question, because it was exactly the question that I was going to ask.
There are people inside the National Audit Office whose job is to deliver these sorts of management changes—the digital transformation and so on. How do you see your role working with them? How often will you be in the office each month? Is it like being a PhD mentor—will you be a sounding board that they can go to, then review what they have done 10 days later? Describe briefly how you think that is all going to work, if you are not rolling up your sleeves.
Alistair Conner: I think it has a lot to do with the circumstances of the subject at hand, the progress that is being made, the criticality of that progress and alignment with any commitments that have been made to make that progress.
In a situation where the world is green, progress is being made and we are on track to deliver, I would say that I would be able to regress to simply an oversight position, as with the rest of the board. If you start to get a situation where things are slipping, or where deadlines are missed or RAG statuses are changing, it is time to start to understand a little bit more.
I would hope that I would be able to invoke an approach that allowed people to—I mean, there is an obvious element here of people feeling comfortable opening up and sharing the challenges. That is a huge challenge with any form of business transformation or programme, or any large-scale programme where people have to feel comfortable admitting where the problems are so that you can get to resolve them.
In the past, I have done pretty well in developing and building trust with people who work with and alongside me, and people I work for as well, and I would not expect there to be any change in that at the moment. I would expect to be able to get people’s trust and to be able to have the information shared with me that I need in order to resolve the problem. It would be a variance of timing, criticality and progress.
Q12 Chair: Apart from the NAO’s board meetings themselves, chaired by Dame Fiona, how often would you expect to be in the office?
Dame Fiona Reynolds: I might chip in a little bit there. There is not a prescribed requirement; it is quite a fluid arrangement. It depends very much on the nature of the relationship on particular things. We have ensured that the ATP comes to the board and to every meeting—
Chair: Could you avoid three-letter acronyms, please?
Dame Fiona Reynolds: I’m so sorry—the audit transformation programme comes to the board every meeting—
Chair: It took me ages to work out that WM means wealth management, by the way.
Dame Fiona Reynolds: I apologise. Individual board members come in for committee meetings, which happen in between board meetings, and everyone is a member of at least one committee; but they also come in as required. I am in very regularly, but other members of the board come in as needed, and I imagine it is the same for Alistair. We are monitoring the audit transformation programme, as a board, very carefully, but I would expect Alistair to have conversations outside the meeting. It has, by the way, just moved to amber, so we are feeling much more confident about it.
I would add that the staff are incredibly open. There is no culture of hiding challenges and trying to pretend that things are better than they are. It is a very welcoming, open and honest culture surrounding this programme, and I am feeling much more confident about it than when I first came to this Committee—not because anything was necessarily going to go wrong but because, in one’s heart, one knows there is always a risk of these things going wrong. I think Alistair will find there is a very welcoming environment for his expertise, but he will not need to be there on a daily basis, because that is never required, nor is it the role.
Q13 Peter Grant: Good morning, Dame Fiona and Mr Conner. Mr Conner, you have described the kinds of roles that you have had in industry, primarily in IT and major transformation projects. Almost all of that has been in businesses that are involved in financial services in one way or another. Does that part of your career mean that you bring something additional to the NAO as well as your experience in business transformation? I suppose what I am asking is: do you bring something more than you would have done if you had had the same kind of career in the petrochemicals industry rather than financial services and banking? I am giving you the chance to big yourself up here, by the way.
Alistair Conner: I think a lot of what I am confident about having to offer is a consequence of having found myself in a variety of different organisations. You say that I have been primarily in financial services for the last few years, and that is of course accurate, but when I left the military, initially I wondered whether I might move into a formal, long-term, purely programme and project management role, so I undertook a PRINCE2 practitioner qualification and found myself working for a construction company called Mace. At the time, Mace had a contract with the Royal Bank of Scotland, which I found myself working on with virtually no experience. One of the challenges that I faced at that stage was—I probably should not go into too much detail, but the general principle was that there was a lack of collaboration, in one part or another, in the way that the organisations were all working together. There was the bank, there was Mace, and there was a whole variety of suppliers who were providing support. It was a national programme that we were working on, and in order to resolve some of this stuff, I identified the need to have a very simplistic KPI programme in place.
Chair: Which is?
Alistair Conner: A key performance indicator programme, which allowed everybody to share how the various suppliers were doing. This was entirely outside my comfort zone; it was not something that I had ever been familiar with, apart from the fact that my father was an electrician. I was outside the construction industry, but what I ended up putting in place was remarkably successful in bringing clarity to how all the different suppliers were working with each other, and to who had input into the outcome of the different projects that were done.
The point I am trying to make, Mr Grant, is that when faced with a situation that was not really linked to financial services at all, I still identified what turned out to be a really very successful digital solution—even if it was back in 2004 or 2005—that brought great clarity to the job that we were trying to do. While it was quite simplistic, it was successful. Sometimes I think that is often the key to successful digital projects, even nowadays: we try to do things that are overly complicated, rather than simply aiming for the simplicity that we really require.
Q14 Peter Grant: Thanks. You mentioned earlier that you have never been a non-executive director, but you have had roles where you were attending board meetings quite regularly. What do you see as the main differences in approach between being a non-exec director in the private sector and carrying out that role in the public sector?
Alistair Conner: It is aligned with the National Audit Office’s general objectives, strategy and mission. I think that a focus on the value for money and expenditure has to be slightly more prominent in the public sector than it is in the private sector. That said, I think many people would be surprised to experience just how carefully costs are managed in the private sector. Popular views would suggest that in banking that is not the case, but it really is. The justification and drive behind managing that value for money is just incrementally more significant in the public sector than it is in the private. Aside from that, I am not sure that there are too many different factors. I have just completed a diploma in directorship experience, and on the course I did and the case studies we studied there was a complete spectrum of opportunity to look at private companies and public companies. The rules, experiences and underlying principles that came out of those were almost entirely the same.
Q15 Peter Grant: What steps have you taken to ensure that your lack of experience in the public sector is not a disadvantage if you were to take up this appointment?
Alistair Conner: For a start, in the process I have spent a lot of time studying the NAO and what its priority and position in public life is. I mentioned earlier that my grounding in the Royal Air Force, which was a very formative time in my life, is unavoidably public service. While I certainly do not feel overly confident, I am comfortable that I have had a grounding in the principles of public life, or public service, in the military that was formative. I do not feel that I am as exposed as someone who may have spent their entire career in a series of private organisations, stepping into the public for the first time. I do not feel exposed to that level.
Q16 Chair: Thank you very much. You said several insightful things there. First, that people might be slightly surprised by how carefully costs are managed in the private sector. My own of experience of that, through meeting people who have worked for most of their lives in the private sector who have then gone into Government, is that is absolutely true. The other thing that is true is that the significance of doing that in the public sector is even greater, simply because of the scale of the challenge, the amount of money involved and the fact that it is not their money or just shareholders’ money, but public money, yet the pressure to do it is less. I think you will not find yourself lacking for examples of what you have just said.
The second thing you said that I thought was interesting was that people spend a lot of time often trying to overcomplicate things. During your term of office, if you are appointed, I would be surprised if you do not come across the phenomenon of people over complicating things because they are very clever. The civil service is full of very clever people, and it is their natural tendency to be drawn to complexity, like a moth to a flame. I think the NAO is less guilty of that than most, to be honest, because it sees the consequences of that more than anyone. How do you think the NAO’s profile is going to develop in the next few years? What do you think are the main risks and opportunities for the NAO itself?
Alistair Conner: Obviously, I considered that as part of the application process. If I look at what I consider to be the future of the NAO over the next few years, it is probably fair to split it into strategic and operational challenges—ones that are maybe two or three years down the line and ones that are imminent. The operational challenges are quite obvious: delivery of the audit transformation programme and ensuring that the delivery of the strategy continues to happen—some of the underlying components of those have been dealt with. Another challenge is ensuring a continuing response to the changing environment that we face at the moment. There is a huge amount of change in public life and, of course, part of the NAO’s role is to be responsive to what those changes are, rather than just have a clearly set-out plan for the next number of years, operationally.
Strategically, there is going to be a general election in the next couple of years, the outcome of which remains to be seen. That may or may not have some sort of impact on the challenge. Public life and life in general are becoming much more complex and so that is one of the challenges. It is almost in the line of the question that you have asked: how will the NAO continue to operate at a level of complexity where it adds value but where it does not get bogged down? If you start to look at the industrial revolutions and where we are going, people say we are out of the third one but I am not sure that we are, or that we started the fourth and the fifth one is just on the horizon. This level of developing complexity is something that will face all organisations, whether public or private. Strategically, that is probably the biggest challenge: that ability to meet complexity and to pitch the level where the contribution can still be made but without becoming bogged down.
Q17 Chair: Some of the complexity was forced upon the NAO as a result of taxpayers having to prop up the banks because they crashed the western world. They did not necessarily wish to start auditing complex financial products and derivatives, but they had no option but to do it. We have learned in recent Commission meetings that that has, to some extent, been a challenge. One, I think, that the NAO has largely overcome. What contribution do you think you might make in that area?
Alistair Conner: One of the roles that I have not had within banking has been the construction and direct sales of complex financial products, so that is not a skillset that I would necessarily have to offer or get involved in. My responsibility within banking has always been organisationally more broad, commercially or strategically. Frankly, in terms of the specific complex products question, I would not be involved in that. That said, I recognise the outstanding opportunity to improve the quality of some of the audits that are taking place. There have obviously been some conversations. I watched the video replay of your meeting of 6 December about specifically that topic, on how we conduct complex audits, where we have to rely on specialists in order to give us the right advice and in order to confirm that that specialist advice is, in fact, useful. Again, my contribution in that circumstance would be one of oversight and engagement as a standard non-executive, rather than anything in more depth.
Chair: It might be better for it. One is tempted to say that perhaps if others had not got involved in complex financial instruments, we might not have been landed with such a big bill.
Q18 Jerome Mayhew: We are in a difficult recruiting market at the moment and there is very significant wage inflation, particularly in the private sector—in fact, specifically in the private sector and not so much in the public sector, which is going to be a bit of a problem. There is limited political appetite for increasing public sector pay, yet the National Audit Office is competing in essentially a private market for recruitment. How do you think the NAO should handle this? Do you have any thoughts?
Alistair Conner: There are many components to the answer to that question. If you ask my general opinion about how we should deal with the current challenges we face—almost as a country rather than just the NAO—relating to external events that are driving inflation and so on, my personal opinion is that tending towards the one-off structure at the moment until we see inflation settle down again and we get a better understanding of what will happen over the coming years would be a good start. That is very much a personal opinion.
The audit industry in the UK is incredibly broad. There is a lot of talent out there and, as you say, it is very keenly sought after. Some of the components that have drawn me towards the NAO, the idea of a public or a national contribution, are for many people in this country something that is either explicit or implicit for them and it is at the back of their mind. In particular, when you see the country facing such large challenges, I don’t think it is too much of a stretch of the imagination to understand people wanting to make more of a contribution; and people, depending on what stage they are at in their career, will always trade off various components of the benefits they get for their work. If it is compensation and a feeling of self-worth and contribution, I don’t think it is impossible to persuade some people that now is the time when they might want to join an organisation that makes a national contribution, rather than one that simply pays them incredibly well as a partner, especially if, for example, they have worked in that industry all their life.
There is a large number of other opportunities. You could consider swapping people—doing exchanges—in order to give people a broader understanding. There is always the risk, of course, that you will lose some of your people in the NAO to, say, KPMG, EY or someone like that, but it might work in both directions.
Q19 Chair: It does. We visited the office in Newcastle a few months ago and we were told about a Pricewaterhouse partner who had joined the National Audit Office in the north-east after a career in the private sector, so it does happen.
Alistair Conner: That is definitely an opportunity. Of course, there are other ways to do this. You can “grow your own”. One of the things I did at one of the banks I worked in was start my own apprenticeship programme, because I felt that the candidates that we were bringing in were from an incredibly specific part of society. We started an apprenticeship programme, which won some awards, but what it also did was bring right to the front end of our bank people who would never have had the opportunity to work there. I know that many of those people have absolutely thrived. They have moved on to many other financial institutions and had a different approach to the opportunities given to them to work in the financial sector from that of people who simply drifted into it because that is what perhaps generations of their family had done.
There is a variety of ways you can deal with this. It will be a never-ending challenge, but to summarise, I think the most powerful component is the sense of national contribution. That is something that can really hook people—whether they are expecting it or not.
Dame Fiona Reynolds: You will be hearing more about this in our submission next time we come in front of you: this is a really live issue for us at the moment, as your question implies.
Q20 Peter Grant: I want to come back to you, Dame Fiona, and I should maybe remind you that we are technically in public just now, so your answers will be in the public domain. You may need to tailor them for that, but could you describe the process of due diligence you carried out to make sure that you know exactly what you are getting in Mr Conner?
Dame Fiona Reynolds: Yes. We have two elements to the process. The first is carried out by the search consultants, and the other is carried out at the point when you decide whether our candidate should be appointed; we have a further, final process. Essentially, it is a process of scrutiny of information about the candidate in the public domain, so we look at their employment record and we validate significant claims that are made, but we also look at social media profiles and other things. I can say that we have been fully satisfied in this case. Indeed, it is very unusual for us not to be fully satisfied.
Q21 Peter Grant: Thank you. To come back to Mr Conner, there can sometimes be perfectly valid reasons why people adopt either a social media presence or, sometimes, a print media presence under a different name. As I say, there can be perfectly valid reasons for that. Have you had occasion to do that at any time in your past?
Alistair Conner: No.
Q22 Peter Grant: So when Dame Fiona has had people looking at your social media profile, for example, it’s all there under “Alistair Conner” and not any other name?
Alistair Conner: Yes, it is.
Q23 Peter Grant: Are you able to give an assurance that there isn’t anything in your past that hasn’t come to light and that might give the NAO a problem if it came to light while you were in office?
Alistair Conner: There’s nothing in my past, no.
Q24 Chair: That actually deals with my next question, which was whether there was anything further in your background that we ought to be aware of.
Alistair Conner: No.
Q25 Chair: Do you have any interests that could give rise to a perception of a conflict?
Alistair Conner: Apart from the point I mentioned earlier about my spouse working in the NHS, no.
Q26 Chair: And are you comfortable with the time commitment for the role?
Alistair Conner: Yes, I am.
Chair: Thank you very much, Mr Conner; thank you very much, Dame Fiona. The Commission will now deliberate in private, but first I want to place on record our thanks to the previous non-executive director, Janet Eilbeck, who served for six years until her term was up last October. The Commission is very grateful to her for her work and her contribution. The Commission will now deliberate in private. Thank you.