Public Accounts Commission
Oral evidence: Re-appointment to NAO Board, HC 1539
Wednesday 3 December 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 3 December 2025.
Members present: Clive Efford (Chair); Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown; Chris Vince.
Questions 1-9
Witnesses
I: Dame Fiona Reynolds, Chair, National Audit Office; Alistair Conner, candidate for re-appointment.
Witnesses: Dame Fiona Reynolds and Alistair Conner.
Chair: Good morning and welcome. We are here to consider the re-appointment of Alistair Conner for a second term on the NAO board. Could you introduce yourselves for the record?
Dame Fiona Reynolds: I am Fiona Reynolds, the chair of the board.
Alistair Conner: I am Alistair Conner, the candidate for re-appointment.
Q1 Chair: I will kick off the questions. Dame Fiona, you are recommending Alistair Conner for re-appointment. In what way has Alistair contributed to the NAO board and helped to shape its work over the past three years?
Dame Fiona Reynolds: As I said when I saw you recently, we have an excellent board, and in Alistair we have someone who brings an original and different contribution. His experience both in the private sector and in the Army means that he has a different perspective on organisation performance and culture, which means that he contributes at every level to all board decisions. He also has a specialism—his knowledge of digital transformation. Frankly, on that he has added so much value that I do not know how we would have got through the last three years without him. He has been engaged with the senior staff and with the teams working both on our digital transformation, which you have heard about and which has been remarkably successful, and on the way in which we approach our assessment of Government digital transformation processes. I am delighted to recommend him. He is adding so much value and is a very valued member of the board.
Q2 Chair: In doing so, you have done an audit of skills on the board. Have you identified any gaps?
Dame Fiona Reynolds: The only gap that we have identified for the future is to ensure that we have the skills to deliver our new strategy, which focuses heavily on digital work and data, both within our own organisation and in our wider work. For me, that makes it even more vital that Alistair remains on the board and that we do not create a gap in that area.
Q3 Chair: Alistair, you are planning to serve for a further three years. What do you want to bring and achieve in that period?
Alistair Conner: Ultimately, I want to build on what we have achieved already. The last three years has been an enormously exciting period at the National Audit Office. We have identified a new strategy, we have replaced our platform and we have progressed the culture of the organisation. These jobs are not yet complete and, as a board, we have more to do. The embedding of the use of Apex across the organisation is obviously important, and that is not a job that happens overnight. There is also the delivery of the strategy and ensuring that all our colleagues are on board with that and that we achieve what we set out to achieve. Improved impact is a key priority for the board. Ultimately, it is to be part of that.
Dame Fiona brought me on to the board, as she has mentioned, not only as a board member, but as somebody with a specialisation in data and digital transformation. Perhaps for the last three years I have been something of an interpreter, because the challenges that we have faced and the technical side of that have to be understood by the board and conclusions reached about how we would deal with them and how we should advise the executive team and Gareth on the way forward.
Moving forward, the ideal would be to develop skills across the board and for me to contribute to educating my colleagues where possible. That includes the future non-executives that we bring on at the end of next year to replace Sir Martin Donnelly and Gaenor Bagley. I also have some form of digital skillset so that we do not have just one person with these sorts of skills. We have broadened that spread so that everybody is thinking in the same way.
Q4 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Good morning, Dame Fiona and Alistair. In a sense, I want to build on that last sentence or two of Alistair’s. Dame Fiona, you are the chairman of the board. You are responsible for assembling a team of non-execs with a mix of skills. You have recommended Alistair for re-appointment because he has IT skills, but he is indicating that the board may not have sufficient IT skills, even with his presence there. Is there a need for more horsepower in IT skills? And are there any other skills that you would like to see on the board?
Dame Fiona Reynolds: Thank you again for that question. We have a small non-executive team, smaller than many corporate or public sector bodies. At the moment we mix the characteristics that we need very well. We have a former permanent secretary. We have Gaenor, a specialist from the audit world in the private sector, and we have Alistair and Hetan Shah, who also comes from the public policy world.
We are all educating ourselves all the time about digital and data. I would certainly not claim to be an expert, but I have learned an enormous amount over the last three years, not least because, as a board, we have had reports on the audit quality transformation programme at every single meeting, and have had opportunities to engage with the staff to look at the technology and see it in use as board members to enhance our own understanding and ability to challenge and appropriately support the executives. So I think that, as the team earlier mentioned, it is a constant learning process. But there is no doubt in my mind that when we look for the new board members and indeed my own replacement, as you well know, we will be looking for people who are—if not experts—attuned, curious, wanting to learn and wanting to be engaged. Nobody today can say, “That’s not my bag. I am not going to engage in those conversations.”
Q5 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: You have sort of covered this, Chair, but I want to drill a bit more into it. Alistair, you are a mountaineer.
Alistair Conner: I am.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Presumably you have not reached the summit of your career yet. What more do you want to achieve on this board?
Alistair Conner: The National Audit Office is an extraordinary organisation, in my view. I feel incredibly privileged to be part of it. I am surrounded by people who are striving for excellence and are very competent. I want to feel at the end of it that I have made a significant contribution to that. As a consequence of that background, it is a big ask for me to deliver that. I think the pursuit of my continued excellent contribution, if I can achieve that, is the greatest ambition.
Q6 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Do you undergo continuous professional development? This IT field is moving so quickly. How do you keep up to date to advise the board?
Alistair Conner: That is a great question, actually. I continuously involve myself in new developments. I read all the time about what the progressions are in the industry. I attend conferences and review conferences that have happened to try to understand where things are going as well.
If you are talking specifically about data and the digital world, it is enormously expansive. One of the key skills is to retain a sense of proportion about the whole thing, as well as a grasp of what is genuinely achievable and what is overly aspirational at any given stage. At the moment, the tendency for organisations everywhere is to think that AI will solve every problem they have, when in fact solving problems often has a lot more to do with making sure that cultural structures, and the organisational structures that exist underneath them, are fit for purpose. As I have said, it is about a lot of education, self-education and a firm grasp of what is realistic.
Q7 Chris Vince: I was going to ask the classic interview question. Dame Fiona has rightly spoken about your IT skills, which are obviously really important, but is there anything that you think you could strengthen to better support the board? Do you have any, not weaknesses, but things to improve?
Alistair Conner: Um—
Chair: You could always say that you are perfect.
Alistair Conner: I am certainly not going to say that I am perfect, but I will say that I have a fairly significant drive to continue to build on what I have already contributed, and that is an ongoing process. If you had asked me whether I have achieved my ambitions for the first three years, my very first ambition would have been to be a useful and contributory member of the board for my esteemed colleagues, and to provide a role model for the rest of the organisation. I feel like I have done that, and I want to continue to improve that.
There are some other things. My remit is almost entirely focused internally on the development of the NAO, but of course the NAO has its own digital insight responsibilities, at which I think we are pretty successful. Those are led by an extremely competent team. I have quite a lot of involvement with them simply to understand what is happening in broader government. In addition, during the last three years, we have had a changeover of chief operating officers. I have had the opportunity to offer some support and critical friendship to the new chief operating officer to help her fit into her new role. Of course, I would expect that to be an ongoing thing.
Dame Fiona Reynolds: Let me add to that and spare Alistair’s blushes. It is important that we do not portray him as simply focusing on IT and digital. The strategy discussions are probably the most important discussions that have happened in my time on the board, and frankly I relished them. We have come out with an extraordinarily exciting and ambitious strategy. Alistair played a really full role in that process. There was no sense that he was confined to certain areas: his experience and understanding of organisational culture really added value to that strategy process. It is important not to label him as our IT person.
Q8 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Dame Fiona, given the importance of IT and its rapid development, is there a case for having some sort of subsection of the board—maybe a committee, maybe not—to save asking Alistair the question, so that he can engage with the specialists who are employed by the NAO to try to come up with a semblance of what the policy ought to be?
Dame Fiona Reynolds: We are thinking about that at the moment, for precisely the reasons you mention. Also, you will have seen that the two big levers for change in our strategy are quality, as you have been discussing this morning, and digital and data. We are looking at whether our governance and the way the committees work fully give the support that is needed.
You will shortly see an external review, which you commissioned, of our governance processes. That is one of the things that has emerged. We are yet to fully explore it, but we certainly will be looking at whether we have all the tools in our governance processes to tackle that. We have done everything at the main board, and for the duration of the quality programme, it was really important that the whole board engaged in that, but we will be looking at the future and seeing what we think we need.
Q9 Chair: I have one last question, Dame Fiona. You are proposing remuneration for non-executive board members of a non-pensionable fee of £20,000 per annum. How was this level of remuneration benchmarked?
Dame Fiona Reynolds: It was benchmarked through the traditional processes that we have used. I do not believe that those have changed. Frankly, for the time that our board members give, it is extraordinary value for money. If you would like a more detailed answer, I would have to write to you. All I know is that we have done the various processes, and the recommendation is in line both with previous offers and with the wider public sector.
Chair: Thank you for that answer. We will deliberate in private now; thank you for attending this morning and answering our questions.