Kate Owen explains what she’s learnt as Chief Executive of the Civil Service Commission
Good decision-making is critical to success in all organisations, be they government, corporate, third sector or in the wider public sector. Good decisions drive success – bad ones can have major long-term consequences.
There are many types of decisions – long-term, strategic, short-term commercial, ‘people’ decisions (such as who’s the best person for the job) and policy ones, to name but a few. But perhaps the trickiest for civil servants and anyone working elsewhere in the public service are those with an ethical dimension, when getting it wrong spreads distrust, disillusion or a lingering sense of injustice.
For the last three years, I’ve been Chief Executive of the Civil Service Commission, an independent body established by statute, responsible for regulating recruitment into the Civil Service to ensure that it takes place in a way that is fair, open and on merit, and that exits from the most senior levels of the Civil Service follow the Business Appointment Rules (BARs).
Last year we approved 457 appointments by exception, a legal mechanism that allows departments to make appointments outside normal ‘competition’ rules to meet, for example an urgent business requirement or a need for unusual skills. Examples have included astronauts for DSIT, Christmas elves for the Forestry Commission and AI specialists at the Artificial Intelligence Security Institute (AISI).
Over the last 12 months we also adjudicated 524 complaints under the Civil Service Code (acting as the appellate body for departments) and Recruitment Principles. Our Commissioners chaired 223 competitions to appoint the most senior civil servants, including the Permanent Secretaries for the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Justice. From October 2025, the Commission also assumed responsibility for advice given to the most senior civil servants and special advisers about roles they want to take up after leaving Government. Separately, my team also supports the independent Commissioner for Public Appointments regulating over 4000 public appointments made by Ministers – from the Chair of the BBC through to members of the British Wool Marketing Board.
The Civil Service Commission and the Commissioner for Public Appointments are therefore responsible for thousands of ethics-based decisions each year, supporting the integrity and effective operation of the Civil Service and the wider public’s perception of it. Some decisions attract considerable public scrutiny, others far less, but in all cases they rest on the merits and stated justification for the decision. How do we create the conditions for good decision-making of this kind – and what can others learn from this?
Acknowledge the reality of the world around
AISI approached us with a problem: hiring decisions for the world class AI specialists they need are typically made in a week, as opposed to the several months that are the norm in some parts of the Civil Service. If normal practices were applied then they would struggle to attract the talent the country urgently needs.
As a regulator, we balanced the government’s wider strategic objectives with the statutory remit we are charged with overseeing. We developed a new mechanism of ‘Class Approvals,’ which enables AISI within carefully defined boundaries and ‘guardrails’ to hire the people it needs within an expedited time frame. These are reviewed regularly to ensure compliance and foster the sharing of good practice but this has been an overwhelmingly positive innovation.
Constructive challenge
A strong culture of constructive challenge is critical in any decision-making body. At our meetings, I’d like to think an observer would not know who was the most senior person in the room, or the most junior. Typically, we identify the key points at the core of a case, establish the key decision framework and apply the facts to it. This might arise, for example, when we consider the conditions to apply to a former senior civil servant seeking advice on what they can do after they have left. We have to balance their right to seek employment with the need to ensure that the public has confidence that such employment is not a reward for decisions made in government. These are matters that can attract considerable emotion and require us to examine the core facts at the heart of a case to reach a clear, reasoned position. Where there are divergent views within our team, we try to unpick what’s behind that difference.
Differences in opinion tend to arise because of varying perspectives on the weighting of a particular element of a case. When this happens, we walk back the weighting process to reconsider it. We also ensure that decisions have at least two pairs of eyes to ensure that challenge is built in via multiple independent assessments (such as the red teaming approach recommended as part of the Chilcot Report). We use fair and open recruitment ourselves to ensure that our team has a diversity of backgrounds.
As a senior leader, I strongly believe that role-modelling constructive challenge is vital for healthy, open discussion. This means deliberately inviting people to find flaws in my own arguments whilst actively showing the team how to probe someone else’s logic without attacking their competence or integrity.
Pre- and post-mortems
In more project-based work, we carry out pre-mortems, which means fast forwarding to the end of a project to consider the ways in which things might go wrong. This allows us to mitigate issues before we start. This was particularly helpful when the Government announced the dissolution of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) in early summer 2025. ACOBA was required to consider its entire case load (which was at a historic high following the election in 2024) prior to its closure in October 2025 and transfer its functions to eight different organisations, one of them being the Civil Service Commission.
The speed with which we were required to execute the transfer of intricate and live-running functions carried acute reputational and operational risks. The pre-mortem, however, was helpful in identifying potential problems surrounding the transfer of staff to new teams, budgetary implications and the need to provide clear guidance to applicants with cases in the system. Addressing these challenges in advance gave us the confidence that we had considered the most pertinent issues.
We regularly review our decisions with ‘lesson learned’ exercises following major cases. These reflect on what went well, what could have been done differently and what organisationally we can improve on for the future. We also take particularly interesting cases to meetings of the whole team, which offers broader learning opportunities. For example, over the summer of 2025 we ran a complex inquiry into the appointment of the Independent Football Regulator which involved scrutinising decision-making by a cabinet minister and supporting an office holder to consider not just matters of fact, but also issues related to less easily defined questions of significance and proportionality. There were transferable lessons from this case relating to the running of investigations which were relevant to our teams assessing potential breaches of the Recruitment Principles and the BARs.
Communicating decisions
Making the right decision is one thing, but communicating the reason for it is an important part of engaging with those making complaints. Complainants need to understand clearly what lies behind a particular decision, such as why their application was not progressed to shortlist or that a reasonable adjustment request could not be accommodated. They also need to receive their decision in a timely way. We publish our performance against our service standards on a monthly basis. Those engaging with us should always know when they can expect to receive the outcome of a decision, and we train our staff to communicate in plain English. Not doing so undermines trust – in our case, public trust in the systems of government.
And what of AI?
Over the last two years we have examined and refreshed all our systems to optimise our use of AI. AI has been particularly helpful in speeding up the administrative side of our work and enabling us to check cases against our precedent bank in seconds rather than relying on institutional human memory. This makes decisions more predictable and more timely. Recent updates to the GDPR make clear that cases are ultimately decided by humans, but AI makes the preceding stages much quicker.
Ultimately, good decision-making is dependent upon creating the right environment and systems. By fostering constructive challenge, optimising modern technology and prioritising transparent communication, organisations can drive the high ethical standards which are integral to building and maintaining public trust.
Kate Owen is CEO of the Civil Service Commission. A solicitor by training, she has a Masters in Public Policy from Cambridge and has spent the last 12 years working in government as a civil servant.
