Senior Profiles

Director General Finance – Department for Constitutional Affairs

The Department for Constiutional Affairs is responsible in government for upholding justice, rights and democracy. Since its formation in June 2003, the DCA’s objectives continue to focus around providing effective and accessible justice for all, ensuring people’s rights and responsibilities and enhancing democratic freedoms by modernising law and the constitution. The DCA is a CIMA Training Quality Partner.

You wouldn’t think it to look at her, but Barbara Moorhouse has something in common with Tony Blair. An unfulfilled wish to be a rock star? A mutual friend or a shared birthday, perhaps? Wrong. Both her and the prime minister have been booed by the Women’s Institute. While working for South West Water she was asked to present to a WI meeting, expecting 20 or 30 people in the room.

However, it transpired that they’d hired a holiday park in Cornwall, and instead of 30 she was faced with over 1,000. The boos came as she walked to the platform, as at the time, being a director of South West Water in that area was, to put it mildly, unpopular. But unlike Mr Blair, Moorhouse rallied and left the platform to a round of applause.

Early stages of her career

Barbara Moorhouse joined the Department for Constitutional Affairs in March 2005 as director general finance, with a CV as long as it is varied. She read politics, philosophy and economics at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. It was at this point she decided she wanted a career in ‘business’, although she had no real idea exactly what that meant to her. ‘So I looked at all kinds of things, sales and marketing, personnel, operations – you name it, I looked into it,’ she says.

She ended up in finance, though by her own admission this was more by default than design. However, it paid off, and appears to be a road Moorhouse has never regretted travelling down. Beginning her working life in one of the ‘great UK conglomerates, as they were in those days’, she moved up through a succession of standard UK-based blue chip companies, including Northern Foods and Courthaulds. It was a classic finance route, though wide-ranging, as she held a variety of commercial and strategic roles mixed in with finance.

Moving to South West Water

The next step was to South West Water in 1990. ‘I joined the water industry just after privatisation,’ Moorhouse explains. “Initially, I held a strategy role, then I took up the regulatory director post. It’s the most boring job title I’ve ever had, and one of the most interesting jobs I’ve ever had,’ she laughs.

‘The water industry was having to change dramatically to cope with the post-privatisation environment,’ she says. ‘All of a sudden, they had to talk to their customers, and the press and media had to be considered. I did huge amounts of things like radio phone-ins, standing on corners handing out leaflets, public meetings, and going to protest meetings about sewage treatment works. This was the job that got me into real contact with public delivery.

‘But what I loved about it was that I was doing a job that was very interesting from a business point of view, because that business was having to change, and cope with new pressures and demands. What we were doing was so central to a lot of people’s lives. And these were for good reasons, such as sorting out problems such as damaged water pipes, and cleaning up beaches, and also for bad reasons, in that people all had a view about a price rise, why the improvement programme wasn’t coming to their area first, and so on.’

So did this give her a good grounding for her eventual move to the public sector?

‘Yes, a lot of issues that are relevant to the way the public sector has to look at things were there in the water industry,’ she agrees. ‘And I loved it. It was fascinating and I learnt an enormous amount. I’d spend one day discussing obscure financial arrangements with Ofwat, and then I’d be debating with a group of people about why the clean-up operation in their area wasn’t happening faster. It was a real mix.’

A varied employment background

Moorhouse felt it was time to move on after five rewarding years, and made the move from the south west of England ‘back into the mainstream’, as she puts it. She worked for a period in facilities management, then took up her first group finance director role with a construction company, before spending 18 months as an interim manager. She worked first in IT, in financial services, then in telecoms, and finally settled in a day nursery company called Jigsaw.

‘These roles were obviously very diverse,’ says Moorhouse. ‘The financial services role was all glamour and expensive board meetings, the telecoms part was more geared towards technology and the day care nursery was geared towards people whose primary interest was childcare.’ Here again are the seeds that would grow into her eventual move to the public sector. ‘If you talked about money in Jigsaw, this was regarded as a dirty word. What could possibly be more important than the education and protection of children? But of course the truth is that high-quality nursery care is very challenging to provide, because parents can’t afford high fees or at least large numbers of them can’t.

So the real challenge is in some ways parallel to the public sector – how do you provide a quality public service to an acceptable standard, when you can’t gold plate it, because if you do, nobody can afford it.

‘I had to build financial awareness in a way that you wouldn’t have to in a normal commercial company, where you can assume that people will understand the profit motive and why you need to keep costs under control.’ This explains why she found herself sitting on small children’s chairs eating homemade flapjacks, trying to explain to nursery care managers why costs mattered. But you get a feeling she took it all in her stride. Moorhouse seems to be one of those people to be envied, who will swim to the surface no matter what kind of deep end she’s thrown in. This could in part be due to the fact that she has worked in such a variety of roles and sectors that nothing fazes her anymore.

Her last but one post before joining the Department for Constitutional Affairs in March 2005 started off with a trademark change of scene for her, from nursery chairs to board meetings in Cannes. As group finance director for Kewill Systems she enjoyed the glamour of working within the burgeoning technology industry of the early ‘noughties’. ‘The company was just outside the FTSE, it was £33 a share,’ she says, somewhat misty-eyed.

‘A very racy valuation, but it was in the supply chain, and logistics, which was all very sexy, and it was in IT – which was the big thing. At the time it was everything I wanted. International conferences, investor relations meetings, tons of mergers and acquisitions and the like, we were right in the middle of the tech boom. It was tremendous fun,’ she says. But they were hit, like everyone else, by the downturn in 2001; the glamour came to an end, and Moorhouse’s role transformed to that of cost-cutter, and the job of preventing the company going bankrupt. And, of course, she succeeded, moving on to become CFO of Scala Business Solutions, another IT company, which she left in 2005 to take up her post with the DCA.

Although this may seem like a leap in a strange direction, from 2002 Moorhouse had accepted the role of non-executive director of the Child Support Agency (a tenure which came to an end in January 2005), which was her first foray into the public sector. ‘If I hadn’t taken that on and started to make contacts in the public sector, I doubt I would have joined the DCA as I wouldn’t have known what to expect,’ she says.

When asked what she thinks she’s achieved in this role, Moorhouse cites the improved quality of the financial management team within the DCA. ‘We’ve made a series of changes to people, we have strengthened the leadership, in the overall sense – not just me – around the finance team, and I think we’ re developing a much clearer view about what finance is there to do, and what kind of skills it needs. And we’ve started to develop a lot more confidence around the finance team.’

‘The first key thing is to invest in people in the sense of building a vision of what you’re there to do. Making sure the organisation understands what it has to do and to deliver, re-skilling, and providing stronger leadership and management direction around the finance function. These are important issues since we’ve faced some enormous financial challenges, such as the legal aid bill becoming a pressing problem for various reasons. We now have a series of reviews under way, which will hopefully provide us with a means and mechanisms to bring that back under control,’ she says.

‘This in turn means that we face enormous change programmes that will impact both on us as a department, and also the wider legal profession and the way in which we work together. I want to make sure that finance’s position is strong in making those reforms.’

So almost a year after she started, how does this role feel for Moorhouse? ‘In any new job, you find things you didn’t expect. In this case it’s been a slow procession of skeletons coming out of the cupboard – one a month, almost.’ But as is her style, Moorhouse is already making her way upstream through the problems. ‘It’s been stressful, but it feels better now,’ she smiles.

This article appeared on the CIMA's website.

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