A welcome to the government finance function from Catherine Little CB - Transcript

My name's Cat Little and I am the Second Permanent Secretary here at the Treasury, but also the Head of the Government Finance Function.

The Government Finance Function is all about making sure we deliver value for money to the taxpayer for the £1.3 trillion that we spend on behalf of you, the citizen, every single year.

We also manage one of the largest balance sheets that's consolidated within the country.

As you can imagine, the whole of the state is a vast, complex set of assets and liabilities, and the finance function is exactly like any other finance function in any organization. It's just a lot bigger and it's much more varied.

The Government Finance Function is a very, very broad group of people from lots of different backgrounds with lots of different experiences.

We are a community that cares passionately about our work, and what you find is lots of viral engagement, lots of people wanting to seek out best practice, learn from each other and to together drive forward our strategy.

Strength in numbers for me is all about harnessing the potential of 10,000 people in our community, coming together, moving in the same direction.

You imagine 10,000 committed finance professionals driving forward our agenda to improve financial management and to deliver better value for the taxpayer. For me, that's really exciting and it's really exciting that our people are right at the forefront of how we do that.

I'm incredibly proud of what our teams do every single day.

So we're not just the people who are there to talk about the money, we're there to talk about how do we improve outcomes, how do we drive greater productivity and efficiency in what we do, and how do we transform the state to be a better place as a result.

We are doing great things every single day and quite often we're doing it as unsung heroes, quietly, professionally and diligently. And that makes me incredibly proud of the public service that our, our teams demonstrate.

So if you are interested and you want to give back to society, if you want to use your professional skills to drive genuine change in the way in which we run the state, then please don't hesitate to be curious, to take a look at the range of really exciting jobs that we've got within government finance.

I know 10 years ago I took a huge leap of faith and I jumped into the unknown and I've never looked back, and I would encourage you to do the same.