A chance to welcome in-person and digital attendees to the event, highlight some of the exciting sessions lined up over the two days, and introduce the refreshed GFF Strategy 2022-25.  

This panel discussion, followed by a Q&A, will focus on why good finance matters even more than ever in the current fiscal environment. It will highlight the critical role finance plays in strengthening public trust and its importance to parliament, particularly in supporting transparency and accountability.  

This session will focus on the strides made across the GFF in promoting and embedding greater diversity of backgrounds, experience, and perspectives. It will look at the impact of the GFF’s Diversity, Inclusion & Wellbeing strategy and highlight future initiatives and plans that will build on this. We will hear personal experiences from senior finance leaders and learn about some of the changes that they are seeing in their own organisations. 

Grab some lunch, watch a live stream from a hybrid room in one of our Zones, chat with our event sponsors and visit the GFF hub in the community square to find out more about what we do and how we do it.

Trust in public institutions is declining, raising critical questions about our ability to tackle society's most important challenges. People want a sense of purpose and community again. But how does government, business and society work together to achieve this? This sets the stage for our workshop, where we consider how as finance professionals you have a role to play in building trust; trust within your own teams and how you collaborate with others.

In this interactive session, we’ll bring to life the importance of trust as the basis for authentic leadership and provide you with tips and techniques on how to measure and build trust. You’ll learn why trust is important, what happens when it’s not there and how you can learn to build better human connections.

Successive high impact events in recent years has underlined the importance of risk management in financial, planning and performance management. 

Join the Risk Centre of Excellence and the new Head of the Government Risk Profession for an introduction to their Risk Management Strategy & Delivery Plan to improve risk management across government, following lessons learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic and in line with key recommendations from the Boardman and Maude reviews.  

The Strategy sets out how the government is working to improve risk management, recognising that effective and meaningful risk management should be an integral part of informed decision-making, from policy or project inception through implementation to the everyday delivery of public services, as well as being fundamental to effective preparations for, and responses to, crises.  

A chance to learn more about the work of the Risk Centre of Excellence, how the Strategy will be implemented over the next three years, and hear real-life case studies of how this works in practice.

A panel discussion, with Laura Bates, Fiona Edwards, and Peninah Achieng-Kindberg, on gender equality, individuals’ experiences of inequality and what can be done to improve upon it in the Civil Service. All genders encouraged to attend.

This event hosts speakers both internally and externally to the Civil Service to ask for their expert opinions on gender equality and its effects in the workplace today. We will invite the panellists to explain their passion for the subject, opening to questions from the audience later in the session. This allows for a more targeted approach to a discussion in a very broad topic of conversation. 

This will be a hybrid event, allowing for multiple people to get involved in a way that is most convenient for them. A Sli.do link will be shared with all those who have signed up to this event prior to the start date for individuals to submit their questions. This event is open to individuals of all backgrounds and we encourage those of all genders to attend and be a part of this conversation.

In a world that expects that public sector departments become more agile and responsive to ever increasing demand, it is no longer practical to rely on legacy systems and processes.

Creating transparent, streamlined processes better aligns central and local government priorities. This, in turn, allows for enhanced management of risk and change, collaboration between users and ultimately leading to improved performance, lower costs and the creation of more efficient, effective, user-friendly and continuously improving governments of the future.

This one on one discussion between Cat Little, Head of the GFF and Director General Public Spending HM Treasury and Dame Meg Hillier, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, will focus on how the finance profession can be as effective and efficient as possible. The interview-style session will look at the important role that finance teams have played in recent years and highlight best practice examples that will demonstrate the benefits of prioritising delivery in complex environments.

Hunter Healthcare interviews Hamza Yusuf, Strategic Finance Director of UKHSA, on his reflections on the challenge of having to rapidly build a new Finance team to support the nation’s response to COVID-19.

• Adopt or adapt approach
• Your data migration strategy and data archiving
• How will you optimize the solution to suit your business processes?
• What options are there for touchpoints with third-party solutions to suit your needs?
• Where are the areas of flexibility?
• What does good look like?

The Women in Finance Network will bring to light the experiences faced by our panel, from overcoming bias, working flexibly and career experiences both in and emerging from the pandemic. 

The purpose of the WiF network is to help women in finance realise their full potential while supporting them to be their authentic selves. 

All are welcome to this session 

The new Civil Service D&I strategy mentions the ‘Navigating the Labyrinth’ report and expands on a previous focus on Protected Characteristics to deliver for all of our people by incorporating a broader definition of diversity (such as socioeconomic, work experience and geographical backgrounds). 

In this interactive session we will explore Social Mobility within the Civil Service and the Government Finance Function (GFF): 
 

• How can we define Social Mobility? How do we measure it? Why is it important? 
• How does Socio-economic background affect career progression within the Civil Service and within the GFF? 
• How can we advance and champion Social Mobility across the function to create a more diverse and inclusive workforce? 
• What are the key challenges, actions, and measurements of success that you would expect from a GFF-wide Social Mobility Group? 
• This session is a precursor to wider engagement across the GFF to see if a Social Mobility Group can be established, to advance and champion Social Mobility across the function. 

Since 2020, as a result of some great collaboration with Defra, DWP and Home Office, via a Task and Finish Group led by the Ministry of Justice, we have developed a Management Accounting Handbook. The session will publicise the Handbook by:  
 

• Helping management accountants, at whatever stage in their career, to understand the key skills and qualities needed to achieve excellence in management accounting.
• Setting out the invaluable role that management accounting plays in working with other areas of finance and supporting the wider business through insight, analysis and story-telling.
• Emphasising the importance of the partnership between management accountants and finance business partners.  

The session seeks to really emphasise the key role of the management accountant as the heartbeat of a department’s finance function.  Attendees who already work in this area or want to know more will hear from management accountant colleagues within the Function and learn how they can shape their careers in this job family. 

The session will also launch the new Management Accounting Network – a great opportunity for management accountants to come together, understand and share best practice and help to shape the future activities and direction of the Network.

Dr Iain McGregor leads Innovation and Development at the GIAA. In this session, he will share how he has enabled the GIAA to develop and embed new ideas by using the principles of great product design and his engineer’s approach to problem solving.

To explain his philosophy of innovation, Dr Iain McGregor draws on specific examples from his diverse career to demonstrate a three-step approach to innovation that: 
Identifies the areas where innovation is required and will make the biggest impact, 
Uses your organisation to develop innovative solutions as an ‘intelligent customer’, and embeds these innovations across your organisation. 

With some unexpected examples of successful innovation, including developing a train toilet that prevents engineering failure, and producing cars through adhesive bonding, he explores how his unique approach has the potential to identify highly targeted interventions. This is a practical approach that emphasises the need to create a learning environment, the importance of ‘continually making mistakes’ and understanding that the final critical step of embedding innovative solutions in an organisation can often take as long as the first two steps combined.  

In Iain’s session, with his colleague Nicola Osinaike, you will learn how innovation transitions from a ‘new way of working’ to simply becoming ‘the way we do things here’ and, when reaching this point, the importance of continuing the innovation process. Opportunities to innovate don’t stop and neither should we!

This presentation will be followed by a Q&A session.

As Public Sector organisations look to transform their finance functions, what should that new North Star be for the finance function of the future?  Are we transforming to a new fixed state or a more agile structure that can adapt more easily as external changes impact our organisations.  On that journey, what are the hyped new approaches and technologies that will help and which ones will fade as we understand that they do not deliver the value that was promised? SAP will bring its expertise from all sectors to give a sharp definition of what to consider as you define your future finance function. 

With ESG now at the top of the agenda for many organisations, CFOs see the climate transition as one of the great challenges and biggest opportunities facing their organisation. In this session, we explore how Finance can power change, make decisions and maintain control in the face of changing regulation and increased expectations.

The session will cover what is Neruodiversity as a whole, as well as a quick look at the 4 most common types of Neurodiveristy; Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, ADHD, and ASD. It will look at some common belifes associate with the Neurodiveristy, and some simple fixes which can alevate some of the potential issues which can arise for individuals who are Neurodiverse. The sessions aim is to act as an informative tool for individuals who have one of the conditions, Managers of individuals within the Neurodiveristy community, or individuals who want to generally know more.   

The session will also look at the ways in which finance as a whole can benefit from employing Neurodiverse individuals, and how having a more inclusive work enviroment can benefit our teams. This part of the session will also try and dispel some myths which which are often associted with certain conditions, and how when put to scrutiny these myths do not hold up.

This session is an opportunity to step back and better understand some of the government’s key priorities, looking at how finance and the wider functional agenda is enabling their delivery. It will showcase the progress made against areas such as levelling-up and Net Zero, while highlighting how functions are key to greater cross-government collaboration which will underpin their success.  

Presentation exploring the value an integrated back office solution for unifying Finance and HR functions. Like other parts of government, poor data and legacy IT are a barrier to effective delivery and oversight of ALBs. More specifically, the requirements of ALBs suggest the need for improved and joined up back-office systems, including: the recruitment and development of various types of specialist knowledge; their funding, which is derived from a variety of sources (e.g. industry levies or asking customers pay for services); organisations with significant commercial operations.

At financial year end 2020-21 the government underspent against its RDEL forecast by a whopping £27bn. This massive underspend represents a huge opportunity cost for teams looking to fund and progress objectives within their departments. 

To help address this, the GFF is rolling out a forecasting project which takes forward initiatives to improve the quality and accuracy of forecasting across government.  

A key strand of this project is budget holder inclusion which will form the basis of this session. Information provided and assessments made by budget holders are key inputs into the forecasting process but many of you in the community have flagged that we need to think how best to engage and empower budget holders to work with us in the best way possible.  

This workshop will provide a brief overview of the project deliverables and will explore ways that we can best engage with and steer budget holders to work with the function to deliver the best quality information for financial forecasting. 

We’re particularly keen to hear from those who work closely with budget holders as well as those in ALBs/SMDs who have a more diverse experience of financial planning in a delivery setting.  

This session is designed to be interactive and we're keen to gather input form the community to strengthen the work that the GFF is undertaking.

Focus of the session will be to describe the transition DHSC Finance is going through from responding to Covid-19 through to a ‘Reset’ programme that aims to improve our finance function as we emerge from the pandemic. We will draw on how we responded to the challenge of Covid-19 response, in particular the leadership and collaboration needed to respond to the challenges we faced as an organisation.  This will be through a brief backward focused review of a. the scale of response, b. the impact on our teams, and c. how we got through it.  

The Test & Trace finance story – How to build a finance function during a pandemic for a £37bn demand led programme:
 

• 10 FTE to 200 FTE – scale & capability  
• Getting finance a seat at the top table 
• Forecasting in uncertain times  
• Realising VFM – ‘moonshots’ 
• Lessons learnt – what would we do differently? 

We’ll then focus on the future, in particular: 
 

• Why the reset programme came about – i.e. why did we decide this was the right time to deliver a transformation programme.
• What we are trying to achieve – a real focus on the future and becoming an outstanding finance function that embraces innovation.
• How we are going about delivering the programme – both insights into what progress we have made, and what progress we continue to make. 
• We aspire for the session to be collaborative, we’ll make use of Sli.do through-out to engage the audience and will retain 15-20 minutes of the session for Q&A.

The panel discussion will cover developments in sustainability reporting across the public sector, as well as recent publications and announcements for preparers. The Treasury will present the key developments for central government, including their new guidance. CIPFA will provide an update on the sustainability reporting development and guidance across the wider public sector, including an overview of their recent publications. ICAEW will draw from their experience hosting the ‘Public Sector Conference: The path to net zero’, giving an overview of developments in both the private and public sector; identifying best practice/innovative reporting; and reflect on the common findings and feedback from preparers across government and further afield. 

The Government Finance Function covers a wide array of finance activity. To achieve optimal delivery of the Government’s Priority Outcomes, the planning and performance system must be understood and supported by officials across each area of finance activity. This Workshop will provide an opportunity to improve understanding of the planning and performance system and maximise buy-in from across the finance profession.

As financial leaders it is important to adopt a sustainability mindset and identify how we generate value, focusing on the five capitals (human, natural, social, manufactured and financial) which today represent 90% of organisational value. The recently formed International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) and the two draft exposure standards issued (IFRS S1 & S2) highlights the importance being placed on sustainability and climate disclosures.

Join Sarah Ghosh and Ash Noah to discuss how these standards pave the way for finance to take leadership in the areas of sustainability, consider how we can work collaboratively to build knowledge, and advance DE&I as part of the ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance) agenda.

HMLR has implemented a new MI tool which has revolutionalised the way we record, collate, report and analyse financial MI.  

The new tool brings together budgets, forecasts, real-time actuals, resource planning, financial risks and variance commentary into a suite of intuitive end-user focussed dashboards.  

We have: 
 

• Shaved 3 working days of the monthly reporting cycle.  
• Delivered daily automated interfaces allowing the business to see real-time financial actuals, budgets and forecasts.  
• Allowed end-users to drill-down to operational, financial and HR transaction-level data.  
• Automated and reduced the production time of monthly management accounts and production of the board report by 3 working days.  
• Removed our reliance on Excel for budget monitoring. 
• Facilitated end-users to ‘self-serve’, entering in their own forecasts and providing commentary which is automatically collated into monthly dashboards.  
• Provided the backbone for HMLR spending review bid and annual business planning process. For the first time HMLR now has a robust medium term financial plan.  
• Improved the accuracy of finance forecast so significantly that staff forecasts are now within 0.5% of actuals.  
• Delivered a model for a HMLR strategic workforce plan. 
• We would like to share our journey (so far) with you and discuss where we would like to go next! 

Government has made big strides in the digital revolution, but how what is the Future of Finance for Public Sector? In this session we will be covering what role finance professionals will play in building the finance function of the future, sharing insights on what skills will be required. Focus over the last few years has been on replacing the ERP with SaaS technology. Whilst this can be a catalyst for change, there are practical, no regrets activities you can be getting on with. And if you have already made the move to the Cloud, we will share our views on how you go further, driving the benefits of your investment.
 
Join our experts for what aims to be an insightful discussion.

The Contingent Liability Central Capability (CLCC) is an analytical and advisory unit within UK Government Investments, established to strengthen contingent liability expertise across government by improving the ability to manage this key area of government risk. 

This panel discussion will bring together public and private sector speakers who can give a rounded view of the contingent liability landscape, to broaden attendees’ understanding of what contingent liabilities are, how they arise in policy making, why it’s essential to manage them effectively and how to work with the CLCC to achieve that.  

Our host will put questions to the panel before opening up to the floor to allow audience members to ask their own questions.  

The panel will feature a member of the CLCC team, a private sector expert and a contact from a finance team within government who’s worked closely with the CLCC.

This session will highlight the need for finance to go beyond being seen as a production centre for financial information, using real life examples to showcase the power of using numbers to tell a story and bringing your audience on the journey with you.  

Leadership responsibilities, including collaboration and professionalism, are suddenly very different in a post-COVID, hybrid-working world. How have you as leaders adapted your style and practices to ensure culture is maintained, values are upheld, communication and collaboration are maximised and professionalism is sustained?

Come along to this session to hear first-hand from HM Treasury on changes to the updated CBG framework and what this means for departments. Hear from the two branches of HMT who lead on annual updates and are keen to understand and engage on what is good about CBG, what could be improved about CBG and how you can help potentially shape changes for the 2023-24 refresh.

This interactive & collaborative session will involve a quick recap of the standard, then dive into the challenges and successes experienced by early adopters with practical tips for bodies getting to grips with the new leasing standard, both in this year of mandatory adoption and forward looking into the future. There will be the opportunity to ask questions of both HM Treasury and early adopter bodies as well details for submitting specific technical queries and how to get advice from HM Treasury. 

An opportunity to understand how we can join up across the functions and drive convergence through the next wave of shared service implementation.
 

Effective risk management is critical for all central government bodies – this session will set out the latest on GFF/HMT/GIAA work work to help departments and public bodies better manage their control environment, as well as include time for questions and dioscussion.

To perform to their best, organisations need a clear and effective control environment to ensure they are managing the myriad of risks they face. This session will present work led by HMT and the GIAA to improve the control environment, by both providing more clarity and consistency around controls themselves and the assurances that these are working. It will also include practitioners from departments to talk about how this will make a difference to them on the ground.

Specifics will include:
 

• an overview of the proposed control framework for central government, and associated forthcoming guidance to help clarify accounting officers’ responsibilities in this area
• best practice in management assurance arrangements in both operational (1st line) and oversight (2nd line) business areas
• and to complement these, emerging views on revised internal audit practices (3rd line) to improve management’s assurances and internal.

Chaired by Dan Worsley, CIPFA’s Chief Operating Officer, CIPFA’s panel will explore how developing, engaging and upskilling public finance professionals is a key enabler for effective public financial management. Public sector organisations that put capability, learning and development of their talent at the heart of everything they do will develop a strategic, effective and efficient workforce to achieve their goals and serve their communities. Having a competent and capable workforce is the building block for any successful organisation.

Without the right leadership, that is underpinned by organisational skillset and culture, public bodies will struggle to achieve their goals – not only to protect their financial resilience but also to work effectively across the wider public sector to improve outcomes for the people and communities they serve. Join Dan and the CIPFA panel as they share how their public finance journeys and careers have shaped their thinking, as well as learning about some of the problems they have faced and how they have overcome them.

Unlocking the “wisdom of the crowd” in the risk management conversation translates strategy into action more effectively by ensuring all involved understand the risks, the compliance standards they face—and the responses required for both whilst delivering change to business users even before the implementation of new technologies. 

When we talk about risk, we consider the likelihood of a given event and consider its consequences. We then develop the controls that must be put in place to prevent that risk occurring (or minimize the damage if it does occur) and ensure efficient continuity. 

Major risk & compliance challenges that exist today, include:
 

• A lack of transparency around possible risks, leading to delayed identification and communication of improvements.
• Reliance on complex, manual, or paper-based compliance systems, preventing efficiency, agility and responsiveness.
• Siloed functional units and lines of business leading to lack of accountability, as well as an inability to comprehend the full risk context of an organisation or end-to-end process.
• In the face of these challenges, a risk management framework which provides opportunities for collaboration across internal boundaries is essential.

Experiences of an accountant on secondment to the DHSC to help them tackle the COVID pandemic. 

In May 2020 the speaker volunteered to go on secondment from the MOD to the DHSC to support their work tackling the COVID pandemic.  

An experienced accountant, he was not familiar with the health sector, freight and logistics, nor the procurement of Personal Protective Equipment, but was asked to act as Finance Business Partner for this work-stream.   

He had to quickly establish a virtual team to manage the finances for this £1Bn programme and start to freight the 32Bn PPE items to the UK.

Whilst there is a clear and ambitious net zero target from Government, which is supported by the Greening Government Commitments, there is a need for more robust and transparent costing around sustainability activities across Government.  Greater understanding and clarity of the cost of achieving net zero could offer a more objective means of assessing return of investment and how to prioritise limited resource across Government for greatest effect.      
 
In this short session, we’ll take you through the role of finance in meeting our ambitious targets and some of the key challenges and opportunities we expect to see.
 
Time is short, but our speakers will be available for further discussions at our stand (number 7, between zones 3 & 4) throughout the conference, as well as directly after this presentation.  We’d be delighted to see you!