Little’s account

After an extraordinary year, Cat Little reflects on how the Treasury and government finance function met the pressures of a pandemic with innovation. By Richard Johnstone

Cat Little was not planning to run a Spending Review from her house. The Treasury’s director general of public spending found out she was going to move from her previous role as chief finance o cer at the Ministry of Defence in December 2019, with her start date at 1 Horse Guards Road set for the following March, after the Budget.

Little’s predecessor, James Bowler – now a Cabinet O ce permanent secretary leading the Covid taskforce – was to cover the Budget. She was to take over the following day and start on the next fiscal event.

“So it all was very clean, but then of course, Covid happened,” Little says. “I think it’s fair to say nobody was really doing what they expected to be doing.”

Little was thrust into the coronavirus response before she could even get to the Spending Review. She had just three days in the o ce before the first national lockdown, making acclimatising to her new role di cult.

Although there have been some benefits of working from home in her hectic first year in the finance ministry – “I normally have a couple of dogs with me who are causing chaos in the background, they’re always a good distraction when you’re trying to have di cult meetings with minister” – Little acknowledges the strangeness of starting a new job in Covid times.

“As a leader, you work really hard to develop relationships in your first weeks and months, because it matters so much to your ability to get stu done,” she says. “But it was completely di erent to what I expected. It really changed a lot of the way in which my teams had to operate.”

She joined the Treasury just after the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, had set out the government’s initial fiscal response to coronavirus in the March 2020 Budget, a £12bn package that was soon overtaken by the scale of the crisis. Just two weeks later, Sunak announced the Coronavirus

Job Retention scheme, also known as furlough, which at its peak saw the government pay 80% of the wages of 8.9 million people. To date, it alone has cost £46.4bn. A sister scheme for the self employed has cost £5.4bn to the end of December 2020.

Following the Budget, “it was all about getting money quickly to the right places to tackle the crisis”, says

Little. “There’s still a bit of that, but we