Carolyn Williamson, who took over as CIPFA president yesterday, will seek to tackle issues around gender pay and BAME recruitment, she told the CIPFA’s annual conference this morning.
Collaboration was identified as another defining theme of Williamson’s presidency as she noted “no one organisation holds all of the answers to the challenges we all face”.
Williamson said that collaboration was vital for the sector, which faces “challenges of unprecedented complexity” and “ever increasing pressure on services”.
The deputy chief executive and director of corporate resources at Hampshire County Council lamented a lack of direction from Westminster amid “political turmoil”.
This turmoil was also touched on by another speaker at the event, professor of political science and British politics at Nuffield College Oxford University Jane Green, who noted a divergence between peoples’ beliefs about their economic situation and the reality of their situation.
She claimed that the referendum results were a result of “cultural, economic and political grievances”.
“We need to go deeper to understand the sources of those grievances,” she added.
