Rewiring the state and the future civil service

Dame Antonia Romeo will be speaking at the LSE campus on Tuesday 10 November, from 6.30pm to 8pm. The talk is titled Rewiring the state and the future civil service, and it's being hosted by the School of Public Policy and the Department of Economics. The evening is a conversation rather than a solo lecture, with LSE President and Vice Chancellor Professor Larry Kramer chairing.

Romeo is the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, which puts her in charge of around half a million civil servants. She's also the Prime Minister's principal policy adviser and Secretary to the Cabinet. She didn't start at the top, though: she joined the Civil Service in 2000 as a professional economist and spent nine years as Permanent Secretary of the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for International Trade. She's also served as Her Majesty's Consul General in New York, Special Envoy to US technology companies and Director General of Economic and Domestic Affairs in the Cabinet Office. That's a lot of ground to cover across the machinery of government.

The talk follows a major institutional reform programme aimed at making the Civil Service a global leader in modern, AI-enabled public service delivery. That's the core of the evening: how the state is being rewired for the AI era and what that means for the people who run it. If you've been following the debate around how government actually works—and how it's changing—this is a chance to hear it from the person currently at the helm.

Professor Larry Kramer has been President and Vice Chancellor of LSE since April 2024, and before that he was President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Dean of Stanford Law School. He'll be the one guiding the conversation. The whole thing runs from 6.30pm to 8pm on Tuesday 10 November at the LSE campus, with the specific venue to be confirmed for ticketholders.