Julie Lorraine, Corporate Director of Resources at the London Borough of Tower Hamlets shares her experience of joining local government from the commercial sector.
Julie Lorraine, Corporate Director of Resources, London Borough of Tower Hamlets
Julie spent her early professional career in private sector mergers and acquisitions. As head of a business development team working on a stock exchange listing for a Swedish assistive technology company, she had a complex and demanding role that involved a considerable amount of travel across the UK and overseas. It was challenging work, but Julie enjoyed it and found it fulfilling.
There came a point, though, when Julie’s personal circumstances led her to look for a new role that allowed her to spend a little less time travelling and a bit more time at home. Local government was, at that time, keen to attract people with private sector customer service expertise. And so, Julie joined a London council in a corporate and customer services role.
Julie soon realised, though, that senior roles in finance incorporated the wider resources portfolio and offered greater potential for career enhancement. With the support of her chief executive, she studied successfully for the CIPFA Professional Accountancy Qualification. With that under her belt, she took on her first section 151 officer role in a district council, followed by a succession of 151 roles inside and outside the M25.
Julie likens moving from the commercial sector to local government as “like learning a foreign language”. The whole paradigm of public finance is, she says, the polar opposite of that in the private sector, with the latter focused on generating income and the former driven by the need to spend money as effectively as possible.
The level of accountability required and the need to engage with a diverse range of stakeholders were also things that Julie’s commercial background had done little to prepare her for. But Julie very much welcomed the opportunity to “look behind the numbers” and to see how her work made a genuine difference to the local community. “I joined out of necessity,” she says, “but I stayed out of choice.”
Keen to maintain her commercial skillset, Julie eventually left local government to guide a large social landlord through a complex bond financing deal. And after that, she moved on to a strategic director role at an AI software company. But despite the excitement of these roles, after a few years Julie decided that it was time to move back to local government.
However, she found that local authorities were now somewhat wary of her commercial background and were more focused on recruiting senior finance leaders from other local authorities, rather than from the private sector. But her current authority, which at the time was experiencing a series of financial challenges, felt that an external perspective might be just what it needed. And now, two years and a successful turnaround later, it seems they may have been right.
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