The Student Loans Company has named former Charity Commission boss Paula Sussex as its new chief executive.
Sussex will join the non-departmental public body – which is jointly owned by the Department for Education, the Scottish Government, the Welsh Assembly Government, and Northern Ireland’s Department for the Economy – later this month.
She left the Charity commission after the end of her three-year term last year and will take over from Peter Lauener, who has served as interim SLC chief executive since November.
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SLC chairman Christian Brodie said Sussex had a track record of delivery and that her legal background and experience with large-scale transformation and change programmes had made her a “compelling candidate” for the job.
“SLC is in the delivery stage of a change programme that will improve our service to customers through a ‘digital first’ strategy which will build on successes such as the introduction of electronic signatures for the vast majority of our new customers this year,” he said.
“We have ambitious goals to improve our service and at the same time improve efficiency and deliver excellent value for taxpayers. Securing someone with Paula’s experience will help us do that.”
Sussex said she had accepted the chief-executive role because SLC was “clearly committed” to improving its service to customers and increasing employee-engagement.
After training as a barrister, Sussex spent 25 years working in consultancy and large-scale IT delivery. She was a senior vice president with IT consultancy Logica before being appointed chief executive of the Charity Commission in 2014.
SLC employs more than 3,240 staff across three sites in Glasgow, Darlington and Wales. It had a loan book valued in excess of £117bn at the end of last month and processes around 2 million applications for student finance every year.