Katharine Hammond

Chief Executive, South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority

Katharine joined SYMCA as Chief Executive in May 2025. She joined following a 22 year career in the civil service the last four of which were spent as Director General for Strategy in GCHQ, one of the UK’s three world-class intelligence agencies. She has worked extensively on policing including for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games; on prisons and criminal justice in both the Home Office and Ministry of Justice; on Afghanistan in the FCDO and spent almost eight years in the Cabinet Office working firstly for Sir John Chilcot on his report into the origins of the Iraq War and then as Director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat focussed on risk, resilience and crisis management.