‘A powerhouse who helped so many’: Memories of Carla Groom from Global Government Forum and beyond

Tributes have been paid to trailblazing civil servant Carla Groom, whose work at the Department for Work and Pensions revolutionised the use of behavioural science in the department and led the reform of the state pension.

Carla, who died at home on 9 August 2026 aged 50, was also a pioneer of sharing new approaches across government, and was a regular contributor to Global Government Forum conferences and summits.

Global Government Forum does not regularly publish obituaries – but Carla was an inspiration to the team at GGF, and we want to add our voices to those marking her sad passing.

Helping change how government thinks

Carla was a behavioural scientist who spent twenty years at the Department for Work and Pensions, where she led the reform of the state pension and then founded the department’s Behavioural Science team which she ran for a decade.

As the head of human-centred design science in the DWP, she was a leading thinker on organisational capability and human-centred transformation in the UK Government.

After studying psychology at Cambridge University, she completed a PhD in social psychology at Northwestern University and held a post-doctoral position at the University of Texas in Austin. She published more than a dozen papers, with a particular focus on issues of inter-group relations and social cognition.

After this, she joined the Department for Work and Pensions in the UK in 2006, where she worked on the implementation of the UK’s auto-enrolment pension system, which automatically opted people into workplace pensions to help them better plan for their retirement.

Under the policy, over 22 million individuals have since begun saving for their pension.

In a Five Minutes With interview in the build up to GGF’s 2025 Innovation conference, at which she was a regular speaker and played a key role in inspiring civil servants to think and do things differently, Carla spoke of how this programme was her reason to join the civil service.

“I wanted to work specifically on the introduction of automatic enrolment to workplace pensions,” she said. “After studying psychology for 11 years (A-level to post-doctorate), this was an incredible opportunity to be part of implementing a groundbreaking, psychologically-informed approach to a huge problem: the impending pensions crisis. So I quit my industry consulting job and joined the DWP.”

Carla also reflected on her achievements in government, and the role she had played in a number of big programmes.

In a LinkedIn post when she left the civil service earlier this year to become a freelance consultant, she split her civil service career into two halves.

“In the first decade of my civil service career, this was about how to get people saving into workplace pensions, how to tackle child poverty, and how to make the state pension system simple enough that people could work out what they would get from the state and plan accordingly. I also got to work closely with the executive team on culture change.

“And then from 2015 I had the opportunity to build the Human-Centred Design Science team. Originally branded DWP Behavioural Science, it was designed to solve the problem that ‘DWP (sometimes) makes decisions based on inaccurate assumptions about people’.”

The team looked upstream to the design of policies and processes, and to the system-wide factors that enable and constrain these design decisions, with a toolkit focused on systems thinking, human-centred design, social science and conceptual analysis.

The work generated huge value in DWP but also a series of cross government initiatives such as the Public Design Evidence Review, which demonstrate the depth to which Carla’s work changed government.

Carla reflected on the incredible array of social scientists who joined the team, inspired by Carla’s vision for better policy design.

“I’m most proud of the team I created and led over the last ten years, developing a fusion of science, human-centred design and systems thinking that helps create organisational capability for better decision-making,” she told GGF last year. “I like to tell my team that we work at the ‘cutting edge of the hardest stuff’.”

Tributes from across the civil service and beyond

Carla’s commitment to working collaboratively on the government is reflected in the tributes to her that came from those she worked with – and beyond – in recent days.

Laura de Molière, a behavioural science consultant and ex-head of behavioural science at the Cabinet Office, has started a JustGiving page in Carla’s memory and said Carla was incredibly smart, loved her family and friends deeply, and was passionate about her many and varied interests.

Many other public servants also shared tributes.

John Fitzpatrick of the Government Digital Service said her passing was “utterly heartbreaking” news.

“We had the privilege of working closely together in 2014 setting up Digital Strategy for DWP and their Digital Academy… Few people will have impacted so many lives this positively. RIP Carla, you’ll be missed.”

Adam Roberts, the principal behavioural insights and trials advisor at HM Revenue and Customs, said “Carla was an absolute powerhouse. She did so much for so many”, while Zeina Afif, now a senior behavioural scientist in the Development Impact Department at World Bank, recalled Carla as “such a warm, enthusiastic and generous person, always so willing to share her experience, her work, and her time with others”.

She spoke for many when she said: “I feel very fortunate to have known her. My deepest condolences to her family, friends, and everyone who had the privilege of working with her.”

Janet Hughes, a director at the Department for Work and Pensions recalled Carla’s role in the GovCamp and OneTeamGov communities, which grew up in the civil service to drive technology-inspired transformation.

“She was brave, principled, creative and kind in the face of all kinds of challenges. What a dreadful, tragic loss of a truly wonderful and unique colleague and friend. Love and condolences to all her family and friends.”

Amy Gandon, a former public servant and consultant said: “She was a powerhouse and will have helped so many citizens with her work over the years.”

And, in a sign of Carla’s broad interests, the self-described voltage-controlled folk music band Psykelektric also shared recollections of her support.

“It’s often thought that an artist/band needs thousands of fans of their music in order to feel validated in what they’re doing. This isn’t true. All an artist needs is one or two ‘champions’ who truly understand and appreciate what the artist is trying to achieve and encourage and support their art.

“She seemed to know us and our ‘vibe’ better than we knew ourselves.”

‘I always knew I did things differently’

In her Five Minutes With interview with GGF in 2025, Carla reflected on her autism, which she was informally diagnosed with in 2017, before a formal diagnosis in 2020.

“I always knew I did things differently. I thought it might be because I had trained as a psychologist, or perhaps because I’d worked in the private sector, or maybe it was my atypical upbringing.

“Either way, it produced results that people seemed to like, but not ones that were easily packaged for interviews or development schemes,” she said, reflecting on the barriers and challenges she had faced in her career.  

She was focused on building inclusive teams in government, and said in an interview: “The values of my team are curiosity, empathy and openness – I also think these are the values of the work of the future. These values are really good for people who do things differently.”

Speaking to GGF, she reflected that she had nearly left government multiple times because she had felt out of place and sometimes undervalued before her diagnosis. “I wouldn’t say I had overcome it – the difficulty of being a neurodivergent thinker in a traditional hierarchy – but at least I now can give the challenge a name.”

Carla was married to Paulina, who was ill for many years, and Carla cared for her while holding down a demanding job. The JustGiving page is raising funds for Carers Centre Tower Hamlets, which supports unpaid carers in the borough where she and Paulina lived and supported them both before Paulina died in August 2018, a few months after they married.

Carla is survived by her mother Lindsay, her brother Simon, her father Dave, her stepmother Pauline, her aunt Catherine, and her uncle Les.

The thoughts of all of us at Global Government Forum are with those who knew Carla, and we will share information on the memorial that will follow.

Kevin Sorkin, chief executive of Global Government Forum, said the team at GGF had been “privileged to have Carla’s expert guidance, knowledge and insights” form a key part of our events.

“Carla was always at the forefront of providing insights on policy delivery to thousands of public servants in the UK and around the world. She will be truly missed by all at Global Government Forum.”

JustGiving page fundraising for Carers Centre Tower Hamlets in memory of Carla Groom