Dido Harding

Diana Mary "Dido" Harding, Baroness Harding of Winscombe (born 9 November 1967) is a British businesswoman and life peer who served as chair of NHS Improvement from 2017 to 2021 and as interim chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) and head of NHS Test and Trace from 2020 to 2021.

She is a former chief executive of the TalkTalk Group where she faced calls for her to resign after a cyber attack revealed the details of up to four million customers; the company was subsequently fined £400,000 by the Information Commissioner's Office for its negligence.

A member of the Conservative Party, Harding is married to John Penrose, a Conservative member of Parliament, and is a friend of former Prime Minister David Cameron.

Raised on the family pig farm in Dorset, she was educated from 1978 to 1985 at St Antony's Leweston, then an all-girl private Catholic school.

She then graduated in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, from Magdalen College, Oxford, where she studied under Vernon Bogdanor and alongside David Cameron, and then studied at Harvard Business School, gaining an MBA.

Upon graduating in 1988 she joined the management consultancy McKinsey & Company.

In 1995 she was appointed marketing director of Thomas Cook before moving to Manpower and Kingfisher in 1998 and Woolworths in 1999.

From 2000 to 2004 she was “commercial director for value added foods" and then “international support director” at Tesco. In 2007 she moved to Sainsbury's as convenience store director, and took a seat on the operating board in 2008. She was named the first CEO of TalkTalk in 2010, when Carphone Warehouse split its telecoms business from its retail operation. She was appointed as a non-executive director on The Court of The Bank of England in July 2014. She has also served on the boards of British Land and Cheltenham Racecourse.

Harding was appointed as a member of the House of Lords by Cameron in 2014.

She holds a board position at the Jockey Club, which is responsible for several major horse-racing events including the Cheltenham Festival.

Harding joined the House of Lords as a Conservative life peer on 20 October 2014.

In October 2015, TalkTalk experienced a cyber-attack, during which personal and banking details of up to four million customers, not all of which were encrypted, were thought to have been accessed.

City A.M. described her responses as "naive", noting that early on, when asked if the affected customer data was encrypted or not, she replied: "The awful truth is that I don't know".

Her inflexible line on termination fees was also criticised.

Marketing ran a headline, "TalkTalk boss Dido Harding's utter ignorance is a lesson to us all".

The Evening Standard noted that "It has been a tough week for TalkTalk boss Dido Harding, facing complaints from customers and calls for her head".

The company admitted the incident had cost it £60 million and lost it 95,000 customers.

Fining the company £400,000, the Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham blamed a "failure to implement the most basic cyber security measures."

In February 2017, Harding announced that she would stand down as CEO of TalkTalk in order to focus more on her public service activities.

She has sat on the Economic Affairs Committee since 27 June 2017.

She has not rebelled against her party on any of the votes she has attended during her time in the House.

In October 2017, Harding was appointed chair of NHS Improvement, which is responsible for overseeing all NHS hospitals, comprising foundation trusts and NHS trusts, as well as independent providers of NHS-funded care.

Parliament's Health Select Committee, at that time chaired by then Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston, recommended that Harding resign as a Conservative peer and sit as a crossbench peer in order to "allow for greater parliamentary and public confidence in her ability to challenge government ministers and policies if this role demands it".

Harding did not accept this.

Her role ceased in July 2022, when NHS Improvement was merged into NHS England.

In January 2018 she joined the main board of the Jockey Club, which runs many of British horse racing's most popular events, including the Grand National, the Cheltenham Festival and the Derby.

In May 2020, Harding was appointed by Health Secretary Matt Hancock to head NHS Test and Trace, established to track and help prevent the spread of COVID-19 in England.

In August 2020, after it was announced Public Health England was to be abolished, Harding was also appointed interim chief executive of the new National Institute for Health Protection, later renamed the UK Health Security Agency.

The new agency was established on 1 April 2021; Harding oversaw a hand-over period which lasted until she departed on 7 May 2021 to be replaced by Jenny Harries.

From June to August 2021, Harding temporarily stood aside as NHS Improvement Chair to apply, unsuccessfully, for the position of Chief Executive of NHS England; Andrew Valentine Morris stood in for Harding during this period before succeeding her on a permanent basis following her resignation in October 2021.

Harding is the daughter of John Harding, 2nd Baron Harding of Petherton, and the granddaughter of Field Marshal John Harding, 1st Baron Harding of Petherton, who commanded the Desert Rats for a few months in World War II.

In May 2020, Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced that Harding was to be put in charge of the "track, test and trace" programme (later given the name NHS Test and Trace) as part of the UK government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In November 2020, a case was lodged jointly by the not-for-profit Good Law Project and the Runnymede Trust, a race equality think tank, to challenge the legality of this appointment.

In February 2022, two High Court judges ruled that Hancock had failed to comply with the Equality Act 2010 when appointing Harding, and also when appointing Mike Coupe as director of testing in September 2020.

The court was told that Harding intervened to add Coupe, a former colleague of hers at Sainsbury's, to the shortlist of candidates.

On 18 June 2020 it was announced by Hancock that the UK government intended to switch its contact-recording mobile phone app from a centralised model to the decentralised approach pioneered by Apple and Google, due to privacy concerns, among other things.

Harding was to decide on the suitability of the alternative model.

She stated that "what we've done in really rigorously testing both our own COVID-19 app and the Google-Apple version is demonstrate that none of them are working sufficiently well to be actually reliable to determine whether any of us should self-isolate for two weeks [and] that's true across the world".

The change was, however, widely interpreted in the press as an abandonment of the UK's app in favour of the Apple-Google one, and a U-turn by the government.

The BBC also reported that the "latest developments come a day after the BBC revealed that a former Apple executive, Simon Thompson, was taking charge of the late-running project as part of Baroness Harding's team".