Portrait of Mr James Freemantle

Mr James Freemantle

The Director of Resources (D Res) is Air Command’s Senior Finance Officer and Air Force Board member responsible for the £6Bn annual operating and equipment budget, including personal approval of projects up to £400M. D Res is the Permanent Secretary’s representative at Air Command, ensuring propriety and protecting the Accounting Officer’s position. D Res is also Air’s Civilian Workforce advisor, representing the 5,000 Civil servants at the Board, and leads the Finance, Planning and Civilian Workforce teams of c200 staff.

Details

James joined the MOD from university as a junior analyst at Dstl. Since then, he's held several analytical, finance, governance, strategy, and transformation roles in the department and across the TLBs. James has worked on several spending reviews from 2010 onwards, initially supporting with policy and output costing support through Dstl, before working as part of the MOD Head Office in 2015, where his focus was on commercialisation and workforce.

Outside of spending reviews James has led force structure force mix studies for Navy Command and supported the development of the National Shipbuilding Strategy. He also pioneered data visualisation techniques, including network analysis and tree maps to support decision making, leading the UKs contribution to NATO research on the topic. James is CIMA qualified.

Most recently James was the MOD Strategic Finance Deputy Director. Here he negotiated with HMT, ran the budgeting process, managed the In-Year position, led transformation and efficiency reporting, the development of the Equipment Programme report, as well as leading the department's finance secretariat function.

Outside of work James enjoys spending time on his bike in the Hampshire countryside and with his family and two boys.