Bio

As Labour MP for North East Derbyshire from 2005 to 2017, I set up and chaired the Backbench Business select committee and sat as Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons learning a huge amount about Parliamentary procedure and how it all works in practice. After a very happy couple of years as partner at Public First, the policy and public opinion research agency, I have now set up a cross-party think tank with my friend and business partner, Tom Waterhouse, called Palace Yard to help plug a gap that we both identified while working in Parliament. There are many excellent think tanks in London all expert at grappling with the minutiae of public policy but what's missing is the really big picture. The vast majority of Parliamentarians I know are highly intelligent but they just don't have the time to get on top of the detail of every policy area. And yet, that's exactly what's expected of them. We want to bring industry and academia together to provide the real-world examples of how things work, to write about what works and what doesn't and to help us draft short, accessible and non-partisan reports that help our policy-makers understand complex and far-reaching policies better - whether that's on energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, the circular economy or the environment.