Camilla Cavendish Keynote Speaker

Camilla Cavendish is a journalist, contributing editor and columnist at the Financial Times, Senior Fellow at Harvard University, former Director of Policy for Prime Minister David Cameron, and Non-Executive Director at the Department of Health and Social Care. She has a particular interest in social and healthcare issues. Camilla is the author of the UK government’s sugar tax legislation.

In 2013 Camilla was commissioned by the British Department of Health to lead an independent review into healthcare assistance in the NHS and care homes.

In 2019, she published Extra Time: Ten Lessons for an Ageing World, and her most recent book, Generation Maybe: Why We’re Having Fewer Children, and What It Means for Us All, will be published in October 2026.

A former Associate Editor, columnist and leader writer for The Times, she was awarded the 2008 Paul Foot Award for campaigning journalism. In 2009 she was also awarded “Campaigning Journalist of the Year” at the British Press Awards. Camilla won the awards for her writings in The Times about the child protection injustices which she claimed resulted from the Children Act 1989 and the practices of family courts dealing with child protection issues. Her campaign convinced the Secretary of State for Justice Jack Straw to introduce legislation which opened the family courts to the media in 2009.

She has worked as a McKinsey management consultant, an aid worker, and as an aide to the CEO of Pearson Plc. She helped to found the lobby group London First, and was the first CEO of the not-for-profit trust South Bank Employers’ Group, which masterminded the regeneration of the South Bank of the Thames in the late 1990s.

She became a member of the House of Lords in 2016 and is known as The Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice.

Camilla regularly appears on broadcast media including BBC Question Time, Radio 4 Today, CNN and Bloomberg providing insights into politics, health, demographic change and the future of work.