Chief Executive, Foods Standards Agency

Policy Leaders Fellow alumna, Centre for Science and Policy

Emily Miles is the Chief Executive Officer of the Food Standards Agency. She took up the role in September 2019 after moving from Defra where she had worked since 2015, joining as the Group Director of Strategy, and later coordinating work on the domestic consequences of Brexit as acting Director-General for the EU Exit Delivery Group.

For the previous 15 years Emily worked largely on home affairs issues, at the Home Office, Downing Street and Cabinet Office, where her roles included: Director of Policing at the Home Office; Programme Director for the programme to clear the UK’s historic asylum caseload backlog in the UK Border Agency; and Programme Director for the closing of the National Policing Improvement Agency and the establishment of the College of Policing. She was also a policy advisor on home affairs to Prime Minister Tony Blair between 2002 and 2005.

She took a career break from 2010 to 2011, in part to spend more time with her two young children. During this period, she was also a Winston Churchill Fellow, travelling to the USA, Canada and India. She published her findings as an InsideOut report, Collaborative Working, for the Institute for Government, where she was a Whitehall Fellow in 2011.

Between 1999 and 2017 Emily was a trustee of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, including a stint as vice-chair. She is a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain.

Emily holds a Masters in the international law of armed conflict and international criminal justice from the University of Nottingham, and a degree in English from the University of Cambridge.