skip to content

Cambridge Forum for Sustainability and the Environment

 

Biography

Emily Miles became Group Director, Strategy in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in 2015. In this role, Emily is responsible for the overarching strategy for Defra and its arm’s-length bodies, and is also the Senior Responsible Officer for Defra’s Data Programme.

Prior to this, she was Director, Projects, Economic and Domestic Secretariat in the Cabinet Office, where her role was to ensure that the most cutting-edge technology and disruptive thinking docks successfully into policy making, and to undertake cross-cutting policy projects. In this role, Emily led a Government-wide process preparing advice for an incoming Prime Minister on immigration policy, and input into the development of the Home Office’s extremism strategy. She also looked at local and national agencies’ efforts to reduce illegal working and exploitation of migrant labour.

Earlier in her career she was Director of Policing at the Home Office, where, along with being responsible for policy issues like Police and Crime Commissioners, public order, the future of police use of data, and the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, she sponsored national bodies like HMIC, IPCC and the College of Policing, and led the work on the Home Office’s response to a number of high profile police integrity issues, including Plebgate, Hillsborough, and revelations about undercover policing.

She was a Winston Churchill Fellow in 2010-11, travelling to the USA, Canada and India. She published her research as an InsideOut report, Collaborative Working, for the Institute for Government, where she was a Whitehall Fellow in 2011. She holds a Masters in the international law of armed conflict and international criminal justice from Nottingham University (LLM with Distinction), and her first degree was at the University of Cambridge, in English.

Group Director, Strategy,
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)
Currently a Policy Fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy
 Emily  Miles
Not available for consultancy