Ruth Kelly
Senior Fellow, Economics and Social Policy
Rt Hon. Ruth Kelly served as MP for Bolton West from 1997 until she stood down in 2010. During this period, she served as Secretary of State for Transport, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Secretary of State for Education and Skills and Minister for Women and Equalities, as well as holding ministerial roles in HM Treasury. Since leaving Parliament, she has held roles at HSBC Global Asset Management and St Mary’s University. She is Chair of Thames Freeport.
Related Publications
Balancing the Books
Download Publication Online Reader In a new, wide-ranging, paper, Policy Exchange makes the case that Government should adopt a three-part approach to restoring the public finances: saving up to £25bn annually. This should involve a significant retrenchment on the energy plan, including a new windfall tax; efficiency savings in public spending; and radical supply-side measures to stimulate growth, including in housing and childcare. This must be embedded within […]
Better Childcare
Download Publication Online Reader Childcare costs in the United Kingdom are some of the highest in the developed world, and they have been persistently so. This is a major factor driving cost of living pressures, and has a variety of deleterious consequences. A new report by Policy Exchange argues that the Government should take steps to reform the childcare market. A new paper Better Childcare: Putting Families First proposes ways to expand […]Related Blogs
Autumn Budget 2024 Analysis
When Rachel Reeves stood up in the Commons on Wednesday as the first Labour Chancellor in 14 years and the first ever female Chancellor, she faced a myriad of challenges. Chronic levels of underinvestment – both public and private – had been holding back economic growth since the financial crisis more than 15 years ago; public services were starting to crumble, particularly in the health sector, when getting a GP […]
More Locke, less Hobbes: modern constraints on executive power
The Rt Hon Ruth Kelly is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange and was an MP from 1997-2010, holding ministerial roles including Secretary of State for Transport, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and Secretary of State for Education and Skills. As might be expected from such a distinguished jurist, Lord Judge’s lecture on the prerogative and executive government across four centuries is both learned and stimulating. […]
Do Keir Starmer's five missions stack up?
This week Keir Starmer announced ‘five bold missions for a better mission’. The missions themselves – centred on growth, clean energy, the NHS, crime and education – are hard to disagree with, but what is unexpectedly impressive is the detail which Labour has devoted to considering how to actually deliver these more effectively. The real meat of Labour’s document comes not in the missions, but in the section modestly titled […]
Beware the bond markets
Beware the bond markets. Bill Clinton’s chief strategist James Carville famously said: “I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” What started last week as a loss of confidence in the Truss/Kwarteng commitment to fiscal discipline […]
A failure of process as much as a failure of policy
It has never been truer to say that a week is a long time in politics. As sterling has plummeted and long-term gilt yields soared, the market chaos has forced an unprecedented intervention by the Bank of England to shore up the gilt market; mortgages have been withdrawn in swathes leaving many would-be buyers in the lurch, and the IMF has waded in to call for a reversal of some […]
The childcare system is broken: It can be fixed by empowering parents
Few dispute the fact that the UK system of childcare is broken. Although around £5.4 billion on childcare[1], and £3.8 billion on childcare places[2], is being spent every year on supporting the sector, it remains financially crippling for parents, inflexible, difficult to navigate and there are insufficient places available for those who could benefit. To give a sense of the scale of the problem, a middle-income household will spend nearly […]