Camilla Cavendish

Camilla Cavendish is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster and the author of Extra Time: 10 Lessons for an Ageing World, an acclaimed examination of the dramatic demographic shift that is redefining how we should look at many aspects of society, published by HarperCollins in 2019. She is a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School and Contributing Editor at the Financial Times, where she writes a weekly OpEd column. As head of the 10 Downing Street Policy Unit under Prime Minister David Cameron she was associated with a range of policies and initiatives, most notably persuading the PM to adopt the so-called ‘sugar tax’.

Camilla has been a board member of CQC, the NHS regulator, and has authored two independent government reviews into health and social care. During the 2020 pandemic, she was called back into government to become a temporary advisor to the Department of Health. She is a member of the Steering Group of ShareAction’s Long-Term Investors in People’s Health Board, on the Advisory Committee of Phoenix Insights for Better Longer Lives, and on the Advisory Committee for the Harrington Review. Camilla is an advisor to InHealth Ventures, the transatlantic healthcare fund, and Patron of Frontline, which puts talented graduates into social work. At Harvard she researches demographic change and its future impact on economies, geopolitics and societies.

Camilla regularly features on broadcast media including BBC Question Time, Radio 4 Today, CNN and Bloomberg, delivering insights into politics, health, demographic change and the future of work. Camilla started her career at McKinsey & Co and holds degrees from Oxford and Harvard.

In speeches, Camilla explores the political and social effects of our increasingly divided, growing population. She asks whether we are too passive about the wave of automation and the growing use of AI and robots, whether the divide between the new five generations working together is really age or skill, and whether there is a link between an ageing population, food production and climate change. With work and the workplace set to radically change, she examines how skills, careers and education may become life-long projects centred more around personal values – looking more like a ‘career lattice’ than a career ladder.