About Emily Miles

Emily Miles is the Chief Executive Officer of the Food Standards Agency in England. She took up the role on 23rd September 2019 after moving from Defra.

She worked in Defra since November 2015, joining as the Group Director of Strategy, and coordinating work on the domestic consequences of Brexit for Defra since the referendum in 2016.

For the previous fifteen years she worked largely on home affairs issues, in the Home Office, Downing Street and Cabinet Office. Roles included Director of Policing at the Home Office; the Programme Director for the programme to clear the UK’s historic asylum caseload backlog in the UK Border Agency; and the Programme Director for the close of the National Policing Improvement Agency and the establishment of the College of Policing. She was 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 she was a trustee for 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 her first degree was from the University of Cambridge, in English.