Philippa Stroud

Philippa Claire Stroud, Baroness Stroud (born 1965) is a British think tanker. She is the chief executive officer of the Legatum Institute, and a co-founder and former executive director of the think tank the Centre for Social Justice. She is a member of the Conservative Party and in 2009 The Daily Telegraph named her as the 82nd most influential right-winger, ahead of former Conservative leader Michael Howard. She was created a life peer on 1 October 2015 taking the title Baroness Stroud, of Fulham in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham.

Education

She was educated at St Catherine's School, Bramley, and the University of Birmingham.

Career

Stroud spent seventeen years in poverty-fighting projects and published a book on social injustice. In 1987-89 she worked in Hong Kong and Macau amongst the addict community. From 1989-96 she pioneered a four-stage residential support project in Bedford enabling homeless people to move off the streets and to become contributing members of the community. From 2001-2003 Stroud developed a project to care for addicts, the homeless and those in debt in Birmingham.

Politics

House of Lords

Philippa Stroud was made a life peer in October 2015. In 2018 she has made speeches in the House of Lords on the topics of Human Trafficking, the European Union withdrawal bill and the Family Relationships bill. She has been an advocate of reducing poverty in the UK through her work at the Center for Social Justice, the Legatum Institute and in the House of Lords.

In February 2018 she made a speech in support of the Family Relationships (Impact Assessment and Targets) Bill which would help ensure future Government policy would be assessed for its impact on family relationships. She argued that the UK has “one of the highest rates of family breakdown in Europe” and that family breakdowns entrenched poverty. Stroud believes family relationships should be a priority for Government to help reduce poverty, with the highest poverty rate being attributed to single parent families.

In March 2018, Stroud made an appeal for the UK to accept more refugee children into the UK and to reunite more children with their families. Her speech garnered support from Lord Judd, Lord Tunnicliffe and Lord Hope who supported for her call for Britain to remain compassionate in its approach to accepting refugees.

Organisations

In 2003, Stroud co-founded the Centre for Social Justice.

After the 2010 General Election, Stroud was appointed as a Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. This came as billions of GBP were stripped from the social security budget, and so she worked to help create and implement the Government's welfare reforms, including the launch of universal credit. She returned to the Centre for Social Justice in 2015. In 2016, the Centre for Social Justice suggested that “life chance risks”, including growing up in a single-parent household or by parents mired in debt, should be taken into account when assessing whether families could be classed as living in poverty. Stroud claimed that, “we need to look beyond the household income to work out the condition the children are growing up in.”

Stroud became the chief executive officer of the Legatum Institute in October 2016. Under her leadership, the think tank has promoted research and ideas demonstrating the opportunities and potential solutions for the UK's trade policies post-Brexit. However, the Institute now focuses more broadly on the benefits of global trade through its Special Trade Commission.

In 2016, Stroud founded the Social Metrics Commission (SMC) with the aim to create a new UK poverty measure to replace the previous official measure abolished by the Conservative government in 2015. In September 2018 the SMC, led by Stroud, published a report using the new measure of poverty for the UK which went beyond the former official measure (which focused solely on income) by including core living costs such as housing, childcare and disability into the equation. The report found that 14.4 million people were living in poverty in 2017, including 4.5 million children. Stroud called on the Government to use this new measure to focus efforts and attention on creating policies and solutions to alleviate poverty levels in the UK.

Elections

Stroud has twice been a Conservative candidate in a general election: she came third in Birmingham Ladywood in 2005; and on 6 May 2010, as candidate for Sutton and Cheam, she came second to incumbent Liberal Democrat Paul Burstow.