Jenny Bates has left her role as director general at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to become the fourth Heywood Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government.
The fellowship, created by the Heywood Foundation in memory of the late cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood, gives a senior UK civil servant the opportunity to explore issues relating to public service and policy outside of the immediate responsibilities of government duties, with a focus on longer-term issues and/or those that cut across government departments.
During her fellowship, Bates “will consider the changing global economic order and seek to develop a refreshed approach – or longer-term strategy – for the UK”.
Her project will seek to “diagnose, understand and take account of that shifting global context and the UK’s position and to develop an approach that can both respond to the needs and aspirations of the people of the UK and endure through inevitable uncertainty”.
She will undertake this work during a nine-month period of special leave from the civil service, during which she will be based at the Blavatnik School. For the duration of the work, Bates will also be a visiting fellow at Hertford College, Oxford, Lord Heywood’s former college.
Bates’s career has spanned more than two decades of economic policymaking at the FCDO, BEIS and Treasury, working across the intersection of international and domestic economic issues.
She is a professional economist and has led interdisciplinary analytical teams, as well as leading policy work on topics including trade and economic security, industrial strategy, climate and the energy transition, and development finance. She has been a DG at the FCDO since 2020, initially focused on China and the Indo Pacific and then more recently on economics, climate and global issues.
Bates said: “I am delighted and excited to be appointed as the next Heywood Fellow. I had the privilege of engaging with Jeremy when he was cabinet secretary and was always impressed by his ability to alight on the core of any issue and keep our focus in the civil service on real world impact.
“I am a passionate advocate and practitioner of evidence-based policymaking and the opportunity to spend time researching a challenging topic of intense interest to policymakers is a great privilege.
“I am also delighted to be following Lucy Smith and Jonathan Black as the previous fellows. My project will build on – and draw from – their important work on developing a national view and strategic approach to issues that really matter and on working across the intersection of domains (domestic and international, economic and security).”
The choice of Bates got the thumbs up from FCDO perm sec and former Heywood Fellow Olly Robbins, who congratulated her on Linkedin, saying: "Yours is the kind of project, and you are the type of first-rate policy thinker, for which this programme was designed."
The Heywood Foundation established the Heywood Visiting Fellowship at the Blavatnik School with support from the Cabinet Office, Hertford College and the Economic and Social Research Council.
Professor Ngaire Woods, dean of the Blavatnik School, said: “We are thrilled to welcome Jenny to the School as our new Heywood Fellow. Her project is timely, as the world seeks to adjust to the global economic and social dynamics that are reshaping the fabric of communities and testing national resilience.
"We are grateful too to the Heywood Foundation for this important partnership that continues to give senior policymakers the time to take a deep dive into some of the most challenging issues of our time.”
Suzanne Heywood, chair of the Heywood Foundation and Jeremy Heywood's widow, said: “We are delighted to appoint Jenny as our fourth Heywood Fellow.
“The fellowship has proved itself to be an effective way for senior officials to tackle challenging policy issues. It has also shown the power of combining government experience with academic rigour and gaining insights from people outside of government and from other countries.
“The board of the foundation is very much looking forward to the thinking that will come out of Jenny’s fellowship, which is tackling a critical topic for the UK.”