Fairness Foundation: Who we are

Our organisation

The Fairness Foundation works to change the debate around fairness in order to build a fairer society. We are a registered charity (number 1044174) and are non-party-political. Our geographic focus is on England, although on some issues we look across the United Kingdom.

We are funded by the Persula Foundation. We do not generally give grants to other organisations. We are a UK-only organisation and are unaffiliated with similarly named organisations in Germany and the USA.

Our objectives and approach

Our vision is a Britain where everyone has the ‘fair necessities’ (essentials, opportunities, rewards, exchange and treatment), made possible by building a consensus about what a fair society and economy looks like.

Our mission is to deliver that consensus by:

Building a vision for a fairer society and showing that this has broad support across a range of issues
Inspiring partner organisations to use fairness to reach and influence key audiences
Persuading decision-makers and influencers of the need to achieve fairness by reducing inequality

We focus on ten issues that span the full range of areas of society and the economy: democracy, education, the environment, health, housing, justice, social security, taxation, wealth and work.

Our approach is to combine:

Looking across the whole of society and the economy
Defining people’s sense of fairness in a way that has majority support
Understanding public attitudes and people’s underlying values
Focusing on the issues that unite people
Championing solutions with broad public and political appeal
Promoting existing research and policy ideas
Framing the arguments in ways that resonate across the political divide
Being strictly non-partisan and non-party-political
Presenting information in compelling ways that capture people’s attention
Mobilising business and other unusual voices to get our messages across
Helping partner organisations to reach and influence new audiences

Our people

Team

Will Snell

Chief Executive

Will Snell is Chief Executive of the Fairness Foundation. He is a non-profit entrepreneur with experience across a range of sectors, both in the UK and overseas. He is the founder of Tax Justice UK and previously held senior management roles at the Tax Justice Network and Global Witness.

Editorial board

Will Hutton (chair)

President of the Academy of Social Sciences

Will Hutton is a political economist, author and columnist. He is President of the Academy of Social Sciences, co-chair of The Purposeful Company, an associate of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, and writes a fortnightly column for the Observer.

Halima Begum

Chief Executive of the Runnymede Trust

Halima Begum is Chief Executive of the Runnymede Trust. She has held senior leadership positions across policy, programmes and research with a range of organisations including the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the British Council and LEGO Foundation.

Bobby Duffy

Director of the Policy Institute at KCL

Bobby Duffy is Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Policy Institute at King's College London. He has worked across most public policy areas in his career of nearly 30 years in policy research and evaluation, including being seconded to the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit.

Alison Garnham

Chief Executive of Child Poverty Action Group

Alison Garnham has been the chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) since September 2010. Prior to that she was the CEO of Daycare Trust, since June 2006.

Sunder Katwala

Director of British Future

Sunder Katwala is the Director of British Future. He has previously worked as a journalist. He was general secretary of the Fabian Society think tank from 2003 to 2011, and was previously a leader writer and internet editor at the Observer, a research director of the Foreign Policy Centre and commissioning editor for politics and economics at the publisher Macmillan.

Adrian Pabst

Deputy Director for Public Policy at NIESR

Adrian Pabst is Deputy Director for Public Policy at the National Institution of Economic and Social Research and Professor of Politics at the University of Kent. His main research interests are in political thought, political economy and contemporary European and international politics.

Daniel Chandler

Economist and philosopher

Daniel Chandler has worked as a policy advisor in the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit and Deputy Prime Minister's Office, and as a researcher at the Resolution Foundation and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He is the author of ‘Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like?’, which makes the case for a new progressive liberalism grounded in the ideas of the philosopher John Rawls.

Sonia Sodha

Chief leader writer at the Observer

Sonia Sodha is chief leader writer at the Observer and a Guardian/Observer columnist. She also makes documentaries on economic and social issues for Radio 4 and appears regularly on the BBC, Sky News and Channel 4 as a political commentator. Her critically-acclaimed journalism focuses on challenging established wisdoms to help readers and listeners understand that a different world is possible.

Trustees

Frances Crook

Campaigner for criminal justice reform

Frances Crook was Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform for 30 years until October 2021. Prior to taking up her role at the Howard League, she worked as a teacher, a campaigner for Amnesty International and in non-executive roles at both Greenwich University and NHS Barnet.

Pete Gladwell

Group Social Impact and Investment Director at L&G

Pete Gladwell is Group Social Impact and Investment Director at Legal & General (L&G). After an erstwhile life as a Youth Worker, Pete joined Legal & General in 2007, launching a new generation of property funds focussed on liability matching and Defined Contributions pension schemes, and L&G’s joint venture with PGGM, which total over £5bn.

Emma Revie

Chief Executive of the Trussell Trust

Emma Revie is the Chief Executive of the Trussell Trust, a charity that works to end the need for food banks in the UK. It supports a network of over 1,200 food banks to provide emergency food and compassionate, practical support to people in crisis, while campaigning for long-term change to the structural issues that lock people into poverty.

Julian Richer (founder)

Retail entrepreneur and philanthropist

Julian Richer is a highly respected retail entrepreneur and philanthropist. The founder of Richer Sounds, the UK’s largest hi-fi retailer, Julian opened his first shop aged 19, in 1978. Julian has funded and founded several non-profit organisations, including Acts 435, ASB Help, TaxWatch, the Good Business Charter and Zero Hours Justice. He has also written several well-regarded books, most recently The Ethical Capitalist.

Our partners

Expert contributors

We work in partnership with a group of expert contributors, who we collaborate with on specific projects on an individual, ad hoc basis.

Membership of this group does not automatically imply broader endorsement of the views or activities of the Fairness Foundation, or vice versa.

Sorin Baiasu

Professor of Philosophy

Keele University

Laura Barbour

Early Years Lead

Sutton Trust

Helen Barnard

Director of Policy, Research and Impact

Trussell Trust

Saul Becker

Professor of Social Care Research and Education Practice

University of Cambridge

Paolo Brunori

Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, International Inequalities Institute

London School of Economics

Jabeer Butt

Chief Executive

Race Equality Foundation

Peter Dawson

Director

Prison Reform Trust

George Dibb

Head of the Centre for Economic Justice

Institute for Public Policy Research

Danny Dorling

Professor of Geography

University of Oxford

Richard Garside

Director

Centre for Crime and Justice Studies

Ben Baumberg Geiger

Professor in Social Science and Health

King’s College London

Peter Taylor-Gooby

Research Professor of Social Policy

University of Kent

Jane Green

Professor of Political Science and British Politics

University of Oxford

Roger Harding

Former Chief Executive

RECLAIM

Andrew Harrop

General Secretary

Fabian Society

Sue James

Director

Legal Action Group

Robert Joyce

Deputy Director

Institute for Fiscal Studies

Geraldine Van Bueren KC

Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College

University of Oxford

Jonathan Kay

Head of Evidence Synthesis

Education Endowment Foundation

Barry Knight

Editor

Rethinking Poverty

Denise Lievesley

Honorary Fellow of Green Templeton College

University of Oxford

Ruth Lister

Emeritus Professor of Social Policy

Loughborough University

Kamran Mallick

CEO

Disability Rights UK

Clare McNeil

Associate Fellow

Institute for Public Policy Research

Katherine Merrifield

Assistant Director for Healthy Lives

Health Foundation

Helen Miller

Deputy Director

Institute for Fiscal Studies

Martin O’Neill

Professor of Political Philosophy

University of York

Andrew Neilson

Director of Campaigns

Howard League for Penal Reform

Gwen Nightingale

Assistant Director for Healthy Lives

Health Foundation

Jemima Olchawski

CEO

Fawcett Society

Michael Orton

Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Employment Research

University of Warwick

Alexis Paton

Co-Director, Centre for Health and Society

Aston University

Jacky Peacock

Head of Policy

Advice for Renters

Natalie Perera

Chief Executive

Education Policy Institute

Nicholas Pleace

Professor of Social Policy

University of York

Fran Darlington-Pollock

Chair

Equality Trust

Stian Reimers

Reader in Psychology and Behavioural Science

City, University of London

Jo Richardson

Professor of Housing and Social Inclusion

De Montfort University

Carys Roberts

Director

Institute for Public Policy Research

Karen Rowlingson

Professor of Social Policy

University of Birmingham

Ryan Shorthouse

Chief Executive

Bright Blue

Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington

Assistant Professor of Social Psychology

London School of Economics

Anna Powell-Smith

Founder

Centre for Public Data

Paul Spicker

Emeritus Professor of Public Policy

Robert Gordon University

Martha Spurrier

Director

Liberty

Mary-Ann Stephenson

Director

Women’s Budget Group

Alfie Stirling

Director of Research and Chief Economist

New Economics Foundation

Paula Surridge

Deputy Director

UK in a Changing Europe

Adam Swift

Professor of Political Theory

University College London

Charlie Trew

Head of Policy

Shelter

Stuart White

Associate Professor of Politics

University of Oxford

Jonathan Wolff

Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy

University of Oxford

Coalitions and networks

We are proud to be members of the following coalitions and networks:

End Child Poverty

Equally Ours

Health Equals

Inequalities in Health Alliance

Stop the Squeeze

Structural Inequalities Alliance

UK Democracy Network

People and organisations consulted

We consulted with a wide range of people and organisations during the scoping and design phase of setting up the Fairness Foundation (in addition to the people listed above on our board and editorial board, and in our expert contributors network).

During the scoping phase we found strong and wide-ranging support for the creation of an organisation focusing on changing the terms of the debate around fairness.

Many thanks to the people and organisations below who generously gave their time and expertise to help us. We are keen to hear from other organisations with whom we have not yet had the opportunity to discuss our plans and opportunities for collaboration.

The inclusion of people on the list below does not necessarily mean that they or their organisation endorse our strategy, views or activities.

Dan Bacall