Baroness Ruth Lister CBE is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at Loughborough University. From 1971 to 1987 Ruth worked for the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), the last eight years as director. She joined the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University after six years as Professor and Head of Department of Applied Social Studies, Bradford University. Between 2005 and 2007 she spent some time at the University of Glasgow as the first Donald Dewar Visiting Professor of Social Justice. She retired in October 2010 and joined the House of Lords as a Labour peer in February 2011. She was elected honorary president of CPAG in December 2010. In the Lords she has sat on the Joint Committee of Human Rights and the Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement and is an officer of a number of all party parliamentary groups including those on poverty, universal credit, carers, refugees and migration. She is currently a patron of JustFair and of the Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens and is vice chair of Compass and a member of the board of the High Pay Centre. She served on the Commission on Social Justice, the Opsahl Commission into the Future of Northern Ireland, the Commission on Poverty, Participation and Power, the Fabian Commission on Life Chances and Child Poverty and the National Equality Panel. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009 and received a life-time achievement award from the Social Policy Association in 2010. She has received honorary doctorates from a number of universities, most recently the University of Oxford. She has published widely on poverty and inequality, social security, gender and citizenship. Her most recent publication is the 2nd edn of Poverty (Polity, 2021).
