Policy Champion
Laura Sandys specialises in the energy, food and resource sectors, focusing on energy markets, food security and resource management. She is an advocate of the low carbon economy, promoter of increasing demand reduction policies and innovator in food systems policies. She believes incumbent thinking needs challenging to promote policy innovation, business competition and creativity. She is Senior Independent Director at SGN Ltd, Chair of the Food Foundation and Deputy Chair of the Food Standards Agency and a member of its Risk and Audit Committee. She runs The Reshaping Regulation Programme with Imperial College and the Energy Systems Catapult and was a member of Government’s Cost of Energy Review chaired by Prof Dieter Helm. She founded the Food Foundation that advocates changes to the UK food system, and co-founder of POWERful Women that promotes women’s role in the energy sector. She has been appointed a member of the Government’s CCUS Council and is a Member of Imperial College’s Centre for Carbon Capture and Storage Advisory Group. Elected to Parliament in 2010-15 as the Member for Thanet South, Laura served on the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, and became Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister for Energy and Climate Change, The Rt Hon Greg Barker, MP. Before Parliament, Laura founded and sold two companies advising energy and regulated busiensses. She worked in the Caucasus and South America as well as in many parts of Europe and the United States. She also served as an advisor to the Georgian Government on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Following the sale of her last company in 2000, she joined King’s College, London, as a Senior Research Associate, and worked with the UK’s military intelligence on a spectrum of risks associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Laura received her Master’s Degree from the University of Cambridge in 2004 specialising in Iraq.