Institute for Public Policy Research

I'm delighted to be chairing this event.

Special thanks go out to all of our excellent panellists who I'll be introducing in a minute, as well as our partners at IPPR.

So, good government requires good political leadership.

This means that it's vital for us to find and support the political leaders of the future at all levels of government.

He also worked at Save the Children and at COSLA, the Convention of Scottish Local

Authorities.

Dr. Sophia Ropek-Huson is interim head of IPPR's Decade of National Renewal programme, and she's senior research fellow in the democracy and politics team.

Her areas of expertise include political inequality and local democracy, and she also worked in the civil service before joining IPPR.

Pemba Project Limited, President and Director, May 2025 to present.

You see Toronto Sustainability Consulting, PI Capital, Executive Director, Canada 2020 Vice President of Research, Institute of Public Policy Research, IPPR, Director of Strategy and Engagement, Basile College of International Affairs, Save the Children, Ashden, Client Earth, board trustee shell foundation friends of royal academy worldwide fund for nature the wwf corporate knights and for her schooling university of oxford and university of pennsylvania she has so many green initiative boards companies that she sits on the board of or she sat on the board of that she's a part of let's call this what it is it's a career builder she's got all this stuff of beyond net zero willis tower watson eurasia group all this stuff and she can go to another company a bigger company say look at this experience i was ocean envoy for the canadian government this is nepotism there's no other way to say it with that said jumping over to the un we've got mark carney promoting his wife here and while she's not getting a salary she will get to expense travel as well as any other expenses in her new ocean envoy role

next spring we will welcome the world to halifax for the our ocean conference hope to see as many of you there as possible uh canada's special envoy uh is here uh Diana.

Make sure I get the last name right.

As Britain seeks a deeper economic relationship with Brussels, the debate is shifting towards how much regulatory alignment London is willing to accept in exchange for lower barriers to trade.

For further information, see Institute for Public Policy Research, The Guardian, and UK Prime Minister's Office.

Scotland's drug deaths rise as nitazenes appear in more than one in five fatalities.

Scotland recorded one thousand one hundred thirty-three drug use deaths in two thousand twenty-five, an eleven percent increase from the previous year, while nitazenes were implicated in two hundred forty-seven fatalities.

I

mean, this is a piece of research that IPPR, a think tank, has put out, and I wrote a forward for them.

I think so far it's the most thorough piece of work I've seen analyzing the art of what could be possible with fiscal devolution.

In many ways, I'd describe this as the beginning.

So when, you know, today Andy Burnham, who has a much greater appetite for ideas, and incidentally has just appointed Mark Steers, who was Ed Miliband's advisor in the early 2010s, an academic who's just come from UCL.

And Steers' job, as I understand it, in 10 Downing Street is precisely to network Downing Street, which is... as a policy institution is being largely led, as I understand it, by Graham Cook and James Purnell, both ex of the Institute for Public Policy Research.

But Steers' job is to try to bring ideas in.

Now, that doesn't mean he's looking for the next version of neoliberalism necessarily, but it is to try to achieve some kind of coherence in the sorts of policies that the outside world is trying to drum up.