External links
Twitter/X: @pollyn1
Instagram: @polly_neate
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Polly Neate CBE is a social commentator and social policy expert, who has been CEO of both Shelter and Women's Aid, and executive director of Action for Children. She was made a CBE in the 2020 New Year Honours list and was made Honorary Doctor of Laws by Bristol University in October 2022.
Neate was born in 1966. Her mother, Patricia Mulligan, is a psychotherapist and her father, Francis Neate, is a lawyer and former president of the International Bar Association. One of her brothers is novelist Patrick Neate. [1] [2]
She attended Gumley House Convent School, Isleworth and St Paul's Girls' School, London, before going to University of Bristol, where she took a Bachelor of Arts in English. She then took a postgraduate diploma in journalism at City, University of London. [3]
After her diploma she was a freelancer whose work was published in The Guardian and the New Statesman before becoming the editor of Community Care magazine. [1] [3]
Neate moved into charity work in 2005 when she became Executive Director of External Relations at Action for Children until 2013. She sat as an independent member of the Labour working group on children's policy in 2008–09.[5] and sat on the Conservative Party Commission on the Future of Social work in 2009.
She became chief executive of Women's Aid in 2013 where she helped secure legislation to criminalise coercive and controlling behaviour. In this role, she also sat as an independent member of the Labour working group on domestic violence policy, and as an independent member of the Conservative government's National Oversight Group on Domestic Violence.[5] She campaigned for improved treatment of domestic abuse survivors and their children in the family courts, and as a result was targeted by men’s rights activists.
Neate became CEO of Shelter in 2017. In that role she introduced community organisers in local service hubs, and campaigned successfully for greater rights for renters and for investment in social housing. Under her leadership, Shelter secured the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023, in partnership with survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, and also demonstrated through strategic litigation that refusal to let property to a tenant on grounds that they receive benefits is indirect discrimination under the Equality Act 2010.
She is a trustee of the Young Women's Trust and of Women in Sport, and a non-executive director of Wessex Local Medical Committees.
She is co-host of the Better Way podcast and of a podcast series on privilege for the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations.
Her public speaking ranges from the Oxford Union to the first Women’s March on London. She writes opinion pieces on social policy, housing, women's rights, leadership, and wider social justice issues.
She won Best Charity CEO on Twitter in 2019's Social CEOs awards.
She is married to Hugh Thornbery CBE [4] and has two grown-up daughters. Neate was permanently disabled in a rock climbing accident in January 2022, but remains a committed rock climber who speaks on the importance of more equitable access to climbing and the outdoors more widely.
Twitter/X: @pollyn1
Instagram: @polly_neate
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