Lord Michael Barber of Chittlehampton (in Devon, where he lives) was elevated to the House of Lords in January 2026. He is a world-leading authority on the effectiveness of government.
His book How to Run a Government so that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don’t go Crazy, published by Penguin in 2016, has been influential among political leaders and officials worldwide.
From 1997 to 2001 he was the Chief Adviser on School Standards to the UK Secretary of State for Education, David Blunkett, focused on improving literacy and numeracy in primary schools, raising standards and tackling school failure.
In 2001, for Prime Minister, Tony Blair, he founded the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit in No10, Downing Street, which he led until 2005. In this role he was responsible for ensuring delivery of the government’s domestic policy priorities across health, education, crime reduction, criminal justice, transport and immigration. The sustained focus on delivery from the heart of government, and the processes the PMDU developed, were significant innovations, of interest to numerous other countries and major global institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank.
From 2005 he was a partner at McKinsey and Company and then Chief Education Advisor at Pearson.
In 2012, he founded, with others, Delivery Associates. With his leadership, Delivery Associates has worked with government leaders across the developing and developed world to enable them to deliver their domestic policy priorities. These include the governments of Albania, Canada, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Peru, Chile, various states in Australia and the mayors of numerous US and Latin American cities including New York City, Medellin and Santiago De Chile. He stood down from Delivery Associates in 2024.
From 2017 to 2021 he was the founding Chair of the newly established Office for Students which regulates the higher education sector in England. He has also advised the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, on skills and the future economy.
From 2009 to 2018 he visited Pakistan more than 50 times to drive delivery of improved outcomes in the education and health systems of Punjab. He has also worked on economic reform and poverty alleviation with the federal government of Pakistan.
In 2017 he was commissioned by Her Majesty’s Treasury to review efficiency and public value. His report “Delivering better outcomes for citizens: practical steps for unlocking public value” was published with the budget in 2017 and proposed a new way of measuring public value.
During this time, he was also the founding vice-chair of the Education Outcomes Fund, of which Sir Ronald Cohen is the Chair. It has been a leading innovator in impact investing in education in the developing world.
For 2024 he was Adviser to the UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, on Effective Delivery and the Foreign Secretary’s Envoy on governance in the Palestinian Authority.
For several years he was a distinguished visiting scholar at Harvard School of Public Health. He is an Honorary Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford. In 2005, he was knighted for his services to improving government. Since he joined the House of Lords in January 2026, he has regularly raised issues relating to productivity, especially in the public sector, and to Devon and the South-West. He is a member of the House of Lords Public Services Committee.
He was Chair of Somerset County Cricket Club for four seasons, standing down in February 2026. He also co-chaired (with David Fursdon, the Lord Lieutenant of Devon) the Devon Land Use Pilot.
He is currently Chancellor of the University of Exeter and a member of the FA’s Performance Advisory Group.