Chris Felton has been a civil servant for over 25 years and has a wide range of strategy, policy and operational experience from his time at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, HM Treasury, Cabinet Office, Home Office and Charity Commission.

Chris currently works for the Home Office in London, and recent leadership roles have covered a wide range of security related issues, including heading the secretariat for an independent review, development and implementation of strategies for achieving the UK’s objectives overseas, running a programme of national exercises which tested the UK’s response to disruptive events, and successful delivery of work to ensure that all UK police forces were connected to and using the Child Abuse Image Database (CAID), a system which helps law enforcement to identify the victims of sexual abuse and bring those who make, share and download the images to justice, as well as assisting industry’s efforts to remove the images of abuse from the Internet. CAID won the Government’s 2015 Innovation Challenge against more than 50 other nominations from across the Civil Service. Chris presented this work on CAID to the 2015 WePROTECT international summit in Abu Dhabi.

Before his work on CAID, Chris was seconded to the Cabinet Office’s Civil Contingencies Secretariat. In that role, he was responsible for producing strategic assessments of the risks facing the UK. He also led the UK’s work to make the UK’s critical national infrastructure more resilient to the effects of severe solar storms (along the lines of the 1859 Carrington event) and volcanic eruptions in Iceland. Before being seconded to the Cabinet Office, Chris’s roles included being Private Secretary to the Home Secretary and Head of Assurance for the safety and security programme for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Chris has also gained significant policy experience from outside government, working in government relations for Universities UK, the representative body for the heads of the UK’s universities, and as a charity trustee.

Chris has a BA(Hons) in Medieval Studies from the University of Manchester and an MBA from Warwick Business School. He is also an alumnus of the Singularity University in California and was a judge for the 2016 Government Innovation Challenge.

 

Areas of expertise

• Strategic risk assessment and mitigation
• Resilience strategies
• Preparedness and crisis management