Emily Miles will soon leave her job as chief executive of the Food Standards Agency to become a director general at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, it has been announced.
Miles will depart the FSA in September and become Defra’s DG for food, biosecurity and trade.
The FSA has begun recruitment for her replacement, with £130,000 on offer for the organisation’s next leader.
Katie Pettifer, FSA’s director of strategy and regulatory compliance, will be interim chief exec while recruitment is under way.
Miles, who has been the FSA’s chief exec since 2019, said: “I’m delighted to take up this new challenge, but I’m really sad to be leaving the FSA.”
“The organisation has achieved a huge amount in these five years with a determined focus on delivering food you can trust,” she added.
“I am very grateful for the hard work and dedication of my colleagues in the FSA, and look forward to continuing to work with them in my new role.”
Miles said she is confident that that she is leaving the FSA in “the strong hands” of its leadership team and its chair Susan Jebb.
Jebb was due to leave the organisation in June but her term as chair has been temporarily extended “to provide consistent leadership” over the post-election period. Jebb said this will enable the FSA to continue to provide an effective regulatory system “to uphold the high food standards that are so important to us all”.
She said Miles will “bring a wealth of knowledge to her new role from her time at the FSA”, adding that she looks forward to working together to improve the food system.
Miles held several roles at Defra before becoming FSA’s chief exec in September 2019. In her last role at the department, she spent five months as director general for Defra's EU Exit Delivery Group.
Before that, she was director of the EU Exit Domestic and Constitutional Affairs Directorate at Defra from 2018 to 2019 and the department’s group director of strategy from 2015 to 2018.
She was also director of projects at the Cabinet Office’s Economic and Domestic Secretariat from 2014 to 2015.
In an interview with CSW last year, Miles said it was her pragmatist nature that led to her pursue a career in the civil service. She had previously spent a year working for the Quakers at the UN office in Geneva.
“It’s very necessary that some people do that, but I realised I wanted to go into the middle of it and understand the difficulties, the trade-offs and the complexity of the situation and try to make incremental improvements," she said.
"I think idealism is needed. But it’s not me. I’m a pragmatist. So I joined government, because I still wanted to make a difference but I was always interested in the humans and the politics and the realities of how you bring those things together and make shifts.”