Speaker details

Biography

Tim Hames has been Director General of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (BVCA) since May 2013. He was previously Deputy CEO and Director of Policy at the organisation. His first career was as an academic at Oxford University where he was a Lecturer in Politics, having previously been an undergraduate and graduate student at the university. He specialised In American Government and also taught British Government and Politics. He has almost thirty publications in various books and scholarly journals on American and British public policy. In 1996 he became a journalist at The Times where he was ultimately the chief editorial writer, a political columnist, an Assistant Editor and edited the newspaper as a whole on numerous occasions. In 2009-2010 he was the first Special Adviser to the Speaker of the House of Commons and responsible for pursuing a wide-ranging programme of parliamentary reform. He came to the BVCA as then Head of Public Affairs, Communications and Campaigns in July 2010. Tim is an Honorary Visiting Fellow of De Montfort University and a Fellow of the Institute of Travel and Tourism. The BVCA has approximately 500 members evenly divided between practitioners and advisory firms. It is responsible for the representation of the private equity and venture capital sectors to ministers, their shadows, other parliamentarians, officials, regulators, the media, other members of the business community, other stakeholders and society at large. It has extensive public policy, research and communications networks and activities. It works very closely with the EVCA and has ties to more than 25 other equivalent trade associations throughout the world. It also seeks to have deep roots in the whole of the British business community and not just London. It currently employs just over thirty full-time staff, evenly divided between membership services and external advocacy.