With more than twenty years’ experience in and around local government, Rachael is a passionate advocate for better policy reform, social equality, and the transformation of public services.
She has worked with national charities, think tanks, and public bodies including the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, IPPR, Citizens Advice, and Nuffield Foundation, and sits on the Visionary Network Panel.
Rachael is a local government policy geek, and after spending 15 years writing it, she now helps councils to deliver better policy through masterclasses, consultancy, and policy evaluations. Better Policy is about governance, social psychology, and exploring how decisions are made, how bias shapes outcomes, and how systems can be redesigned to work better for people.
She has a particular interest in local government funding reform, has studied and consulted on local government policy decision-making extensively, and advocates for a fairer, needs-based approach to service delivery.
Rachael’s national profile has grown rapidly in recent years. She is a regular commentator across the media, appearing on BBC News, BBC Radio 4’s Money Box Live, LBC, and BBC Wales, and her research and commentary have been featured in national newspapers and think tank publications. You might also find her videos on social media talking about what good public and social policy looks like.
She holds an MPA – Master of Public Administration in Public and Social Policy from the University of York, an IRRV Diploma in Local Government Finance and Administration, a BA in English from the University of Manchester, and other qualifications in Local Government Finance and Marketing.
Through Better Policy, Rachael helps councils, think tanks, and charities design and deliver better policy.
Because better policy changes lives.
Council Tax is underpinning regional and local inequalities and simply makes no sense anymore. We treat national priorities like education and social care as local services because of the way we fund them. And we are setting our communities up to fail by failing to share the burden of funding these national, essential services.
If you’ve met Rachael, she will have exposed herself as a Council Tax geek, declared her life’s work as a mission to abolish it, compared its funding to the NHS, and will have complained about Council Tax.
A lot.
Even the term “welfare reform” is problematic. Social security is a national, societal investment and the stigma, shame, and divisive public conversations stem from bad policy design.
Rachael’s particular interest is social policy philosophy principles of reciprocity, resentment, and moral deservingness — exploring how blame and virtue shape who we believe should be helped, and on what terms.
Rachael write, talks, and teaches policy bias using real world welfare scenarios like the two-child limit, local welfare assistance, and policy sanctions.
Rachael has studied the fragmentation of local welfare assistance and discretionary programmes such as Council Tax Reduction, Household Support Funds, and short-term policies like Test and Trace Support Payments. Rachael’s academic and consultancy work has found this fragmentation at the root of local and regional inequalities, geographic injustice, and sometimes frankly bonkers policymaking.
It is from this work that Rachael founded Better Policy, a way to support local government to design, build, and deliver local policy that works for communities without bias.
Rachael is a passionate Lancastrian with lived experience of regional inequalities and works nationally to expose the real-life differences in the way people experience public services, health, wealth, and happiness.
Regional inequalities are driven by funding structures (see Council Tax), public infrastructure (or lack of), and the persistent view that the local economy is still somehow defined by local government boundaries.
Regional inequalities feature heavily in our blog.
Social policy choices often hit women first and hardest. Whether this is welfare policies like the two-child limit or single household payments of Universal credit, or health policies like maternity care funding and social care cuts, women are disproportionately affected by decisions that undervalue unpaid labour and caregiving.
Gender bias in policy is rarely explicit, it’s embedded in the assumptions of who works, who cares, and whose time is worth protecting. Rachael’s work explores how economic design, family policy, and welfare structures can be rebuilt to recognise and reward women’s contribution to society rather than penalise it.
Rachael’s interest in social science fiction comes from a belief that imagination is a political tool. The boundaries of policy are often set not by evidence, but by what we assume is possible. Social science fiction uses speculative thinking to test those limits, to ask what society might look like if we designed systems around care, fairness, and collective wellbeing instead of austerity and scarcity.
Through this lens, Rachael explores how policy could function in alternative futures: what universal welfare might mean for dignity, how local governance could work without hierarchy, or how data and technology might serve equality instead of control.
Social science fiction is about world building with the courage to imagine policy that truly works. That and a bit of sci-fi geekery to make policy fun.