Carolyn Fairbairn

Carolyn Fairbairn was appointed as a non-executive director of the UK Statistics Authority on 1 April 2013 for a period of three years.

Since 2012, Carolyn has served as a non-executive director of Lloyds Banking Group and Vitec Group plc, and she is currently a Trustee of Marie Curie Cancer Care. Between 2009 and 2011, Carolyn was Chair of the Royal Television Society, and was a non-executive director of the Financial Services Authority between 2008 and 2011.

Carolyn has held a number of senior UK media roles, including as Director of Group Development and Strategy at ITV, Director of Strategy and Distribution at the BBC, and Director of Strategy at BBC Worldwide. Carolyn was a partner at McKinsey and Company in London where she led McKinsey’s UK media practice serving clients in the UK and Europe, specialising in digital strategy. Before joining the BBC, Carolyn was a special adviser in the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit at 10 Downing Street (1995-97). Her early career was as an economist at the World Bank in both Washington DC and Bangkok, and as a journalist working for The Economist in London.

Carolyn was educated at the University of Cambridge where she read Economics, followed by postgraduate study at the European Institute of Business Administration (INSEAD) in Fontainebleau, near Paris, and at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.