Kat advises clients in Frontier’s Public Policy practice and has been a professional economist since 1999.
She has specialised her career in using economics to help create policy that delivers better outcomes for society, the economy and the environment. She has worked with many major UK government departments, agencies, regulators and the wider public sector. Kat has extensive experience of policy design, appraisal and evaluation. Particular areas of her policy expertise are in environmental policy (mainly climate change adaptation); economic growth; transport and infrastructure; and health and social care. She takes a common-sense approach by listening carefully to her client’s policy challenge, understanding the decision-making context and applying economics to find a practical solution.
Kat has worked for many clients to help them understand the impacts on local or national economic activity of particular government policies, and the contribution of particular sectors to economic growth. She led work for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to assess the channels through which the digital communications sector contributes to the economy, and estimated the magnitude of this contribution using analytical methods. This work fed into the DCMS review “A Communications Review for the Digital Age”.
She also led work with Infrastructure UK and HM Treasury to assess the potential contribution to economic growth of better accounting for the interdependencies across the infrastructure system. This analysis used in-depth case studies to estimate the scale of benefits and fed into the government’s National Infrastructure Plan.
Kat joined Frontier in 2011 after twelve years in the Government Economic Service. During that time she held several senior economist positions advising government ministers and senior officials on issues such as the value for money of transport initiatives, climate change policy, airport regulation and carbon valuation in appraisal.