Mr A Dilnot

Principal

Andrew Dilnot has been Principal of St Hugh’s College since October 2002 and Pro Vice Chancellor of Oxford University since 2005. He is an economist and broadcaster. He went to a comprehensive school in Swansea, and then after a PPE degree in Oxford worked for the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London.

He was Director of the Institute from 1991 to 2002. He was the founding presenter of BBC Radio 4’s series on the beauty of numbers, More or Less, and presents television documentaries about the economy for Channel 4. He is the chairman of the Statistics Users Forum of the Royal Statistical Society. He has served on the Social Security Advisory Committee, the National Consumer Council, the Retirement Income Inquiry, the Balance of Central and Local Funding Inquiry, the Rowntree Committee on the future costs of long term care, the Ageing Population Foresight panel, and the Councils of the Royal Economic Society and Queen Mary and Westfield College. He is an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College Oxford, Queen Mary University of London, the Swansea Institute of Higher Education and the Institute of Actuaries, and holds an Honorary Doctorate from City University.

He is passionate about the role and use of statistics, which is the subject of his latest book, 'The Tiger that isn't:seeing through a world of numbers', written with his long-standing colleague Michael Blastland. Rory Bremner said of the book that it 'makes statistics far, far too interesting'. His main research interests lie in government economic policy and its effects on the distribution of income, labour market behaviour, savings and pensions, and also the control and setting of government budgetary rules and the monitoring of fiscal policy. He was awarded a CBE in 2000 for services to economics and economic policy.