Alison Garnham has been Chief Executive of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) since September 2010. Prior to this she was the CEO of Daycare Trust and was previously, for nine years, the Director of Policy at One Parent Families (now Gingerbread). In her early career, she worked for nearly ten years as a welfare rights adviser in Citizens Advice Bureaux and for women’s organisations and local voluntary sector organisations before, in 1989, joining CPAG (for the first time) where she co-authored a number of publications about the Child Support Act. She has subsequently written about childcare, lone parenthood and child poverty. Before joining One Parent Families she was Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of North London (now London Metropolitan University) where she has also been an Honorary Research Fellow. She was for nine years a member of the Social Security Advisory Committee. She is a school parent governor at her son’s school and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.