Simon Russell spent 25 years as a partner at Spencer Stuart, an international executive search and leadership consulting firm. A hereditary peer, he entered the Lords on the cross-benches in 1982, leaving after the 1999 House of Lords Act, returning in 2014 as one of the 90 elected hereditary peers. He sits on the EU Internal Market Sub-Committee and is the cross-bench representative to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the continent’s leading human rights organisation. He is an officer of the APPG for Adoption and Permanence. He is a Governor of the children’s charity, Coram, having been a trustee from 2009-2018, and was the chair of Life Education Centres which he merged into Coram, from 1994-2018. He is a Patron of the Cavell Nurses’ Trust. He read history at Trinity College, Cambridge 1978-81 and business administration at INSEAD, Fontainebleau 1981-82.