Our Strategic Council is made up of 18 member organisations, and provides the overall direction for IHPN’s work programme, ensuring our strategic agenda links with our members and their priorities.
Lord Kamlesh Patel (Chair)
Lord Kamlesh Patel was raised to the peerage as Baron Patel of Bradford, of Bradford in the County of West Yorkshire in 2006 and is a cross bench peer.
A qualified Social Worker, Lord Patel worked in inner city Bradford and then established a number of Third Sector agencies working with those misusing drugs and those with mental health problems; later moving to academia working with a number of universities.
Lord Patel has held a number of high-profile public appointments on national boards and committees, including the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work, the Home Office’s Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs, the Healthcare Commission, the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse and the Care Quality Commission. He was also Chairman of the Mental Health Act Commission and Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
Lord Patel has contributed to a variety of Government policies including being the architect of the Government’s five year action plan for delivering race equality in mental health care. In 2007 he was appointed by the Prime Minister to act as a Ministerial Adviser to the Secretary of State (DCLG) in respect of the government’s PREVENT agenda (Preventing Violent Extremism). He was also Chairman of a National Taskforce looking at the effectiveness of prison drug treatment culminating in the publication of the influential Patel Report.
In 2018, Lord Patel of Bradford was appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and the Secretary of State for Health & Social Care as the Chair of Social Work England – the new regulator for all child, family and adult social workers in England.
He was honoured with an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 1999 and was voted “Yorkshireman of the year” in 2016.
