Richard Allan has spent half his career working in the public sector (healthcare and politics), and the other half working in the private sector (internet hardware and social media).
Richard has worked on most of the “hot” technology policy issues including privacy and data use, content regulation, the conduct of politics online, competition, tax and connectivity.
Richard studied archaeology and worked as an excavator on ancient sites in the UK, Europe and Latin America.
Richard also has an MSc in Information Technology and spent several years building information systems for the UK’s National Health Service.
Richard began his political career in 1993 as a local councillor in Bath and was elected to the UK Parliament in 1997 as MP for Sheffield Hallam where he was re-elected in 2001.
Richard stepped down from Parliament in 2005 and moved to the technology sector, working at Cisco Systems (2005-9) and Facebook Inc (2009-2019).
Richard has been a member of the UK Parliament’s unelected second chamber, the House of Lords, since 2010 and became Health and Care Spokesperson for the Liberal Democrat group in January 2023.
Photo released under an Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence.
[Several official portrait images are available under a Creative Commons license from the UK Parliament website at https://members.parliament.uk/member/397/portrait]
Richard Allan 