Sir Robert Chote

I was delighted and honoured to be appointed as the 29th President of Trinity College, taking up my post in November 2025.

Most of my career has been spent scrutinising economic policy and the management of the public finances, hoping to improve the quality of policy decisions and outcomes for public benefit both directly and by informing public understanding and debate.

In addition to my college responsibilities, I chair the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council (NIFC), an independent public body created to bring transparency and scrutiny to the region’s public finances. I am also a Non-Executive Director of Pacific Horizon Investment Trust plc, which invests in high-growth businesses in Asia. And I am a trustee of two charities, one of which supports early career professional development in theatre, music and literature.

I began my career as a business and economics journalist on The Independent in 1990, moving to the Financial Times to be Economics Editor in 1995. From 2000, I spent three years as an adviser to the First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC, before returning to the UK to become the Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies for eight years.

In 2010, I was appointed as Chair of the newly created Office for Budget Responsibility and served in that role for a decade. For three of those years, I also chaired the OECD’s Network of Parliamentary Budget Officials and Independent Fiscal Institutions. I remain an advisor to the Parliamentary Budget Office of the Oireachtas in Ireland and have provided ad hoc advice on budgetary institutions and processes in countries ranging from Brazil to Iceland. From 2022 to 2025, I was Chair of the UK Statistics Authority. I also chaired an independent review of the Church of England’s support for low-income and poorly served communities in 2022.

I was born in Winchester in 1968 and went to school near Southampton. I studied economics at Queens’ College Cambridge, then journalism at what is now City St George’s University in London and later international public policy at SAIS Johns Hopkins in Washington DC. I am an Honorary Fellow at Queens’ and hold honorary doctorates from York and City St George’s. I was knighted for services to the economy and fiscal policy in 2021.