Theresa Villiers, Ex-Northern Ireland Secretary
With over 25 years in public service, Dame Theresa Villiers DBE has held senior roles in both Westminster and the European Parliament. She is best known for her tenure as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, where she managed crises and defended the Good Friday institutions. Her career has been defined by clarity, resilience, and diplomatic skill.As a former Cabinet Minister, Villiers has overseen critical portfolios including Environment, Transport, and Northern Ireland. She played a leading role in projects such as Crossrail, delivered legislation like the Environment Act, and helped guide the UK through the London 2012 Olympics. Her expertise bridges security, governance, and sustainable development.
In this exclusive interview with The Champions Speakers Agency, Villiers reflects on sustainability, regulatory reform, cyber threats, and crisis leadership. She shares her perspectives on how businesses and governments can adapt to global challenges while building resilience for the future.
Q1. How can greater visibility of women in senior roles strengthen governance and decision-making?
Dame Theresa Villiers: I think diversity in a board or in your overall leadership team is just a crucial part of competitiveness. Having women in leadership positions sends a real signal that businesses are interested in the perspective of their women customers, their women investors.
And representation does matter. Women make up half the population and they want to know that their concerns are listened to, their perspective is part of the decision-making in our great businesses in the UK. You can’t really do that unless you have women in visible, prominent positions.
Also, in terms of motivating the workforce, every business will have high-performing women involved in their workforce, and keeping them is important. One of the ways to do that is to make sure that they see women role models at senior levels in the business.
I think, you know, there are obviously many debates on affirmative action programmes and so-called wokeness, but it’s absolutely mainstream that having women represented at senior levels in a business helps it engage with its customers and ensures that having a diverse board with different perspectives on how you approach innovation, how you manage risk, can be a serious competitive advantage.
I’m pleased to say that businesses seem to very much remain committed to that, despite the background of culture wars that seem to be underway at the moment.
Q2. What role should businesses play in advancing sustainability and addressing climate challenges?
Dame Theresa Villiers: I think it’s really crucial that they do. Again, sustainability is, I think, a crucial part of having a sustainable business for the long term. There are huge amounts of initiatives underway in terms of incorporating environmental impact into reporting and accounts, which I think is really welcome news.
There are great ways in which businesses can begin to measure their impact both on climate and on the natural environment, on biodiversity. Setting some science-based targets and KPIs for the business to reduce its environmental footprint is now being done across a wide range of sectors.
Some of the work that I did in terms of the Environment Act was designed to make that easier, and I think we’re seeing some dividends being yielded from the Environment Act. I hope it makes it easier for businesses to get involved in reducing their environmental footprint and their impact on both our climate and nature.
Getting some good professional advice about how to set achievable targets, I think, is going to be important. And then very much involving and training your staff and your contractors on how to operate in the most sustainable way, engaging with your staff, contractors, and your customers about this journey that we’re all going on.
For me, nature recovery and conservation – conserving the natural environment – was a key theme of my political career, my time in public life, which I return to again and again. I’ve been impressed with the commitment shown amongst UK business to that. In the speeches I make, I always try and build in that environmental theme because of the urgency of dealing with this issue. It’s a cause I care really strongly about.
Q3. How can regulatory reform be used as a tool to foster innovation and competitiveness?
Dame Theresa Villiers: Well, regulatory reform is crucial for facilitating innovation because there are so many sectors where it’s very difficult to get products onto the market or engage with customers unless you have some certainty about standards, about safety, essentially about regulation.
An obvious example is AI, but there are other things such as driverless cars. Agri-tech was something that I was very interested in and focused on during my time as an MP. In all of those, the UK has tremendous strengths, and creating the right regulatory environment will enable those areas to flourish.
I hope we’ve seen a bit of a contrast in the approach taken in the UK as compared to the EU on artificial intelligence. The EU rules – there’s a real anxiety that they’ll smother innovation, whereas in the UK we’ve tried to take a more flexible approach which will enable innovation.
Certainly, in the work I did on the Task Force on Regulatory Reform I was involved with, and further back in my career doing financial services regulation in the European Parliament, I know how important it is that regulation is targeted, risk-based, and proportionate.
But I think also a crucial issue is you’ve got to be able to update it quickly when circumstances change. With technology moving at an incredibly fast pace, what makes sense in regulatory terms one month may be counterproductive and not work a month later.
I’ve been a great advocate for testing, trying different types of regulation, and particularly sandboxes which enable a particular product to be marketed with real consumers so that you can see how it works and whether safety and regulatory concerns do exist, whilst minimising the risk because you’re testing it in a controlled and limited environment.
That targeted nature of regulation, but also flexibility to make sure you can change it when circumstances change, has been an area of interest for me for 25 years or so – in two parliaments, in the European Parliament and the House of Commons – how we get regulation right.
It is so crucial to enabling us to compete in the global race for jobs and investment, because if we have the right regulatory climate we’ll attract capital here, which leads to more and better jobs and economic growth. That’s why I’ve taken such a strong interest in it over the years, and why it, too, features in the speeches I tend to make.
Q4. What lessons can diplomacy and business leadership share about handling crises?
Dame Theresa Villiers: A lot of it is prior preparation, and getting a trusted team around you that can give you wise advice when the crisis occurs, and also having built relationships with different stakeholders.
Almost a kind of question of fixing the roof while the sun’s shining – when things are slightly calmer, put the hours into making those contacts so that when there is a crisis, you can get good advice, look at the evidence, make a swift decision.
I very much think it helps to get out there and make your point, provide that direction. You may not have all the answers initially, but it’s best to be clear and resilient and calm in the face of a crisis because that will instil confidence.
And, as I say, having that great team around you helps you project that and work out the next way forward. I think all of that is really crucial in successfully dealing with the sort of crisis I faced. For example, when twice the institutions set up by the Good Friday Agreement were on the point of collapse during my time as Secretary of State.
In both those instances, I got out there in front and made speeches and gave press conferences and set a direction and set a strategy and followed it.
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