The life and career of Polly Neate, the journalist who became a charity chief executive

Ms Neate started her career as a journalist at Community Care, a magazine covering social work and care. She spent 15 years there and was editor for the last six. “I absolutely loved it,” she says, particularly the campaigns and working with social workers.

From journalism to the charity field

In 2005, she moved into the charity sector, first as executive director of external relations and communications at Action for Children.

Why the career change? Ms Neate had wanted to be a journalist “who really changed things”.

“Then I realised that some journalists do really change the world, but I wasn’t a good enough journalist to be one of them,” she says. I am dubious though, as Community Care won business and professional magazine of the year at the Professional Publishers Association Awards in 2003 under her watch.

Ms Neate thought she would be more able to change things in the charity sector.

In 2013, she took on her first chief executive role at domestic abuse charity Women’s Aid. “I wanted to be a chief executive – I felt like I could be,” she says. “And I’m a feminist, so the idea of running a women’s organisation really appealed to me.”

Domestic abuse was present in many of the family situations Action for Children was seeing. “[It] is huge, but so poorly resourced, so little understood and so badly dealt with, still by a whole range of agencies. So when the job came up at Women’s Aid… I knew that was what I wanted to do. I was very lucky to get [the job],” she says, adding that she took a “massive pay cut” to do so.

Why is domestic abuse so poorly resourced? “Patriarchy,” Ms Neate states. “If you want to get resources for it, you have to make sure you mention the fact that men are victims too, otherwise forget it. They are, but the vast majority of victims are women.”

If the vast majority were men? “Are you actually kidding me? If women were killing men at the rate men are killing women – can you even imagine? Women are put in prison for not paying fines,” she says. “If dogs were killing people at the rate men are killing women, we wouldn’t have as many dogs around the place.”

She stops. “Don’t get me started. Because all your readers will start hating me, and I don’t want them to do that. I want them to hire me as an executive coach after I leave Shelter,” she continues.

We will get to that later. Ms Neate says working at Women’s Aid was a “privilege” that changed her as a person. “I matured a lot. I matured as a feminist. I gained a lot of clarity on my values and beliefs and what was important to me,” she explains.

It was also hard – a constant fight to keep the organisation afloat financially. “I spent a lot of my time chasing money, but we really made change.”

Under her leadership, Women’s Aid successfully campaigned for legislation which established coercive and controlling behaviour as a criminal offence. Ms Neate describes this as “one of the most amazing moments” of her life.

She points to the case of Sally Challen, who was jailed for murdering her husband in 2011 but released in 2019. Her conviction was quashed due to evidence of coercive control. “That was just a moment, a moment for women, but it was a real moment for me, for sure,” she says.

She praises the charity’s staff and the women running local domestic abuse services. “They inspired me every single time I met them – they still do. When I think about those women and what they do and the lack of resources.”

Ms Neate says she was “getting loads of recognition”, but “they weren’t getting any of that… And they were literally saving women’s lives every day. That was really humbling.”

The role had downsides for her personal life. Men’s rights activists egged her house and slashed her tyres. She says she was able to handle it because she is a “resilient” person. Why is she? “I’ve just had a very privileged life. I had a very privileged, happy childhood. I’m just resilient because I’m lucky.”

I argue that privilege does not always equal resilience. “That’s actually a very good point,” Ms Neate says, but adds she has “always” been that way.

In her next role four years later, she would take on a new challenge: the housing crisis.

Private landlords have described Ms Neate as “controversial”, blaming her for rises in homelessness due to campaigning for increased regulation of the private rented sector to give tenants more protection.

Ms Neate was awarded a CBE in 2020 for services to homelessness. “They put up a petition to stop me from getting it,” she says.

“When I joined Shelter, a load of men’s rights activists petitioned the Charity Commission to get me sacked because Shelter wouldn’t help men any more when I joined because I’m a mad man-hater,” she jokes.

“You can tell something by people’s enemies, can’t you? I’m proud of my enemies.”

Ms Neate joined Shelter in 2017. She had not been looking for a job move, but that changed when the role came up. “Because I had really come to realise that it is all about housing,” she says.

In her previous role, she saw women stay in life-threatening situations to avoid homelessness. “You could well be put in intolerable situations to live in, and women don’t want to put themselves and their children through that, [so] they continue risking their lives.”

But the housing sector was a culture shift. “I couldn’t understand why the housing sector wasn’t talking about social housing… and Shelter wasn’t either,” she recalls.

“I hadn’t forgotten that men run the world, because they were literally egging my house, but I had forgotten what it was like to be in that situation of being mansplained,” Ms Neate says.

“If I had a thousand quid for every bloke that’s said, ‘housing is a lot more complicated’ than I think it is, I could build the bloody social housing right now. You can quote that.”

She adds there are also “absolutely awesome people” in the housing sector and that things have improved a lot (but are still a bit the same).

The lack of discussion around social housing and its impact on homelessness was surprising to Ms Neate. “I couldn’t understand why nobody was talking about the fact that we wouldn’t have this problem if we had social housing.”

So, is it really that simple? She says: “Of course, there are lots of things that need to change in order to deliver the social housing. I get that. I’m not stupid. But, literally, that is the answer. You still can’t get everyone to say it – not loud enough.”

Thoughts on the government

Ms Neate says the biggest challenge to addressing homelessness is the “political will gap around social housing”.

What does she think of the Labour government so far? “I believe that Angela Rayner is committed to building a significant number of social homes,” Ms Neate says, and calls the deputy prime minister and housing secretary’s actions so far “positive”.  However, she adds: “It isn’t enough, of course.”