New appointments to Board of the Office for Environmental Protection

Two appointments and two re-appointments to the OEP Board

Professor Elizabeth Fisher and Caroline May have been appointed as Non-Executive Directors of the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), and Professor Dan Laffoley and Dr Paul Leinster CBE have been reappointed for second terms.

Elizabeth Fisher’s and Caroline May’s new roles will run from 1 July 2025 until 30 June 2029. Dan Laffoley’s and Paul Leinster’s second terms will run from 1 July 2025 to 31 December 2026.

The appointments have been made in accordance with the Ministerial Governance Code on Public Appointments published by the Cabinet Office. All appointments are made on merit and political activity plays no part in the selection process.

The Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) was created in November 2021 under the Environment Act. It is an independent statutory body with a remit to protect and improve the environment by holding government and other public authorities to account in England and Northern Ireland.

Professor Elizabeth Fisher is Professor of Environmental Law at the Faculty of Law and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford.

She has over three decades of experience as an environmental law academic and writes widely on environmental law and administrative law in national common law jurisdictions.

She was General Editor of the Journal of Environmental Law from 2012 to 2022 and from 2022 to 2025 she held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a project exploring legal imagination and environmental law.

She is a Delegate of Oxford University Press and has served as Vice Dean of the Oxford Law Faculty. She is also an Overseas Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law and has been a Member of the OEP’s Advisory Group on Environmental Principles since 2023.