Nancy Hey

Nancy Hey is Director of Evidence & Insight at Lloyds Register Foundation and a global leader in the field of wellbeing.

At Lloyds Register Foundation Nancy is setting up a Global Safety Evidence Centre and leads the World Risk Poll. From 2014-2024, Nancy was the Executive Director of the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, the UK's national body for wellbeing evidence and practicing aiming to understand what governments, business, communities and people can do to improve wellbeing. Nancy holds a wide a range of advisory roles, past and present, including as an expert advisor to the OECD and to the UK House of Lords Life Beyond Covid Committee; she is a Leadership Fellow at St George’s House, Windsor.

Prior to setting up the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, Nancy worked in the UK Civil Service as a policy professional and coach, delivering cross Government policies including on Constitutional Reform. Nancy has worked with the UK’s top Civil Servants to introduce wellbeing into public policy and to establish the professional policy community in the UK. She has degrees in Law and in Coaching and Development, specialising in emotions and in learning systems.

Nancy got interested in Creative Health, and how more people can benefit from it more often, because

• the high impact of arts, culture and creativity participation, of many kinds, on mental wellbeing consistently comes through in the evidence;
• Music participation produces some of the highest happiness findings in the evidence base;
• heritage volunteering kept producing strong impact findings for population groups for whom it really made a big difference in their lives