Jo Valentine, Baroness Valentine

Who is Jo Valentine, Baroness Valentine?

Josephine Clare Valentine, Baroness Valentine, known as Jo Valentine is a Crossbench member of the British House of Lords.

Valentine was educated at St Paul's Girls' School and St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she read Maths and Philosophy.

Valentine sits on the boards of several organisations in the United Kingdom. She is chief executive of London First, and was on the National Lottery Commission until September 2005. In 2005 she was recommended by the House of Lords Appointments Commission to be made a life peer, and is now known as Baroness Valentine, of Putney in the London Borough of Wandsworth. She is a Trustee of London Housing Association the Peabody Trust.

Baroness Valentine joined London First in 1997 as Managing Director, becoming Chief Executive in 2003. Her role centres on representing to national and local government the most pressing issues affecting London’s leading businesses. London First’s mission is to make London the best place in the world in which to do business. Its members include leading retailers, investment banks and property companies.

Prior to London First, Jo Valentine worked in corporate finance at Barings Bank, where she became the first female manager. In 1988, on secondment from Barings, she established and ran ‘The Blackburn Partnership’ a public-private partnership to regenerate Blackburn, Lancashire. In 1990 she joined The BOC Group to head the corporate finance and planning function, leaving in 1995 to establish the Central London Partnership.