Paul Dacre (chair of the review team) is an Executive Director of the Daily Mail and General Trust plc and was Appointed to the Board in 1998, having joined the Group in 1979. He has been Editor of the Daily Mail since 1992 and Editor-in Chief of Associated Newspapers since 1998. He is also a member of the Press Complaints Commission.

Sir Joseph Pilling worked in the Home Office, the Northern Ireland Office and the Department of Health from 1966 to 2005. He was Permanent Secretary of the NIO from 1997 until he retired. He is now Chairman of the Koestler Trust, which encourages the arts amongst prisoners, a member of the council of the University of London and a trustee of Macmillan Cancer Support. From 2005 to mid-2007 he chaired a working group for the Church of England that published Talent and Calling, a report on senior appointments in the church. He is now conducting a strategic review of the Civil Aviation Authority for the Secretary of State for Transport.

Professor Sir David Cannadine is the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Professor of British History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. He is the author and editor of numerous books including: The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990); G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (1992); Class in Britain (1998); Ornamentalism: how the British saw their empire (2001); In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain (2002), and, most recently, Mellon: An American Life (2006). He is also Chairman of the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, a Trustee of the Kennedy Memorial Trust and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, a Commissioner for English Heritage and Chairman of its Blue Plaques Panel, a member of the Advisory Committee of the Royal Mint, and the Editorial Board of the History of Parliament.