Cathryn Ross is Strategy and External Affairs Director at Thames Water. She is responsible for shaping and embedding a strategy to ensure that Thames Water delivers for customers, communities and the environment. She is an experienced regulatory and competition economist and has worked across a number of different sectors advising on economic, regulatory and competition issues.

Before joining Thames Water, Cathryn was Group Regulatory Affairs Director at BT Group and responsible for developing and implementing BT’s regulatory strategy across the group, covering regulation in the UK and beyond.

Prior to that Cathryn was Chief Executive of Ofwat, the independent economic regulator for the water and wastewater sector in England and Wales. She successfully saw through the delivery of a new strategy for Ofwat, focussed on a vision for the sector of trust and confidence in water and wastewater services, and transformed the regulator in order to deliver this.  She led the 2014 price review and played a key role in the opening of the non-household retail market in England to competition.

Previously, Cathryn held a variety of executive roles including at the Office of Rail Regulation (now Office of Rail and Road), the Competition Commission (now Competition and Markets Authority), Oftel (now Ofcom) and in economic consultancy.

Cathryn is also a non-executive director at the Institute of Customer Service and serves as an independent non-executive director on the boards of National Grid Electricity Transmission and National Grid Gas.