The UCL Constitution Unit’s leadership structure will change on 13 May as Professor Alan Renwick takes over as Director. He will succeed Professor Meg Russell FBA, who has been Director since 2015.
Meanwhile, Dr Tom Fleming will succeed Professor Renwick as Deputy Director. The Unit is also very pleased to announce that it has appointed a Lecturer in British and Comparative Politics, completing its new leadership team.
Professor Meg Russell FBA has been Director of the Constitution Unit since 1 October 2015. She originally joined the Unit as a Senior Research Fellow in 1998 and was promoted to Professor of British and Comparative Politics in 2014. She is recognised as a leading authority on parliaments comparatively and on the UK parliament, including a particular interest in the House of Lords. She is the author of five books, most recently Legislation at Westminster: Parliamentary Actors and Influence in the Making of British Law (2017, with Daniel Gover) and The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit (2023, with Lisa James). She has also authored or co-authored over 35 Unit reports, most recently The Constitutional Landscape: Options for Reform (2025).
During Professor Russell’s leadership of the Unit, the UK’s constitutional system has faced both changes and challenges during a turbulent decade of politics. She and the wider Unit have sought to inform public debate, and frequently given advice to policy-makers from all political parties and none. She was appointed as an Associate of the Institute for Government in 2015, and elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2020. From 2019 to 2022 she was a Senior Fellow with the UK in a Changing Europe, leading a project on Brexit, Parliament and the Constitution. Most recently, she has led the Unit’s Constitutional Principles and the Health of Democracy project, which seeks to inform debate among policy-makers and others about UK democracy and constitutional change, and to promote the importance of maintaining constitutional and democratic standards.
Professor Russell will mark the end of her tenure with a private lecture on 12 May. A recording of this event will subsequently be made publicly available. She will continue to be based at UCL, and from September will drop to a 50% contract, continuing to teach, write and contribute to policy debates.
Professor Alan Renwick will become Director of the Constitution Unit on 13 May. He is a leading expert in electoral systems, referendums and deliberative processes such as citizens’ assemblies, and often works closely with policy-makers from across the political spectrum on these matters.
Professor Renwick joined the Unit as Deputy Director in 2015 and was promoted to Professor of Democratic Politics in 2021. His subsequent inaugural lecture was titled ‘How can we fix our democracy?’. He is the author or co-author of four books and over a dozen Unit reports. He is currently Deputy Head of Department (Impact and Engagement) for the Department of Political Science and co-host of the UCL Uncovering Politics podcast, and he leads the UCL Democracy Forum.
Projects that Professor Renwick has led at the Unit include the Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit, the Independent Commission on Referendums, Doing Democracy Better and the Working Group on Unification Referendums on the Island of Ireland. His most recent major project, Democracy in the UK after Brexit, used two large-scale surveys and a citizens’ assembly to explore public opinion towards UK democracy. It produced four Unit reports that have been extensively cited in parliament, the media and by two former Prime Ministers.
Dr Tom Fleming will succeed Professor Renwick as Deputy Director of the Constitution Unit on 13 May. He joined the Unit in 2021 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2025.
An expert in parliamentary politics, Dr Fleming is leading the Unit’s Politics of Parliamentary Procedure project and published the report Delivering House of Commons Reform: What Works? in 2024. He has (co-)authored journal articles on various subjects, including parliamentary reform, legislative scrutiny, prorogation, and cabinet reshuffles.
Since joining the Unit, Dr Fleming has been a key member of its leadership team and the coordinator of its events programme. He has also submitted written evidence to multiple parliamentary committees and is currently writing a book about the process of procedural reform in the UK House of Commons.
Following a competitive application process, the Unit is also very pleased to say that it has appointed a new Lecturer in British and Comparative Politics to complete its leadership team. Further information about this appointment will be announced next year.
In the meantime, the Unit’s next annual conference will take place online on 24 and 25 June. We will publish a full programme in the coming weeks, and we encourage all in our networks to save these dates in your diaries.
Outgoing Director Professor Meg Russell FBA said:
‘It has been a privilege to lead the UCL Constitution Unit for these last 10 ½ years, and to work with an amazing range of talented and committed people. This was an often challenging period, which saw significant upheaval in our politics, including the questioning of various constitutional fundamentals. I am very proud of what the Unit has achieved, to shed crucial light on constitutional questions, foster well-informed public debate, and encourage policymakers to adhere to high standards of democracy. I am really grateful to all of those inside the Unit, and with whom we have collaborated, who have made such important contributions to that. Those people include Alan and Tom, and I now wish them every success as a new leadership team.’
Incoming Director Professor Alan Renwick said:
‘It is a huge honour to be taking over from Meg Russell as Director of the Constitution Unit. Meg is both a scholar of great renown within academia and an expert with an unrivalled reputation for insight and good sense among policy-makers. She will be a remarkably hard act to follow. I am grateful for all she has done, and look forward to continuing the work of the Constitution Unit that she has led so well. It will be a pleasure to work with superb colleagues within the Unit and across our wider networks. Our mission to inform debates about constitutional change and healthy democracy is more important today than ever. We will shortly announce a fantastic programme of speakers for our annual conference in June, and I look forward to setting out further plans for the Unit’s future in the coming months.’
Incoming Deputy Director Dr Tom Fleming said:
‘I am delighted to be taking on this new role at the Constitution Unit. The Unit’s reputation as an outstanding source of timely, rigorous, independent research is the fruit of many people’s hard work over more than thirty years. I look forward to building on and continuing that work in collaboration with Alan and our other excellent colleagues. I particularly look forward to continuing and developing the Unit’s research on parliament – a topic that will remain central to our work in the coming years.’
The Unit is the UK’s leading research centre on constitutional change. Founded in 1995 by Professor Robert Hazell, it produces timely, rigorous and independent research covering parliament, government, democracy, elections and more. This work has a significant real-world impact, informing policy-makers and public debate. The Unit’s outputs include a long-running report series, lively blog and monthly events programme.
