 Owen Kelly joined the civil service in 1988, a couple of years after graduating from Edinburgh University with an honours degree in Chinese. He worked on several prominent areas of conservation government policy in Scotland, including the ‘poll tax’ and the reform of the legal profession. He also spent 2 years in Tokyo working to persuade Japanese companies to invest in Scotland; and served as Private Secretary to one of the Scottish Office Ministers, Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, from 1990 to 1992.
He was asked in 1997 to work on strategic communications, as the whole nature of government communications went through rapid change with the arrival of the new Labour government. He was responsible for EU and external affairs at the time of devolution in 1999 and led negotiations with the UK government departments on how EU and international business should be handled. He has since worked as head of the Scottish Executive Press Office, Head of Properties at Historic Scotland and as Private Secretary to the First Minister, Jack McConnell, from 2003 to 2005.
From 2005 to 2007 he was lead official for the Scottish Government’s work on international relationships and communications, becoming full-time Director of Communications in May 2007.
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