The Princess of Wales has called for more dignity for carers and a greater respect for values such as “tenderness” in business, in her first public speech in two years.
At an event in the City of London, Catherine called on 80 top business leaders to play their part in ensuring employees can have healthy family lives, including caring responsibilities.
“I believe in restoring the dignity to the quiet, often invisible work of caring, of loving well, as we look to build a happier, healthier society,” the princess told the Future Workforce Summit.
The event was part of Catherine’s campaign to raise awareness about the importance of children’s early years and building healthy family relationships.
This was Catherine’s first speech since November 2023 and the first since her cancer diagnosis, which was revealed in March 2024.
Since then, she has delivered recorded messages on social media, including about her gradual recovery after chemotherapy, but this has been the first speech since then to have been delivered in person.
It marks another step in her return to public life and also reflects her style, with the event beginning with a poem read by Alex Wharton, former children’s laureate for Wales.
Her speech, confidently delivered, reflected her deeply-held, personal message about the need for a greater emphasis on kindness and recognising that “love is the first and most essential bond”.
“The love we feel in our earliest years fundamentally shapes who we become and how we thrive as adults,” said the princess.
She told business leaders about the need for families to be able to provide a supportive home for their children, as part of what she called the “weave of love”.
The speech was delivered high up in a city skyscraper, with London stretched out below like a model village.
Catherine called on business leaders to re-think their workplaces and create a different kind of model for their priorities, in which companies were “valuing time and tenderness just as much as productivity and success”.
The princess, who set up the Centre for Early Childhood before her illness, called for a more rounded way of measuring success.
“As business leaders you will face the daily challenge of finding the balance between profitability and having a positive impact. But the two are not, and should not be incompatible,” she said.
The event also heard from Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, who said research showed that people who had been in nurturing relationships in early childhood were still likely to be more emotionally secure in their old age.
Former England football manager Sir Gareth Southgate, addressing this business gathering, said that when he was trying to motivate players, he had found that youngsters from difficult family backgrounds might not have the same level of trust as those who had grown up in closer family relationships.
He said that coaches carried out personality profiles on the players to understand the “way they were wired”.
He talked about his own experiences of responding to moments of pressure, using a combination of “sleep, good nutrition and limiting alcohol” and breathing exercises to control stress.
Sir Gareth also remembered his own recovery after the “public humiliation” of missing a penalty in the Euro 96 semi-final when he said “half the world was watching”.
He said that it meant “slowly taking small steps to recover your confidence” and he talked of the importance of people, in any type of workplace, being able to “feel comfortable in your own skin”.
This gathering was part of the Business Taskforce set up by the princess to try to get business support for her campaign to recognise the importance of early childhood.
Delegates at the event heard from leaders of companies supporting the project including Aviva, NatWest Group, Iceland, Ikea, Lego and Deloitte.
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