Simon Tse

CEO, Crown Commercial Service (CSS)

Simon Tse was appointed Chief Executive of the Crown Commercial Service in 2018. He first joined CCS in May 2016 and led the Procurement Operations directorate. He served as interim CEO from July 2018 until his permanent appointment, which followed an external competition, in December that year.

Simon is an experienced Chief Executive Officer and has extensive experience of strategic planning, customer service, driving performance improvement and achieving results. He first joined the Civil Service in 2008, taking up the position of Chief Executive Officer for the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, where he remained in post until 2013.

Simon was Health Director at the Department for Work and Pensions, one of the UK’s largest public service departments, from 2013 - 2016. In this role he was responsible for the provision of all health and disability assessments services within the UK.

This role followed a successful career in the private sector spanning more than 25 years, most recently at Virgin Media, firstly as Managing Director for Wales and West, and subsequently as the UK SME Business Director.

Malcolm Harrison

Group CEO, Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS)

Malcolm joined Mars in 1982 as a management trainee after graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in Chemical Engineering. He has a broad international experience in consumer facing companies in both general management and global functional roles, particularly Procurement. In his early career he worked in Production, Sales, Procurement, Supply Chain, and HR with Mars Confectionery, Pedigree Petfoods and Bass. In 1993, he was appointed Purchasing Director of Bass Brewers where he established their first Purchasing function. From 1996 he was CEO of Bass Brewer’s UK Midlands free trade business before joining the Board of Britvic Soft Drinks in 1999 as Operations Director.

From 2000 he created and led global Procurement for Interbrew, participating in the acquisition and integration of several brewers – in Europe, Asia and Latin America - including AmBev in 2004; he was subsequently Chief Procurement Officer of InBev. In 2006 Malcolm joined Nestlé SA in Switzerland as Chief Procurement Officer responsible for the largest FMCG procurement spend in the world (CHF 60 Bn across 80 countries), heavily focused on global agricultural commodities; he brought a real focus to building the capability of the function and led a step-change in involvement of the procurement function with the Nestlé businesses. He joined the Executive Committee of Rexam plc, the FTSE 100 consumer packaging company, in 2010 as CEO of the global Plastic Packaging division (turnover of £ 1.3 Bn with 45 factories located in 9 countries) serving customers in Healthcare, Cosmetics and FMCG businesses. After leading its successful disposal, he worked in beverage cans during 2013 and his responsibilities included global IT, Environment Health & Safety and Global Procurement where managing the exposure to volatile Plastics and Metal prices was a key responsibility.

In 2015, Malcolm joined the Cabinet Office of Her Majesty’s Government where he held the role of Chief Executive Officer of the Crown Commercial Service, overseeing an annual spend of more than £13 Bn on common goods and services across the UK public sector. He also had responsibility for UK Public Sector Procurement Policy and for supporting the UK Government’s initiatives with SMEs.

In July 2018 he joined The Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS) as Group CEO.

Malcolm lives in the UK and has previously spent in total more than 12 years living in West Africa, France, Belgium and Switzerland as part of his professional career.

David Smith

Former Commercial Director, DWP & Lead Judge, UK National GO Awards 2020/2021

Until October 2013, David was the Commercial Director of DWP responsible for all commercial and contract management activity and its procurement spend of £5 billion pa. He was the commercial and procurement adviser to Ministers, a member of a number of the Department’s Executive Team Committees and led the Department’s Commercial Function of some 500 people. He was also Government’s Deputy Chief Procurement Officer and the Crown Representative for 7 of Government’s biggest suppliers and a member of the Cabinet Office Procurement Reform Board and Commercial Relationships Board and HM Treasury’s Major Projects Review Group (MPRG). His previous roles include senior procurement positions at UK’s Inland Revenue, HM Treasury, Cabinet Office and the Home Office.

David now advises some of the world’s biggest organisations on their procurement practice and process and in their dealings with the public sector.

Malcolm Harbour CBE

Chair, LGA Task & Finish Group on Public Procurement of Innovation

MEP for the West Midlands 1999 to 2014. As Chairman of the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee, he played a lead role in the 2014 reform of Public Procurement Legislation. Since 2004, a strong advocate of innovative procurement, gathering extensive international experience. Continues to deploy his expertise as a Senior Adviser to the European Policy Centre. Since 2016, independent chair of an innovation procurement task force for UK Local Government, report published in September 2017. In 2019 became an Associate at Connected Places Catapult, developing a new initiative to boost innovative procurement.

David Gigg

Head of Policy Delivery, Crown Commercial Service (CCS)

David Gigg is Head of Policy Delivery in the Crown Commercial Service, part of the Cabinet Office. He leads a small team responsible for the implementation of all aspects of procurement policy in CCS’s operations and is developing leading-edge government procurement strategies in areas such as social value and modern slavery. David has over twenty years of experience at a senior level in public sector procurement.

Emma Scott

Representation Manager, Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS)

Emma studied BA Business Studies and Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University and gained her MCIPS in 2003.

Emma worked in procurement for 10 years before joining CIPS specialising in procurement to pay process and system implementation managing a suite of end-to-end e-procurement tools and their surrounding processes.

Now Representation Manager at CIPS Emma is responsible for content development, supporting Supply Management magazine, CIPS campaigns and content for the global awards and conference portfolio. Emma has been leading on campaigns such as modern slavery, women in procurement leadership and the profession of choice project to encourage young people into a career in procurement.

Mark Palmer

Head of Public Sector & Life Sciences, UK & Ireland at Google

Mark joined Google Cloud in 2018 bringing 30+ years experience in the technology industry from across the Public Sector, Defence and Healthcare markets. Google Cloud provides an extensive portfolio of infrastructure, data management, analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities to enterprise customers, as well as G-Suite & Chrome.

Prior to this role he was the UK Country General Manager for InterSystems, focused on Electronic Health Record and Interoperability solutions for the NHS.

He spent almost 20 years at IBM, where he was latterly their VP Public Sector, Europe. Prior to this, he led the UK’s Government and Defence businesses over 10 years, and was a member of the IBM UK leadership team.

Mark began his career in the 1980's as a Software Engineer designing and delivering complex real-time systems integration projects for the aerospace industry. He was one of the original start-up members of AeroSystems International; a joint venture between Sema Group and Westland Helicopters working to deliver airborne software systems.

Mark is a Chartered Engineer, and has a degree in Electronic Engineering as well as an MBA. He has had assignments in Italy and also Washington D.C. Mark has an interest in architecture and has built two houses for his family. When not ferrying his competitive kids to either swimming or equestrian events he can be found on the south coast sailing his boat.

Keith Rowley

Managing Director, NOE CPC

Keith Rowley has been Managing Director of NHS North of England Commercial Procurement Collaborative (NOE CPC) since 2012. Prior to joining NOE CPC, Keith worked in the IT Services Sector for 14 years. His career has covered a wide spectrum of roles including procurement, sales, marketing and operations within this sector.

Keith is particularly interested in ensuring the role of Procurement is valued and developed to ensure it continues to underpin the success of the NHS. He represents the four NHS procurement hubs working together as NHS Procurement in Partnership (NHS London Procurement Partnership, NHS Commercial Solutions, East of England NHS Collaborative Procurement Hub and NHS NOE CPC), on the HCSA National Stakeholder Group as well as a Specialist Area Lead on the HCSA National Stakeholder Group.

Tina Holland

Improvement Manager, Local Government Association

Tina is the Programme Manager for the procurement programme within the LGA. She is the lead on the development and implementation of the National Procurement Strategy for local government and the National Advisory Group for Local Govt Procurement and the workstreams. She oversees and disseminates the learning from LGA funded innovation projects relating to category management.

Tina has been with the LGA (formerly IDeA) since 2003 having spent the previous fifteen years as a procurement practitioner and procurement consultant, delivering procurement expertise to public, private and financial sectors.

Lee Tribe

Commercial Director Police and Fire

Coming Soon

Chris Cuthell

Head of Procurement, Accent Housing

Chris is Head of Procurement for Accent Housing, an English Housing Association with 21500 homes stretching from Surrey and Kent in the South to Cumbria and County Durham in the North.

Much of Chris' career has been spent in IT leadership roles, split equally between the Public and Private sectors and includes significant periods working in France, Germany, Spain and Australia. The move into Social Housing was completely accidental, but Chris is clear that he knew pretty much straight away he’d found a cause he could (and still does) believe in.

His first formal exposure to public sector procurement was setting up one of the early pilot OJEU eTendering systems for Local Authorities across the North of England. Following several years of leading on procurement and implementation of high value complex IT projects in education and children & young peoples' services, Chris joined Accent to manage the procurement and implementation of two major IT projects, but forgot to leave when they were completed. In 2018 he finally succumbed and moved from IT to the dark side, to head up Accent's Procurement Team.

Chris grew up in Mozambique attending mainly local schools and college before graduating with a degree in Business and Modern Languages from Huddersfield University, majoring in micro-economics and Spanish. In addition to Spanish, he speaks French and Portuguese competently plus German really rather badly. Outside of work he has an abiding interest in technology, a passion for buying, restoring and selling classic cars (occasionally not losing money!) and a love of the literature of Terry Pratchett.

Gillian Askew

Director, All Things Procurement

Gillian is an experienced procurement professional with a career spanning over 25 years in both private and public sector. Gillian currently runs All Things Procurement, a social enterprise focussing on increasing public sector business to SME's and optimising the delivery of social value through procurement.

Gillian is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply and a member of the Institute of Leadership & Management, as well as a member of FSB and Social Value UK. She is also an active committee member of the CIPS South Yorkshire branch along with a number of other volunteering activities

Gillian first joined public sector procurement in 2013 as Head of Procurement for Nottingham Trent University, she was also a non-executive director of NEUPC during her tenure there. She then joined YPO in 2016 as Head of Procurement Services responsible for over £600m public sector spend under management. Prior to this Gillian worked as Supply Chain Director within Babcock International Group leading global procurement & supply chain teams in asset infrastructure. In addition, Gillian has extensive experience as a small business owner including business acquisition and start up.

Rachel Woodward

Senior Category Manager, North Yorkshire County Council (NYCC)

Rachel is a CIPS qualified procurement professional with a vast amount of experience within the Public Sector, currently leading the category strategy for adults and children’s social care and public health covering a £200m pa budget.

Demonstrating a proactive attitude she has a passion to drive social value through procurement and contract management, ensuring the wider benefits are delivered across the sector, helping to support and improve communities and local economic activity.

Rachel is a senior lead team member of the Procurement and Contract Management Team which won the GO award for Procurement Leadership of the Year 2019. Two of Rachel’s recent procurements were shortlisted for the CIPS award, Best Public Procurement Project (2018) and, Best Contribution to Corporate Responsibility (2016).

With a strong value for governance and organisational learning, Rachel leads the Yorkshire and Humber Health and Social Care procurement group with engaging best practice and collaboration across the region and contribution best practice to the LGA and CCS.

Ben Carpenter

CEO, Social Value UK

Ben Carpenter is the chief executive of Social Value UK and Social Value International leading a global network of practitioners to develop principles and standards for social value accounting.

Ben is part of the National Social Value Taskforce and the British Standards Industry committee for Social Value. Prior to becoming CEO, Ben was Social Value UK’s Operations Manager developing the international membership, the assurance and accreditation services and led on projects with the OECD, World Economic Forum, Impact Management Project and World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Ben’s background in homelessness, social housing and the built environment, affords him experience that spans sectors and an in-depth knowledge of Social Value accounting.

Chris Ball

Research Associate Newcastle University Business School

Expert on all aspects of policy and practice regarding the ageing workforce. Passionate about the value of older workers, management of an age diverse workforce, development of the "silver economy" and demographic change, including international dimensions on all these. Speaker, commentator and writer.

Publications include "Managing the Ageing Workforce: An Introductory Guide for HR Professionals", (TAEN, 2007), research reports for Newcastle University and CROW, as well as academic book chapters and many blogs and articles.

Specialties: Learning, health and well-being, age management, labour market, demographic changes, employee relations.

Amber Greenhalgh

Commercial Director, B&M Waste

Amber joined B&M Waste in 2017 and has over 14 years’ experience within the waste recycling sector. Amber currently leads the building of strategic relationships with our UK partners. Her drive for leadership and passion for ensuring the innovative solutions, mean she is integral to delivery of the highest level of service to customers. Collaborative partnerships with customer and suppliers alike are key to the way Amber works, and she is an industry expert in the realm of all things waste and recycling, with a sustainable focus.

Guy Battle

CEO, Social Value Portal

Guy Battle trained as an environmental engineer at Bath University and started his career as a building engineer specialising sustainable solutions for the built environment during which time he worked for Arup (1986-1993) and his own firm BattleMcCarthy (1993-2009). Guy set up the specialist carbon management company dcarbon8 in 2006 which was acquired by Deloitte in 2010 where he became the lead partner for DeloitteSustainability working on a range of advisory and assurance projects including work with Unilever, Kingfisher Plc, Sky, Grosvenor and Arcelor Mittal.

On leaving Deloitte, Guy set up The Social Value Portal (2014), a social business focussed on supporting business and the public sector in the creation of a better society through the implementation of the Social Value Act and he has since developed a deep understanding about the practical implementation of the Act through his work with a range of local authorities and businesses including Lambeth, Hammersmith & Fulham, Birmingham City Council and Legal & General.

Jeremy Brim

Managing Director, Growth Ignition

Jeremy brings 20 years of experience as a bid management professional across both the public and private sectors.

Leading successful bid functions spanning professional services, outsourcing and construction Jeremy has secured an enviable collection of high-profile projects, programmes and frameworks with blue chip clients around the globe.

“I have learned from the best – working with a range of incredible business leaders of high growth global organisations, their cutting edge bid teams, and their entrepreneurial sales teams to develop winning propositions.”

Early on his career Jeremy developed a specialism in UK and European public sector tendering, in both central and local government, which is still called upon today.

The robust compliance driven nature of public sector proposals provided a great grounding to expand his experience in to the private sector, securing large scale frameworks and programmes with corporate clients.

For more than 15 years he has led business development and tendering training programmes for Directors, Partners, Associates and Graduate schemes.

In addition to his large corporate roles he has continued to deliver significant ROI for SME business owners, entrepreneurs and investors as a board member, advisor and Non-Exec.

In the Autumn of 2018 Jeremy founded Growth Ignition, where he works with leadership teams and business owners as a consultant and advisor to plan and deliver sustainable growth through analysis and interventions across the sales cycle.

Jeremy has also taken on leadership of the bid toolkit bringing with him a wealth of bidding knowledge and desire to help businesses of all sizes improve their win rates.

Glenn St John-Colgan

Managing Director, Augmentas Group

Founder and Group Managing Director, Glenn St. John-Colgan has worked in the commercial sector for nearly 30 years – the majority of which, he has spent operating at director level within the public sector, private international organisations and consultancies.

Having previously worked as a consultant, interim manager and a Senior Civil Servant, Glenn largely found the professional services delivery method frustrating and thought the value structure of both consultancies and agencies could be better.

Being part of the traditional consultancy / interim model, Glenn would enter into his various contracts as an individual, land and complete the job, but feel rather commoditised. The agency model added little value, with limited support or engagement throughout the contract duration. The consultancy model would simply drop you in and brand you but offered little development, and the drive to increase revenue contradicted a claimed client-centric approach.

Even as an independent consultant, Glenn brought the people he worked with together, whether consultants, contractors, interims, civil servants, or employees and deliver something cohesive for his customers and the individuals. He understood the need to bring likeminded specialists together for the benefits of the outcome needed by the employer, the customer, the team.

So why do this alone? He didn’t! He set up Augmentas, finally putting in place the values structure he had been looking for in professional services delivery for so many years.

Augmentas Group is a respectfully disruptive service business, challenging the established models in all of our sectors. Our approach has been designed by wanting to enhance the engagement model from both sides of the consultancy model – the customer and the deliverer. We want to challenge the existing models, and encourage all providers in this field to re-focus on the people, and on delivery.

Nabeel Irshad

VP, Govt & Public Sector UK & Ireland, Mastercard

Nabeel leads Mastercard’s government and public sector business with a focus on card payments, e-payments and financial inclusion. Prior to joining Mastercard, Nabeel worked at Metro Bank, one of the original ‘challenger’ banks launched in 2010, where he ran its current accounts, cash accounts and cards business. Earlier in his career, Nabeel worked as a special advisor in government and as a management consultant working on procurement projects in the UK and overseas.

Adam Crampsie

Managing Director, Bloom Procurement Services

Adam Crampsie is an experienced commercial leader focussed on delivering innovative solutions to address the challenges facing the public sector. Adam joined Bloom Procurement Services as Managing Director in 2019, overseeing a period of significant growth for the marketplace and the implementation of the multi billion pound framework, NEPRO³. Bloom are providing the public sector with an outcomes focused marketplace and dynamic supply chain to buy and manage professional services. Prior to his role at Bloom, Adam had overseen the commercial and category development function of Nuffield Health, Mckesson UK and Celesio UK managing substantial contracts and delivering outstanding outcomes for the public sector.

Emilia Cedeno

Crown Commercial Service (CCS)

Emilia is the Enhancing Capability Lead at the Crown Commercial Service (CCS). She is a member of the CCS Technology Pillar’s Digital Future Team which manages spend of c.£4.0Bn. Emilia will be talking to you about the work that CCS has been doing to build capability within the public sector. She has delivered over 350 workshops to various government departments and she also leads the first UK digital buying community, which brings buyers of technology and digital products together to celebrate the procurement profession, share experiences and share best practices. The community currently has over 600 members and it is expanding to different regions across the UK. Emilia is also the International Advisor for the Global Digital Marketplace programme to tackle corruption in emerging economies.

Emilia’s background is in international procurement, working within various industries and sectors for the last 15 years in North, South America and Europe.

Nicola Badley

Crown Commercial Service (CCS)

Nicola is a member of the software and cyber team within Technology in CCS. Nicola has been managing commercial agreements and developing the shape of future agreements in this team to meet the changing landscape of Technology procurement we are seeing across all sectors.

Nicola has been working with buyers and suppliers to understand current challenges to public sector procurement of technology. With the goal of making technology procurement simpler for the future.

Nicola has been supporting Emila in building the communities of practice in regions outside of London. These communities are key to enhancing the capability within the public sector.

Nicola has been working in procurement for almost 10 years with experience across the private and public sector. Nicola has a background in the environment and sustainability and brings these principles and values into her daily work.

Eddie Regan

Principal Procurement Consultant

Eddie is BiP Solutions’ Principal Procurement Consultant and working alongside the Client Services team, he frequently assists public sector organisations with clarification and interpretation of EU Directives and a wide variety of legislative issues. For the last 21 years Eddie has lectured regularly on procurement policy and processes at conferences and events, both on behalf of BiP and for a variety of other organisations. He also provides in-house training on the tendering process to personnel in both the public and private sectors.

Grahame Steed

Content, Research and Communications Director, BiP Solutions

Grahame joined BiP Solutions in 2003 and has held the positions of Senior Executive Officer, Deputy Chief Operating Officer, Sales and Marketing Director, MD for Media and Marketing Solutions and Director of Business Intelligence and eSourcing, Now, as Content, Research and Communications Director, Grahame is responsible for driving the growth of the business through the creation and delivery of the most accurate, relevant and actionable data, content and insight available.

Scott McKechnie

Business Development Manager, Delta eSourcing

Scott McKechnie is Business Development Manager for BiP Solutions covering the North West, Midlands and South West of the UK. With a career spanning 9 years at BiP and knowledge of electronic tendering, Scott introduces public and private sector clients to the benefits of Delta eSourcing demonstrating compliance with EU and Public Contracts Regulations 2015.