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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kevin O’Malley

Innovation Lead/ SBRI Lead, Clean Growth & Infrastructure, Innovate UK

Kevin is Innovation Lead/ SBRI Lead in the Clean Growth and Infrastructure Directorate at Innovate UK and is responsible for managing internal and external relationships, technology strategy and delivery with partners across central and local government, with the aim of boosting procurement-led innovation.

Kevin joined Innovate UK in 2018. Prior to coming to Innovate he was City Innovation Team Manager at Bristol City Council, leading the delivery of the Authorities award winning Smart City programme. He has been responsible for writing dozens of successful funding bids, including REPLICATE, Bristol’s £25m H2020 Smart Cities and Communities Lighthouse Project