Speakers

As VCSE Representative, Claire acts as an intermediary between the Government and the voluntary and social enterprise sectors to champion the Social Value Act and an improvement in commissioning practices. Claire was appointed as VCSE Crown Representative in February 2018. As a key player in the social enterprise movement for over 40 years she brings a wealth of experience to the role.

Claire nationally and internationally is known for her work in the sector and for ten years chaired Social Enterprise UK. She worked with government and leaders from the sector to create the first strategy for the Social Enterprise movement. She ensured that Social Enterprises had a voice within Westminster and Whitehall, this included working with the teams to introduce the Social Value Act which is now embedded into many local government frameworks and worked with Cabinet Office and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to develop the Social Value Model. After stepping down as chair of Social Enterprise UK Claire became a patron to the organisation.

Claire led the highly successful Blackburne House Group, until she retired in July 2020. Blackburne House offers an outstanding educational offer to women alongside running its award-winning School for Social Entrepreneurship and highly successful social enterprises.

Claire has received many awards for her role within the sector, which includes an MBE, OBE and also the Queens Lifetime achievement award for Enterprise promotion. Claire was once again honoured in the 2020 New Year’s honours list with a CBE.

Anne Davies is Professor of Law and Public Policy and a Fellow of Brasenose College, University of Oxford. She was a Prize Fellow at All Souls College from 1995 to 2001, and the Garrick Fellow and Tutor in Law at Brasenose College from 2001 to 2015. From 2015 to 2020, she was Dean of the Oxford Law Faculty.

Anne writes about labour/employment law and about public law, with a particular focus on government contracts and public service delivery. Her books include Accountability: a Public Law Analysis of Government by Contract (OUP 2001) and The Public Law of Government Contracts (OUP 2008) and in recent journal articles and book chapters she has explored various aspects of NHS reform, the use of social clauses in public procurement, and public law issues in government contracts.

Anne chairs the Oxford Procurement of Government Outcomes (POGO) Club, a knowledge sharing initiative that is open to anyone interested in capacity building in public procurement and in collaboration to improve social outcomes. She is an independent member of the Council of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS), and a member of the Advisory Panel to the Welsh Language Commissioner.

Abby Semple, LL.B., Ph.D. is a consultant advising public bodies on strategic and legal aspects of procurement. Her main focus is on the environmental and social impact of public contracts and how these can be meaningfully addressed through the contracting process. Through her consultancy Public Procurement Analysis, Abby has managed complex tenders on behalf of public sector clients in the UK and Ireland, and developed policy and guidance at the EU level and in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United States. Her writing and speaking engages with academic and practitioner audiences, including over 80 presentations and training sessions throughout Europe and the world. Abby is the author of one of the first books on the 2014 EU Procurement Directives A Practical Guide to Public Procurement, published by Oxford University Press in 2015. Her academic writing can be accessed on SSRN.

Following the successful completion of her pioneering LLM study in the regulation of construction procurement in the public sector, Allison registered in 2016 for a doctoral study to continue her research in this field. In her doctoral dissertation, Allison asked whether a relational understanding of construction procurement in South Africa assists in formulating regulation for this area of public procurement. She successfully completed her study in 2017 and was awarded the doctoral degree in 2018. In 2021, she published the first dedicated academic work on construction procurement law in South Africa with Juta & Co.

Allison is currently Deputy Director of the African Procurement Law Unit situated at Stellenbosch University. She does consulting work with government agencies on procurement issues and provides training to state officials on government procurement. Her most recent research procurement was on data protection in procurement with Open Contracting Partnership.

James Anthony Josey has spent the past eight years in government procurement and acquisitions. He is currently a Level III Certified Acquisition professional holding Unlimited Warrant Authority within the Department of State’s Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization (OSDBU). His breadth of government acquisitions includes A&E, R&D, IT, Grants, FFP Commodities, Construction and experience with numerous contracting vehicles.

Anthony joined the US Department of State in Washington, DC in February of 2015 as a Senior Procurement Analyst in the OSDBU Office. He oversees the small business efforts of the Bureau of Overseas Operations, WOSB/EDWOSB Program and the Mentor-Protégé Program for the Department of State. Prior to joining DoS, he served as a Small Business Specialist with the US Department of Health and Human Services OSDBU Office. While there he impacted the agency in many ways. Most notably, he negotiated a 40% SB set-aside of the HHS Program Support Center’s $750 million IDIQ. Small Businesses had only received $23 million on the previous cycle.

Prior to his tenure at HHS, Anthony was appointed Deputy for Small Business Programs, US Army Corps of Engineers-Charleston District. While there, the small business achievement peaked at 73% and the District was recognized at the SAME Small Business Conference in 2012. He also served as a contracting specialist in the Charleston District.

Mat is Chief Development Officer (CDO) at Catch22, a charity and social business that designs and delivers services which build resilience and aspiration in people and communities. Catch22 delivers services including alternative education schools, family interventions, vocational training and employability programmes and prisoner rehabilitation. Mat’s primary responsibilities are business strategy, growth and development, to raise revenue and maximise Catch22’s social impact.

Prior to this, Mat spent two years at No. 10 Downing Street as a Special Adviser to Prime Minister Theresa May, covering Home Affairs and Justice Policy. He’s held numerous policy roles at London’s City Hall, including delivering on the Mayor’s serious violence and youth programmes and contributing to the London 2012 operations.

Mat is a Churchill Fellow and a Fellow of the RSA.

Nandita is a Senior Policy Officer at the Department of Planning and Environment (DPE) in New South Wales (NSW) government. In DPE she is leading a Public Value Measurement Framework. She has previously worked in areas of strategic policy development and advisory, outcome evaluation, across diverse portfolios including NSW’s Net Zero Plan, NSW Premier’s priority of Greening Our City and Affordable & Diverse Housing.

Prior to joining DPE, Nandita was an academic with the University of New South Wales (UNSW), University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Western Sydney University (WSU) where she taught Environment and Development, Climate Change Politics and Ecology, Economy, Society and Globalism, Race, Ethnicity and Identity Politics in Australia, Organisation Behaviour.

Nandita has over 10 years’ experience in international development in India and worked with BBC Media Action and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI); across a range of issues including urban infrastructure development, natural-resource management, poverty alleviation and HIV/AIDS behaviour change communication.

Nandita has a PhD in Climate Change Governance (recipient of Australian Post-Graduate award). She is an alumni of Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India.

Nandita’s lived experience of growing up in deprivation and domestic violence and coupled with her grass-root work with marginalized communities in India have shaped her perspectives on power and justice.

Gus is the founder of Tussell. Tussell was founded in 2015 to fill a gap in the market for the provision of useful and reliable information on government contracts and spending. By consolidating trillions of pounds worth of public procurement data into a single platform, Tussell provides an unparalleled vantage point over the UK public procurement landscape.

Tussell's market intelligence is harnessed by some of the government's largest suppliers, central and local government bodies, and the mainstream press.

Before founding Tussell, Gus worked as a Managing Director at Thomson Reuters and an investment banker at Lazard. He has a track record of building subscription-based data businesses

Sandra is a UK/Canadian citizen, Canada’s first Social MBA, and designer of Canada’s first municipal Social Procurement Frameworks. Currently based at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, she is conducting Ph.D. research into the UK adoption of mandatory Social Value Procurement.

In 2017, Sandra was invited to present her work on ‘The Importance of People, in a People, Planet, Profit approach to Sustainability” at the WTO Symposium on Sustainable Government Procurement in Geneva. More recently at the 2021 WTO Public Forum, Sandra participated in an expert panel discussion on the role of Green government procurement in an open international trade environment; and she presented at the Circular Procurement Summit in Toronto, an official side event of the World Circular Economy Forum (WCEF) on the topic of international trade agreements – Friend or Foe of the Circular Economy? Videos of these presentations are available on the Alliance Manchester Business School YouTube channel - Sandra G Hamilton

Her most recent paper - Public Procurement: Price-Taker or Market-Shaper? (2022) focuses on the social aspect of sustainability and highlights concern for the lack of progress being made at the international level to advance mandatory Sustainable Public Procurement through the WTO-GPA – Government Procurement Agreement. https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib-08-2020-0116