Trustees

Senior Partner of Spofforths Chartered Accountants, former President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants.

Lecturer and broadcaster on financial matters. Member of Lord Hodgson’s 2012 review of the Charities Act 2006.

Committees: Finance

Chair of Trustees as from January 2021

Until 30th April 2015, David was National Head of the Product Liability Team at Irwin Mitchell and had specialised in medical negligence and product liability work since the mid 1980s.

His specific areas of medical negligence expertise are claims arising from birth and paediatric injury, anaesthetic and neurosurgical accidents, and he has experience of most types of claims arising from failures to diagnose and treat.
In the 1990s he dealt with many product liability claims arising from the use of contaminated growth hormone which caused Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) and represented the families of CJD victims at the BSE inquiry. He has spent a good part of the last decade running a group action against Sanofi on behalf of the injured children of epileptic women who took sodium valproate during pregnancy.

Committees: Health & Wellbeing

Shan is a pensions actuary with BT, working to improve member and shareholder outcomes in relation to the BT Pension Scheme, one of the UK’s largest corporate defined benefit pension schemes. He specialises in pensions strategy, actuarial & investment risk, and in implementing effective governance & risk frameworks.

Committees: Finance

Senior fixed income fund manager at Legal and General Investment Management.

Previous experience at AXA Investment Managers, Royal Bank of Canada and Hambros Bank. Experienced across all classes of fixed income debt with a wide variety of clients.

Committees: Finance

Ruthe is the Head of Health and Care Influencing at the Charity Age UK. Her work includes: research and policy development; influencing local and national policy makers; working with professionals and service providers to improve people’s outcomes from and experience of care; and supporting people to maintain and improve their own health and wellbeing. She has extensive expertise in the impact of ageing and older people’s health.

Adrian Newland is Professor of Haematology at Queen Mary University of London and Honorary Consultant at Barts Health NHS Trust.

He is ex-Chair of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Diagnostic Assessment Programme and co-chairs the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on In-Vitro Diagnostics (SAGE-IVD) and is a member of the peer review group for the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer. Adrian is Specialist Clinical Advisor in Pathology for NHS Improvement. He was President of the Royal College of Pathologists from 2005–2008 and the International Society of Hematology (ISH) from 2014–2016.

Committees: Health & Wellbeing & Research

Professor Owens is currently a consultant cardiac surgeon at South Tees Hospitals NHS Trust, where he was previously a medical director, R&D director and clinical director.

He was awarded a Hunterian Professorship from the Royal College of Surgeons and currently holds honorary academic appointments with Newcastle, Teesside and Durham Universities.

Committees: Health & Wellbeing & Claims

From 1978, Caroline practiced as a barrister from Chambers in Manchester. She was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1993, specialising in complex clinical negligence, catastrophic brain injury and industrial disease cases, mainly representing claimants. Between 2001 and 2005, she was Leading Counsel to the Shipman Inquiry.

In 2005, she was appointed a Judge of the High Court, Queen’s Bench Division. She tried primarily civil cases and, from 2006 until 2015, she was the Judge in charge of the British Coal Respiratory Disease Litigation, a group action involving over half a million claims. Between 2012 and 2014, she was Judicial College Director of Civil Training, with responsibility for the training in civil work of Judges at all levels in England and Wales.

She retired from the Bench in 2015 and, from January 2017 until December 2022, headed the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service, the body which organises and conducts all disciplinary hearings involving doctors whose fitness to practice the General Medical Council considers may be impaired.

Rosemary Varley is Professor in the Faculty of Brain Sciences/Division of Psychology & Language Sciences at University College London. She undertakes research into cognitive impairments following brain injury, particularly in stroke and dementia. She has published research articles in major international journals such as Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA, New York Academy of Sciences and Stroke. Her research is funded by government research councils and charities such as the Alzheimer’s Society and the Stroke Association.

Committees: Health & Wellbeing & Research