Neil is Head of Business Services at Hampshire County Council and has been a member of the Central Buying Consortium Management Board since 1997. He is known to suppliers and local government alike as an active supporter of initiatives to obtain greater value for money through aggregation of purchasing for the public and voluntary sectors. Neil took over as CBC Chair from Ros Aird in September 2007.

Stephen is a management consultant with Brian Farrington Ltd and an Associate of the National School of Government, specialising in roles within procurement, supplier management, commercial negotiation and, increasingly e-procurement. He is the BFL lead presenter on the CIPS-examined Certificate of Competence in Purchasing and Supply. Consultancy and training clients include London Borough of Waltham Forest, London Borough of Southwark, Southend Borough Council, Bolton Metropolitan Council, St Helens LEGI, the Office of Government Commerce, DCMS, DFID, Rolls-Royce, AstraZeneca, Scottish Power, the Home Office and the Forensic Science Service. Stephen holds a Masters Degree in which his dissertation looked at ‘barriers to the implementation of e-procurement in local government’. He is co-author of the CIPS course book, ‘Contracting for the Public Sector’, and has published peer-reviewed articles on commercial negotiation skills. He is also a visiting lecturer at the University of Manchester.

Richard spent the first 15 years of his career in the private sector, working for organisations such as Carlsberg, Whitbread and Adnams. A marketing and customer services specialist, he championed the development of a more customer-centric strategy for these organisations, not only through process re-engineering, but also major culture change programmes. The shifting focus within the public ector towards a more customer-orientated model attracted him into local government, and he joined Colchester Borough Council as Executive Director. After only a year at Colchester, he was invited to join Bedfordshire County Council as Director of Customer Engagement and Corporate Services, responsible for customer and democratic services, as well as property, procurement and IT. Bedfordshire County Council has seen a remarkable turnaround in performance over the last two years. It has moved from zero stars on it’s Comprehensive Performance Assessment in 2005, to three stars in 2007 – just one off the top national rating – making it one of the fastest improvement stories in local government history.

Stuart is an organisation and management development specialist. His background includes teaching to post graduate level, research and corporate business life. He has trained, consulted and researched in the fields of leadership, organisation and management development for over 20 years. This includes significant time with large organisations in both the public and private sectors, moving from a traditional top down culture to a more customer-focused team working culture.At a strategic level he works with directors and senior managers to develop and translate mission, vision and values into practical outcomes. At an operational level he develops and trains organisation members to deliver bottom line improvements using business process improvement techniques. Stuart is an advisory board member of Sir John Adair’s Leadership Foundation, a visiting speaker on leadership to various academic institutions and a member of the skills policy group of the West Midlands Business Forum. 

Rebecca is a supply chain consultant at ADR International. She started her career at British Airways and worked in IT procurement and at KPMG Consulting prior to joining ADR in 2003. She has ten years’ experience in purchasing and supply chain management and received her CIPS graduate diploma in 2000. Rebecca currently works with global organisations to deliver purchasing solutions that focus on process improvement, category savings and skills transfer. Her recent assignments include delivering category management training at Disney, supporting organisational change at American Express Services Europe and designing and delivering training/e-Learning for Nokia’s indirect sourcing team. She leads ADR’s practice in capability change, using ADR’s Development Needs Analysis tool to assess procurement skills, and has worked to address the challenge of process change and maverick procurement expenditure with organisations such as ntl, American Express and the Metropolitan Police Service.

Ross is a motivational business speaker and creator of the TOM Leadership and Communication programmes. Using the latest brain research he combines powerful experiential learning techniques with what he has called ‘En-Lightning Training’ to deliver highly motivating and extremely memorable sessions.