Sophie Gilligan
Head of Homeownership and Commercial Assets, Yorkshire Housing

Sophie is Head of Homeownership and Commercial Assets at Yorkshire Housing, where she is focused on transforming the services delivered to homeowners in a housing associatoin setting. She has worked in the housing sector for 18 years and brings a wide range of experience in both tenant and leaseholder service charges.

Olubukola Abiiba
Head of Leasehold Sales Services, Newlon Housing Trust

Olubukola Abiiba is the Head of Leasehold Sales Services at Newlon Housing Trust where she leads with precision, empathy, and a deep understanding of the leasehold sector. A specialist residential conveyancer and chartered member of the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH), Olu has accumulated an impressive 16 years’ experience in the housing sector with her career defined by a steadfast commitment to delivering high-quality services for existing homeowners and supporting the aspirations of first-time buyers.

She champions best practice, regulatory compliance, and statutory requirements, combined with a commitment for prompt communication and a helpful approach.

Richard Blakeway
Housing Ombudsman, Housing Ombudsman Service

Richard was appointed as Housing Ombudsman from 1 September 2019. He has extensive experience in the housing sector, with previous roles including Deputy Mayor of London for Housing, chair of the Homes for London board, and a non-executive director of Homes England. During his eight years at the Greater London Authority, Richard was responsible for housing investment and land regeneration programmes. He also led the creation of the first team at City Hall to address rough sleeping, commissioning around £10 million of services each year, as well as the first Social Impact Bond on homelessness.

Richard is a former board member of the Chartered Institute of Housing and has been an election observer in Somaliland and the Ukraine.  He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and sits on the Administrative Justice Council. Richard is also a former chair of the Ombudsman Association and is a board member of the British Library.

Jaclyn Burns
Finance Service Charge and Systems, Acis Group

Jaclyn has worked in finance for eight years. She currently works with Acis Group Limited as the Finance Service Charge and Systems Lead. She is responsible for Service Charge Budgets, Reconciliations and managing the Service Charge process for all properties currently within the group. Her role is integral in driving improvements and efficiencies for the Service Charge process. She works with a diverse property portfolio including Sheltered, Social, Shared Owners and Leaseholders. She also administers the financial system for Acis Group.

Emma Comer
Consultant-Projects, Triathlon Homes

Emma has worked in housing for 20 years. Early on she started working in service charge teams and moved quickly into managing service charge teams initially in supported housing and then for social and leasehold tenures.  Emma has combined this experience with leading homeownership teams as well as service charges teams across all tenures.  Her work as a consultant allows her to use her experience to stabilise services, design effective operating models and ensure organisations are communicating effectively with tenants and leaseholders and providing assurance that landlords are managing services well and holding external organisations that provide services to account.

Paul Connolly
Head of Rent and Service Charge, Guinness Partnership

Paul has worked in social housing since 2012, and was responsible for centralising and nationalising the Income Collection and Debt Recovery activities for the three Guinness group partners.

Paul was appointed as the Head of Rent and Service Charge at Guinness in October 2019, implementing a new service charge system and structure to the service, whilst also navigating policy changes with the introduction of the new Rent Standard.

Laura Coulter
Head of Rent and Service Charge, L&Q

Laura is currently Head of Rent and Service Charges for L&Q and has been working in Service Charges within housing with L&Q for over 10 years. Before that, she has had a career touching on all aspects of property within the private sector, working with both commercial and residential portfolios from property management, accounting to sales and lettings.

Louise Dawson
Managing Director, Trace Solutions

Louise joined Trace Solutions in 2001, rising to become a Board Director from 2017 and Managing Director in 2021.
Louise has played a key role in many areas across the business. She has managed trainers, the help desk, QA and product engineering teams, while her background in property accounting has given her a profound hands-on understanding of the ins and outs of service charges. She also led one of Trace’s largest housing association implementations, at Peabody in 2012.
As Trace’s Managing Director, Louise has championed software innovation, using it as a tool to drive usability, accuracy, and resident satisfaction.

Becca Fury
Head of Homeownership, RHP

Cara Jackson
Head of Leasehold and Homeownership, Accent Group

Sarah-Jane Gay
Head of Building and Fire Safety Programmes, National Housing Federation

George Grant
CEO, Housing Techology

Adam Gravely
Policy Officer, National Housing Federation

Cara Green
External Affairs Manager, National Housing Federation

Cara Green is External Affairs Manager at the National Housing Federation. With a background in communications, strategy and digital innovations, she works closely with members to drive meaningful change with a powerful mission: ensuring everyone has access to a safe, affordable home.

Dawn Grocott
Leasehold Manager, Torus

Dawn has worked in Social Housing for 24 years and is experienced in all aspects of Leasehold Management, Shared Ownership and Service Charge administration. Currently working as Leasehold Manager for Torus 62 Ltd, Dawn also chairs the Affordable Home Ownership Group (North & Wales).

Abbie Harries
Head of Homeownership, LiveWest

Christopher Last
In House Legal Counsel - Team Manager, A2Dominion

Scott Lawrence
Assistant Director of Service Charges, Peabody

Pascale Mézac
Consultant, Plan2moro

Pascale is the lead author of the NHF service charges guide to housing associations. She is an accountant, providing business planning services for social housing and charities. Her service charges expertise is vast and includes planning new developments, depooling charges from rents, financial modelling, agreements, communications, financial support and value for money. Trading as Plan2moro, Pascale combines the unique knowledge of housing, NHS, charities and social enterprises. The business aims are to provide business planning services whilst supporting organisational management and personal development of teams. Training delivered includes business planning, finance regulations, sheltered schemes remodelling, service charges, year end and budgets. Pascale works with you to bring a team together to deliver a specific project, making it happen with a strong commitment to excellence. She is innovative, wants to add value to your organisation and will meet deadlines with you whilst being inclusive.

Gabriel Olu’ Brown
Leasehold Services and Alterations Manager, London Borough of Tower Hamlets

Gabriel is a results-driven housing strategist with over 20 years’ experience in leasehold management, service improvement, and stakeholder engagement. He has a proven track record of transforming customer satisfaction, driving operational efficiencies, and embedding value for money across service delivery functions. Combining operational expertise with a deep understanding of policy, compliance, and the human factors that build trust, Gabriel brings a unique perspective to tackling complex housing challenges and draws on his extensive experience in exploring the root causes of resident dissatisfaction, practical approaches to resolving complaints and preventing maladministration.

Carla Platell
Head of Service Charge, LiveWest

Sue Ramsden
Policy Leader, National Housing Federation

Sue leads the Federation's policy work on housing management and supported housing.  She is a board member of Thamesreach Housing a small specialist homelessness provider in London.

Lee Reevell
Founder and CTO, Housing AI

Natalie Robinson
Shared Owner and Board Member, Nottingham Community Housing Association

Natalie is a shared ownership customer Board member with Nottingham Community Housing Association (NCHA). Prior to this Natalie chaired the Scrutiny Panel for NCHA, resulting in effective change for the organisation.

Outside of housing, Natalie is a Solicitor and Lecturer at Nottingham Law School, teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Prior to taking on the role of law lecturer, Natalie’s had several different roles in the legal industry, predominantly as a practising solicitor. Natalie has a history of working in local and central government prior to and following her qualification as a solicitor and remains an active member of the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

Natalie has also undertaken extensive volunteering at local, national, and international levels alongside any full-time employment. Many of these roles involved representing and advocating on behalf of young people, often lobbying the UK and European parliaments to bring policy change

Natalie Rose
Director of Customer Experience, Plus Dane

Natalie joined the social housing sector in 2021 after a career spanning almost twenty years in customer operations within retail, commercial property and travel. Career highlights include leading the transformation of the customer journey as part of Manchester Airport’s £1bn Transformation programme and delivering the Covid response at Sheffield’s 26 million visitor shopping centre, Meadowhall. With a degree in European Languages and Culture, Natalie is passionate about the science of human behaviour and the power of communication in transforming services for all. Since joining in 2023, Natalie has launched Plus Dane’s first dedicated customer experience strategy focussing on creating person-centric services to build customer relationships that last.

Will Routh
Director and Co-Founder, Chirpy Heat

Will has worked in social housing heat networks for 17 years, including 10 years as Head of Sustainability at large social housing provider where he was responsible for direct management of heat network portfolio of over 4000 properties.

1n 2019, he co-founded Chirpy Heat to provide independent and impartial advice to housing providers to deliver great heat networks and fulfil their promises to be low cost, low carbon and easy to manage. Over the last years 6 they have advised over 100 housing providers with over 3,000 heat networks, representing more than 100,000 properties, helping clients with every type of management issue they have on heat networks ranging from compliance, cost, customers, contracts, capability and carbon.

His wider work in the sector includes co-founding The Heat Network, a best practice sharing and lobbying group heat networks in social housing, co-creating The Heat Exchanger mentoring programme to help improve skills, professionalism and learning in the developing heat network sector and was advisory group member for DESNZ’s Heat Network Efficiency Scheme (HNES) programme.

Kirsty Skinner
Leasehold and Service Charge Manager, Coastline Housing

Kirsty has worked in social housing, at Coastline Housing Ltd, for 16 years. Having started in the customer service team before moving into income management, she has specialised in leasehold and service charges since 2012. Kirsty haa a particular passion for IT systems and data accuracy and enjoys using her teaching qualification to train and empower colleagues.

Alistair Smyth
Director of Policy and Research, National Housing Federation

Alistair has worked in the social housing sector for the last 16 years in a wide range of roles and organisations including a previous spell at the NHF from 2014 to 2017. Prior to that, he worked as a consultant on a range of neighbourhood and community empowerment projects. He also spent three years working in a customer-facing role as a Neighbourhood Manager and as Assistant Head of Neighbourhoods for Peabody. He is currently the Vice Chair of the Chartered Institute of Housing’s Policy Advisory Committee.

Rob Thompson
Strategic Lead Rent & Income Services, Thirteen Group

Deborah Toner
Policy Researcher, Citizens Advice

Deborah Toner is a Senior Policy Researcher in the Energy team at Citizens Advice. She works on heat networks, especially in relation to the new regulatory framework and consumer experiences of debt and affordability.