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).

Fiona Astin
Fiona Astin Consultancy

Fiona has worked in the housing sector for almost 30 years, predominantly for housing associations and local authorities. She has been running a consultancy business since 2016, working with a mix of developers, planning consultants, Local Authorities and Registered Providers. She is also on the board of a specialist LGBTQ+ housing provider in London.

Affordable housing development has been a mainstay of her career to date, from frontline delivery to strategic level. She also has specialisms in regeneration, community led housing and extra care housing provision.

Richard Bampton
Head of Income, A2Dominion Group

Ed Barber
Policy Officer, National Housing Federation

Ed is a Policy Officer at the National Housing Federation, working across rents, supply and finance policy areas internally and with members.

Peter Barker
Benefits Specialist, HB Anorak

Richard Blakeway
Housing Ombudsman

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 non-executive director of Homes England. During his eight years at the Greater London Authority, Richard was responsible for a major investment programme, overseeing the delivery of 100,000 affordable homes and regeneration plans for 670 hectares of land owned by the authority. Richard 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.

Penny Bournes
Associate, Anthony Collins Solicitors

Penny provides non-contentious specialist housing management advice and training to landlords who are primarily registered providers. She specialises in service charges (including section 20 consultation and first-tier tribunal applications) and tenure advice, where she excels in highly technical and often complex advice.

Penny frequently provides full occupancy agreement/policy and procedure reviews and advice, along with specialist advice on other housing management issues, such as rent review, service charges, succession, consultation and compliance with housing legislation and guidance.

She also advises on leasehold management issues, including interpretation of leases, service charge recovery and landlord and leaseholder rights and obligations generally.

Emma Comer
Assistant Director of Estates and Facilities, Thrive Housing Association

A service charge, lease and contract management specialist with over a decade's experience in the housing sector, Emma has worked for G15 housing associations, local authorities and smaller providers across all tenures, market rents and commercial property management.

Emma is a member of the IRPM, part of the NLG National Leasehold Group and currently works for Thrive Homes where she is responsible for service charges and service charge recovery across the Thrive Homes portfolio. Her role also covers alternative housing tenures, procurement of estate-based services and contract management for these services.

Danielle Coombs
Service Charge and Leasehold Manager, Silva Homes

Kevin Dunleavy
Head of Leasehold Service, The Guinness Partnership

Kevin has 20 years of experience in establishing and leading successful leasehold management teams within the housing sector. This includes delivering services to a range of leasehold customers, including those through shared ownership, right-to-buy and open-market sale. He has also played a lead role in working across the sector to establish professional standards and service improvements. This includes being a founding member and current Chair of the National Leasehold Group and working alongside government to influence products and areas of law reform.

Paula Goodacre
Finance Director - Homes Plus, Places for People

Paula has worked in the housing sector for almost 20 years. As the Finance Director for Homes Plus within the Places for People Group, she has responsibility for the financial performance of the regulated housing assets. With extensive experience in leasehold management and the administration of service charges more generally, she has represented PfP at tribunals to defend customer charges. Given the prevailing rates of inflation, she has particular concerns around the affordability of housing stock when service charges are increasing at a faster rate than rent and is keen to explore what we as a sector are doing to ensure that services demonstrate value for money.

Emma Hardman
Partner, Anthony Collins Solicitors

Emma leads the Housing Management and Right to Buy teams at Anthony Collins. She is co-author of the NHF publication ‘Service charges and estate rentcharges: a guide for social landlords’.

She acts on behalf of landlords, primarily registered providers and charitable landlords, in relation to all housing management issues providing practical solutions to complex scenarios. This includes advice on occupancy agreements, policies and procedures, rent and service charge setting and disputes arising, and regulatory issues. She particularly enjoys client training.

Ken James
Head of Leasehold Services, Managing Agents and Service Charge, A2Dominion Group

Ken brings over 10 years’ experience of leasehold property and service charge management in the social housing sector. He currently serves as the Head of Leasehold Services and Service Charge for A2Dominion Group a residential property group with a social purpose and over 38,000 homes. He is an active member of the National Leasehold Group and the National Leasehold Conference Steering Group and holds both MIRPM and AssocRICS accreditations.

Mervyn Jones
Chair, Islington & Shoreditch Housing Association

Mervyn Jones is Chair of Islington & Shoreditch Housing Association, an actively developing locally based provider. He has over 48 years’ experience of managing and regulating affordable housing, to CEO level. He was a board member of Heylo RP, which has delivered over 8,000 shared ownership homes, and of Hackney Homes. He led Savills Affordable Housing consultancy from 2006 to 2022, developing a range of services to improve asset management, for which he was made FRICS. He advises on housing policy, routes for new entrants and decarbonization of the sector. He has lived and worked in North London for 50 years.

Desmond Kilcoyne
42 Bedford Row Barristers

Nathanael King-Smith
Director, MH Architects

Nat is a Director of MH Architects based in Chichester. He has extensive experience of designing affordable housing whether in urban or rural settings. Working closely with clients to deliver excellent, people focused housing. MHA have delivered a number of affordable extra care developments, with more in the pipeline.

Scott Lawrence
Head of Property Charges, Hyde

Claire Martin
Brunelcare

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.

Rachael Mills
Secretariat, The Heat Network

Rachael Mills co-founded and is the secretariat of The Heat Network, a peer group for social housing providers to share good practice, improve customer service and influence policy on communal and district heating schemes. We have 31 housing association and local authority members, and are supported by the National Housing Federation, the Chartered Institute of Housing and the National Housing Maintenance Forum. Collectively members represent nearly 125,000 homes on more than 3,000 networks, over 25% of all customers living on heat networks in the UK: we also have thousands of other customers living on heat networks managed by third parties. Rachael is also a co-founder and Director of Chirpy Heat, providing high quality, independent and innovative support for portfolio managers with the one aim of creating simply better heat networks. Loving a busy life, Rachael is also a Non-Executive Director for the Association for Decentralised Energy and a co-creator of the District Heating Divas, one of the fastest growing diversity and inclusion networks in the UK energy industry with nearly 500 members.

Antoinette Nwufo
Head of Policy; Rent and Service Charge, Riverside Group

Meadow O’Connor
Associate Solicitor, Trowers & Hamlins

Meadow is an Associate Solicitor in Trowers' Manchester Property Dispute Resolution and Litigation team, working with private and public sector clients on a breadth of matters across leasehold and freehold land and property.

She regularly advises both landlords and tenants on leasehold matters from breach of covenant to residential service charges, including advice on the implications of the Building Safety Act 2022 and associated legislation. She has experience in both the courts and the First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber).

Meadow also advises on more niche queries related to occupation of land and property, including boundary and neighbour disputes, access to land and easements, and agricultural law.

Liz Oliver
Safer Homes Director, The Hyde Group

Liz Oliver had led in compliance and safer homes roles within the housing sector for over ten years, working for organisations including Homes for Haringey and Optivo.

Liz feels passionately about keeping both residents and buildings safe. She has headed up Hyde’s Safer Homes team for around 18 months, and under her leadership, Hyde has carried out major building safety work on 10 residential buildings and thousands of other smaller projects. She recently led on the successful recladding project affecting 433 homes in five tower blocks at Gosport. The project has not only won national awards, but Liz’s work at Gosport led to her becoming a ‘Building Safety Ambassador’ for Inside Housing.

Thanks to Liz’s approach, always focusing on engaging with residents, and by being honest, open and supportive, Hyde has demonstrated to residents, stakeholders and government that it is a sector leader in building safety.

Giles Parlett
Leasehold Manager, Irwell Valley

Jeff Platt
Lead Technical Author, RICS

Sue Ramsden
Policy Leader, National Housing Federation

Sue Ramsden is a Policy lead at the National Housing Federation. She looks after a number of areas including: Covid 19 response, Landlord and tenant issues, Supported Housing and Welfare.

Adrian Shaw
Head of Rent and Service Charges, L&Q

Adrian joined L&Q in June 2021 as Head of Rent & Service Charge, where his responsibility covers rent and service charge administration and s20 consultation. He has worked for several housing associations as well as local authorities in London.

He was previously Head of Service Charges at Clarion Housing Group and prior to that was Director of Commercial & Leasehold Services for Circle Housing Group. He is an Assoc RICS and MIRPM and is a Board member of the National Leasehold Group and chairs their service charge sub-group.

Darrell Smith
Senior Policy Advisor, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities

Darrell Smith is a Senior Policy Advisor in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Darrell had worked in supported housing policy both in the Department for Work and Pensions and DLUHC for the past ten years, and recently led work on the passage of the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Act 2023 through Parliament. Darrell is currently working on the implementation of the measures in the Act, and on research into supported housing in England.