Plenary and Panel Speakers

Mark Bourgeois

Chief Executive, Government Property Agency

Mark was appointed CEO of the GPA in October 2024. He is an established corporate leader with over 30 years of strategic and operational real estate experience across asset management, investment, development and operations. Mark was previously Managing Director UK and Ireland at Hammerson plc, Executive Director at Capital & Regional plc and Interim Corporate Director City Development at Liverpool City Council. He studied Industrial Economics at Nottingham University and began his career in Audit at KPMG.

Mark Chivers

Government Chief Property Officer, Cabinet Office

Mark joined the Cabinet Office as Government Chief Property Officer in January 2022.
Mark is responsible for providing senior, strategic leadership for the whole cross-government property function. He works with a wide range of senior stakeholders within government and in the wider public sector promoting the intelligent use of property to deliver better public services at lower cost to the taxpayer.
Mark provides strategic leadership for the Government Property Function, and holds senior leaders accountable to the Government Functional Standard. He leads on major change programmes, supporting the delivery of better and more integrated public services, overseeing – among others – the Places for Growth programme and supporting the regional growth agenda.
Mark has 20 years experience at Board level in both the private and public sectors, most recently as Director of Estates Engineering and Energy at Boots UK, but has led teams across Property, Marketing, Procurement, Operations and Transformation in Walgreens Boots Alliance businesses.
He is also a Non-Executive Director at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust.

Lynda Rawsthorne

Government Head of Property Profession, Cabinet Office

Lynda Rawsthorne was appointed Government Head of Property Profession and Director, Property Capability, Sponsorship & Standards, in August 2023.
Lynda is head of the Government Property Profession, the community of property professionals across government. She provides professional leadership across a diverse range of government departments and arms-length bodies which deliver the government’s property ambitions.
Lynda is responsible for the Government Property Strategy and the Government Property Functional Standard. The strategy sets out the government’s plans for a public sector estate for public benefit, ensuring it enables the best possible public services, is efficient and sustainable and supports the government’s levelling up ambitions. The Functional Standard sets expectations for how government property is acquired, managed and disposed of.
Lynda has over 25 years’ professional experience across the property lifecycle including valuation, managing estates as well as delivering transformational and construction-based programmes. A Fellow of both the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the Association of Project Management, Lynda is a graduate of the Major Project Leadership Academy at the University of Oxford.

Hadleigh Standen

Deputy Director, Property Programmes, Office of Government Property, Cabinet Office

Hadleigh is the Deputy Director for Property Programmes in the Office of Government Property (OGP) where he has responsibility for the OGP FM standards, tools and policies and leads a team working cross government to drive collaboration and innovation in tackling the condition challenges and improving the resilience of the government estate including leading the response to the NAO and PAC on the condition of government property. Prior to this Hadleigh spent 3 years in the Government Commercial Function as part of the Strategic Partnering Programme, working with government Strategic Suppliers in the Built Environment. Before joining the Cabinet Office, he spent over 20 years working in industry where he held senior roles with a number of large FM suppliers delivering services to the public sector. Hadleigh is also a fellow of the RICS.

Session Speakers

Matt Bailey

Workplace Analytics Specialist, Matrix Booking

With a passion for harnessing the power of data to transform traditional office spaces into dynamic, adaptive environments, Matt is a seasoned expert in workplace analytics and insights. With a background in SaaS for high-growth technology companies for more than 15 years, Matt brings expertise on how to leverage technology and data to forecast building utilisation, driving cost savings and sustainability.

Matt believes that by harnessing the insights derived from workplace analytics, organisations can not only optimise their office spaces but also create environments that foster collaboration, creativity, and employee well-being.

Peter Buist

Partner, Purcell

Peter is the regional partner for the East UK and has over ten years’ experience of delivering award winning projects.
Experienced in contemporary design and new build projects, Peter specialises in the design of innovative learning, teaching and research buildings and has delivered a number of complex buildings for university institutions. Peter enjoys meeting and collaborating with the variety of people involved in his projects, from local community volunteer groups and corporate stakeholders, to school children and specialist consultants.

Sam Carey-Smith

Head of Workplace Design, Innovation and Assurance, GPA

Biog coming soon

Hannah Cheminais

Partner, Mills & Reeve LLP

Hannah has over 15 years’ experience in all aspects of commercial property acting on both investment and development transactions. Hannah’s area of expertise lies with large regeneration and development projects. Hannah has experience acting for public bodies in respect of CPO and large regeneration projects including site assembly and funding, but also on the developer side, acting for developers on JV agreements with public bodies.  Hannah is named as a “Next Generation Lawyer” in the Legal 500.

Patrick Clarke

Masterplanning Lead, UK & Ireland, AECOM

Patrick is AECOM’s Masterplanning Lead for the UK+I and has more than 30 years’ experience at the forefront of the professional debate on planning for housing and sustainable communities.

He led the groundbreaking studies of Sustainable Residential Quality in London demonstrating how urban design and placemaking could unlock more and better homes, supporting significant changes in national planning policy. He has led or contributed to a series of national guides to better planning and design including the Urban Design Compendium, Better Places to Live, Safer Places and the Irish Government’s Urban Design Manual.

Patrick has worked with a range of public and private sector clients to apply the key principles on large-scale new community projects directly relevant to the Government’s New Towns agenda. These include: Welborne Garden Village in Fareham; Ebbsfleet Garden City in Thames Gateway; Manydown Garden Town at Basingstoke; and Brookleigh (Northern Arc) at Burgess Hill.

Patrick has given evidence to Parliamentary Inquiries, been a member of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment’s National Design Review Panel and the Town and Country Planning Association’s Expert Panel on Garden City Principles for the 21st century. His contributions to Town Planning and the Social Sciences in the public interest have been recognised by fellowships of both the RTPI and the Academy of Social Science.

Andrew Dobson

Partner, Purcell

Andrew studied designing for sensitive sites, reflecting vernacular materials, culture, and sustainable design, particularly design-for-climate. Coupled with his experience at Purcell, this developed into a passion for the conversion of historic buildings for new sustainable uses, and the construction of extensions and new buildings in historic and sensitive settings.
Andrew’s experience at Purcell lies in complex refurbishment and conversion of listed buildings, primarily in the public sector. In particular, Andrew has key experience in integrating complex services systems into his projects. His designs make use of existing building features where possible to provide passive solutions for long term sustainability, and also thoughtful and discrete integration of climate control for museum spaces.

Carly Ersser

Director of Workplace Services, GPA

Biog coming soon

Michael Ferris

Client Engagement Manager, Central Government & ALBs, Crown Hosting Data Centres

Michael Ferris leads engagement across central government and arm’s length bodies for Crown Hosting, a Cabinet Office partnership delivering secure, sustainable data centre services to the UK public sector. He works closely with estates and digital teams to help them make the most of the Crown Hosting Framework (RM6262) — reducing costs, cutting carbon emissions, and improving resiliency by migrating IT infrastructure out of existing buildings.

With a background in compliance, commercial operations, and public sector delivery, Michael brings a practical, client-focused approach to digital transformation — helping organisations align infrastructure decisions with estate strategy and net-zero goals.

Dave Hallam

Senior Director, Arcadis

Dave is an accomplished built environment professional and senior leader in Arcadis with over 25 years’ experience as a Chartered Building Surveyor and thought leader in PPP / PFI, providing Project and Asset Management expertise on major programmes of work and complex real estate portfolios worldwide. Dave is a member of the Senior Leadership Team within the Arcadis Asset Optimisation practice. In this role, he leads the sale, growth, and delivery of advisory services to public sector clients, private sector investors and other stakeholders, with a focus on asset optimisation and PFI including developing and delivering propositions associated with PPP/PFI concession expiry and hand back services.

Nigel Herbert

Head of Practice – Asset Optimisation, Arcadis

Details coming soon….

Katherine Hosea

Project Director, London Legacy Development Corporation

Ron Lang

Regional Director, Project and Programme Advisory, AtkinsRéalis

Ron is a Regional Director and Chartered Management Consultant at AtkinsRéalis, specialising in sector transformation. He delivers advisory services to public and private sector clients, with a focus on transforming the way they deliver capital programmes and portfolios. Ron has been on long-term secondment to NISTA since October 2024, supporting development and delivery of the Social Infrastructure Roadmap. Prior to joining AtkinsRéalis, Ron was Chief Technical Officer at the Construction Innovation Hub; a £75m, government-funded research programme focused on Industrialisation, Digital Transformation and Outcome-Based Decision-making. Through this role, Ron played a central role in the development of UK Government policy including the Infrastructure and Project Authority’s Transforming Infrastructure Performance programme and the Construction Playbook.

Chris Law

Central Government Lead, UK & Ireland, AECOM

Chris Law has spent over a decade driving workplace transformation and lifecycle improvements across the public estate within UK & Ireland. As Regional Director at AECOM, Chris works closely with government departments to modernise property portfolios, drive efficiency and create flexible, future-ready environments that support better public services. His experience spans major initiatives across central government, with a strong focus on aligning property strategies to organisational goals and unlocking long-term value for communities. Chris brings practical insight into how innovation and collaboration can shape the next generation of public estate assets.

Katy Lock

Director of Communities, Town and Country Planning Association

As Director of Communities and FJ Osborn Fellow Katy oversees TCPA’s work on new and renewed communities and leads on the TCPA’s campaigns and promotion of garden city principles in policy, legislation, education and the arts. This involves working at all levels of government and with a wide range of public, private and third sector organisations and individuals, at all stages of planning, design and delivery. Katy is also responsible for overseeing Project Delivery at the TCPA.

Katy leads the TCPA’s ongoing research on transferable lessons from the post-war new towns, and work supporting new town authorities through the New Towns Network and All-Party Parliamentary Group. She is the co-author of ‘New Towns: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth’ with Hugh Ellis (RIBA Publishing, 2020).  In 2017 Katy co-authored ‘The Art of Building a Garden City: Designing New Communities for the C21st’ with Hugh Ellis and Kate Henderson.

Katy is a Chartered Town Planner (MRTPI) and has a background in planning, urban design and sustainability. Before joining the TCPA in 2011, she worked for several years in the private sector as an environmental planning consultant. Katy is currently a trustee for Planning Aid for London, and a Design Review panellist for Design South East.

Jonathan Saks

Chief Economist, National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA)

Jonny is the Chief Economist at the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA). He was formerly in a similar role at the National Infrastructure Commission, which he joined in October 2023. He previously worked at the Department for Transport, where he headed up a multidisciplinary analysis division serving the department’s Aviation, Maritime and Security Group, and has extensive senior experience leading analytical programmes across government, working across a wide transport brief.

As an economist his experience includes leading funding bids and strategic analysis in Spending Reviews and fiscal events, being a senior advisor on public/private funding negotiations, heading up technical delegations at international negotiations, and delivering a range of large, innovative modelling and forecasting programmes. He also lead the analysis on the Global Travel Task Force during the COVID pandemics, and was lead economic advisor at the Airports Commission. Jonny is also a regular contributor and chair for expert panels at the OECD.

Terry Stocks

Director Strategic Programmes, AtkinsRéalis

Terry is the UK and Ireland Strategic Programmes Director for AtkinsRéalis. He has worked in both the public and private sectors managing large organisations and delivering projects across wide social and economic infrastructure asset classes. Before joining AtkinsRéalis, Terry was the Estates Director for the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) with responsibility for the capital delivery and operational maintenance and management of the MOJ’s estate. Terry has led many key government initiatives, driving construction industry productivity and modernisation. Terry led the UK Cabinet Office (IPA) BIM mandate, chaired the cross government ‘modern methods of contracting’ group and was a digital workstream lead in the Cambridge Universities centre for digital built Britain. Terry continues to be an industry leading figure and innovator, developing and introducing innovative approaches for client delivery and revenue creation. Terry has been awarded an MBE for his services to construction innovation.

Stephanie Walters

Sector Head Central Government, AtkinsRéalis

Stephanie brings 17 years of experience at AtkinsRéalis to her role as the National Head of Sector for Central Government. She plays a pivotal role in supporting government clients to align strategic estate planning with departmental objectives to develop, maintain, and operate agile, fit-for-purpose facilities. A Chartered Building Surveyor by background, Stephanie has overseen complex multi-disciplinary technical delivery across Central Government, Education, Local Government, and Commercial sectors. Her approach centres on creating sustainable, future-ready environments that empower occupants and enhance public service outcomes.

Speakers, agenda and times may be subject to change