Commission Members

Chair of the Commission

Dr Jane Roberts, DBE

Jane Roberts has extensive experience in local government. She was a councillor for the London Borough of Camden for 16 years, and Leader of the Council from 2000 until 2005. She is currently carrying out work for the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) and the Local Government Leadership Centre. She is an Associate Fellow at Warwick University working with the Leadership Development Research Programme at Warwick Business School.

Professionally, Jane is a medical doctor specialising in child and adolescent psychiatry, and Director of Quality and Performance at Islington Primary Care Trust. She became Chair of the charity Parenting UK in December 2006. She has been a member of a number of commissions covering children's services, local government, sustainability and governance. Most recently, she has been a member of the Gilbert Teaching and Learning Review 2020 and has been appointed to the new OfSTED Board. She is also a member of the board of trustees of the Institute of Public Policy Research (ippr), and New Local Government Network (nlgn). In addition to numerous articles, she has published a number of academic papers in paediatrics, psychiatry and child psychiatry and was co-editor and contributor to 'The Politics of Attachment' (Free Association Books 1996).

Commission members

Yaseer Ahmed

Yaseer is a successful entrepreneur and a strategic independent advisor on the Race Independent Advisory Group to the Greater Manchester Police Authority. He is also a Non-Executive Director at the Bolton Hospitals NHS Trust, was a Commissioner at the CRE between 2006-7 and currently manages the Bolton Council of Mosques which represents all the mosques in Bolton supporting over 30000 Muslims.

Yaseer is an ardent believer in voluntary and community work. He has been Vice Chair of the Bolton Council for Voluntary Services and has chaired and been a member of a number of organisations, ranging from entrepreneurial networks to community engagement in sport.
 
As well as other awards of formal recognition, Yaseer was awarded Bolton's Young Entrepreneur award in 2002. The Bolton Black and Asian Achievement award in 2004 and a Muslim News Award in 2006. He has extensive experience of developing partnerships to engage hard to reach groups, in particular the BME community and has a keen interest in the workings of local government and the role of the local councillor.

Councillor Cathy Bakewell

Cathy is the former Leader of Somerset County Council. She has been a Liberal Democrat member of Somerset County Council since 1993. She has been Chair of the Executive since June 2001 and is a member of the Somerset Strategic Partnership. Cathy is also one of the Vice-Chairs of the County Council Network. She is a member of the South West Regional Assembly and is a Director of the Somerset Rural Youth Project. Cathy has also worked as a Constituency Agent for the Liberal Democrats and was PA to the Rt Hon Paddy Ashdown in the House of Commons in 1997-98. Before taking time out to raise a family, she worked as a personal secretary in a variety of organisations.

Jessica Crowe

Jessica is Executive Director of the Centre for Public Scrutiny. She has extensive experience as a community representative, non-executive scrutineer and consultant who has contributed to public service improvement both nationally and locally. Since 2004 she has been a non-executive director of Homerton University Hospital Foundation Trust and between 2002 and 2006 she was a director of Groundwork East London. She is an accredited IDeA Peer and has carried out two corporate assessments under CPA 2005 for the Audit Commission. She has extensive experience in elected and lay member training and adult education and has conducted training sessions on behalf of organisations including IDeA and the Association of London Government.

Jessica was a councillor in the London Borough of Hackney between 1998 and 2006, where she took part in the council's first ever cross party scrutiny review before becoming Deputy Mayor and was part of the team responsible for delivering significant service and performance improvements in the borough. From 1998 to 2004 she was a primary school governor and from July 2001 until Feb 2003 she was a policy officer for LGiU, a local government think tank, where her areas of specialism included social services and the voluntary sector. She wrote the LGIU-DfES joint publication on corporate parenting, 'If this were my child...'. She has worked as an adviser to a government minister, for the Labour Party and the Local Government Association. She has an MSc in European Social Policy from the London School of Economics, where she specialised in comparative local government.

Councillor Margaret Eaton

Councillor Margaret Eaton OBE was elected to Bradford Metropolitan District Council in May 1986; she was Leader of the Council's Conservative Group May 1995 to May 2006. She was the first female Leader of the Council from May 2000 to May 2006.

Margaret has been Chair of Bradford's Local Strategic Partnership Board, Bradford Vision; Chair of Bradford's Cultural Consortium; Co-chair of Bradford's Safer Communities Partnership; she was a Director on the Board of the Bradford Centre Regeneration Company.  She is a Director of Leeds Bradford International Airport. She has also a member of the Yorkshire and Humber Assembly and a member of the Association of West Yorkshire Authorities.

Margaret is a Vice Chairman of the Local Government Association, Leader of the LGA Conservative Group, and is a member of the LGA Executive Committee and Strategy and Finance Policy Review Group; previously she has been Vice Chair of their Cultural Services Executive and Chair of their Equalities Executive.

Margaret is Chairman of the Conservative Councillors' Association and a member of the Conservative Party Board.

Ben Page

Ben is Managing Director of Ipsos MORI Public Affairs and Chairman of the Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute. He joined MORI in 1987 after graduating from Oxford University in 1986. A frequent writer and speaker on leadership and performance management in the public sector, he has directed hundreds of surveys for UK local and national government and large service providers examining quality of life, service delivery, customer care, communications and the democratic deficit. Since 1992 he has worked closely with ministers and senior policy makers across government, leading on work for Downing Street, the Cabinet Office, the Home Office, Communities and Local Government and the Department of Health, as well as a wide range of local authorities and NHS Trusts. Named one of the '100 most influential people in the public sector' by The Guardian newspaper, Ben was winner of the 2001 BMRA award and a 2005 MRS medal. He is a Commissioner of Architecture and the Built Environment at CABE. He sits on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Market Research (IJMR), and of INVOLVE, a charity promoting citizen participation.

Matthew Taylor

Matthew has been Chief Executive of the Royal Society for the Arts since November 2006. Before that, he was Chief Adviser on Political Strategy to the Prime Minister. Matthew was appointed by the Labour Party in 1994 to establish Labour's rebuttal operation. He has also been a county councillor, a parliamentary candidate, a university research fellow and the director of a unit monitoring policy in the health service. Until December 1998, Matthew was Assistant General Secretary for the Labour Party. During the 1997 General Election he was Labour's Director of Policy and a member of the Party's central election strategy team. He was the Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research between 1999 and 2003, during which time the Institute tripled in size to become the largest independent public policy think tank in Europe.

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