The Ownership Dividend
Initially, Ownership at Work aims to build on the report The Ownership Dividend – the economic case for employee ownership which published in June 2018 and features the evidence, findings and recommendations of the year-long Ownership Effect Inquiry.
Led by the EOA, in partnership with John Lewis Partnership, The eaga Trust and the academic support of CASS Business School and Manchester Business School, the inquiry was one of the most comprehensive studies of employee ownership in the UK.
More than 100 employee owned businesses (EOBs) and those who advise them gave evidence to an independent business-led panel of representatives from Britain’s leading business and professional organisations at seven hearings across the UK.
Board
Chair
Ann Tyler
Ann Tyler is Chair of Ownership at Work. A Cambridge graduate and qualified solicitor, she has over 30 years’ experience of legal and policy advice, and consulting work, in the field of employee ownership. She advised on employee ownership schemes in a wide variety or public and private companies, setting up the first ESOP in the UK, in Roadchef Limited.
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She implemented employee trusts on privatisation of the bus, air, electricity and coal industries, and worked with a number of trades unions as well as the trade union owned bank, Unity Trust. She was a founder member of Capital Strategies Limited and a Trustee of the Baxi Partnership Trust for 10 years to 2010. From 2001 – 2013 acted as Executive Director and Company Secretary of the Employee Ownership Association, during its transition from a small lobbying group to successful membership organisation. She took a private members’ bill through Parliament in 2002 to improve the tax regime for employee ownership and set up the APPG on Employee Ownership.
Recently, she has contributed to the Nuttall Review, sat on the BIS Stakeholder Advisory Group, led a working group on the proposed establishment of a new Institute for Mutual and Employee Owned Business, organised the first Robert Oakeshott Memorial Lecture delivered by Sir Nick Clegg when he was deputy Prime Minister, reviewed the Labour Party’s policy on Employee Ownership as part of the Hunt Review on Mutuals and organised a UK employee ownership study tour for a group of lawyers and politicians from the Basque Country. She advised Grant Thornton on their ‘Shared Enterprise’ scheme, was employee ownership consultant with Lewis Silkin LLP, and is currently an associate of Mutuo and a trustee of Voice at Be Caring.
Board members
Clayton Hirst 
Clayton Hirst is a corporate affairs specialist, with 25 years’ experience working in policy, communications and public affairs. He headed corporate affairs at John Lewis Partnership through a period of extraordinary change with Britain leaving the EU and the COVID-19 crisis.
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Before that he was Director of External Communications at Virgin Media and Director of Communications at the regulator Ofcom during a period of digital disruption. Clayton spent the early part of his career as a journalist, latterly Deputy Business Editor at the Independent on Sunday, reporting on a range of world business and economic events, including 9/11.
Deb Oxley OBE
Deb Oxley OBE is the CEO of the Employee Ownership Association (EOA), the UKs leading voice on employee ownership, representing a sector that contributes between £30-40bn a year to UK GDP as well as a membership organisation for UK businesses of private or public sector origin, that are wholly or partially owned by their employees.
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Deb has over 30 year’s business experience across private and public sectors and latterly after founding and running her own small business for 10 years, joined the EOA in 2012, becoming Chief Executive in 2015. Having recently led a national inquiry into the economic and social effects of employee ownership, Deb is now leading a programme of work to realise the recommendations of the inquiry findings, the Ownership Dividend.
As part of her role at the EOA, Deb also chairs the Employee Ownership Sector Group, is a member of the Government Mutuals Advisory Group, a Commissioner on the Grant Thornton Vibrant Economy and a member of the Managing Partners Forum (MPF).
In 2018 Deb was awarded an OBE for her services to employee ownership and social enterprise.
Jo Pritchard MBE
In 2006 Jo was instrumental in establishing the first social enterprise to come out of the NHS in England; she led CSH Surrey for eleven years tripling its size. This paved the way for a national strategy encouraging the development of social businesses and employee ownership. In 2011 Jo was invited by the then Secretary of State for the Cabinet Office to join the Mutuals’ Taskforce to create opportunities for employee ownership within the public sector.
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Appointed as a Commissioner on the Prime Minister’s Nursing and Midwifery Commission in 2010, the following year she was awarded an MBE for services to social enterprise. In 2017 Jo was honoured with the Employee Ownership Association’s Philip Baxendale Fellowship award and was made an Honorary Fellow of Social Enterprise UK.
Jo is an independent consultant with a particular interest in supporting employee owned health and social care social enterprises. She is an Honorary Professor at the University of Surrey.
Malcolm Lynch
Malcolm is a partner at Wrigleys and head of the Charity and Social Economy Team. He is a charity commercial lawyer and was an executive committee member of the Charity Law Association until June 2013.
He qualified in 1983 and has been advising on the legal, trust and tax aspects of employee ownership since 1987.
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Malcolm advises a wide range of local, national and international charities on charity law and relations with the Charity Commission, charity trading, commercial contracts, public procurement, legal structures, social investment, social enterprise, mergers and governance. He is known for his lateral thinking and innovative approach to clients’ problems.
He is recognised by the National Legal Directories, Legal 500 and Chambers & Partners, as an expert in Charity Law. He is a trustee of Leeds Youth Opera and Chairman of Business and Enterprise Finance Limited.