Board of Trustees
Our Board members are either elected or recruited — usually for their specific skills or experience. All our trustees are appointed for three years and generally cannot serve more than two consecutive terms. The Board normally meets five times a year, but may meet more often if necessary.
Trustees are all legally our company members and can vote at our annual general meeting, normally held in the autumn.
Victim Support would like to acknowledge and thank Nurole for their support in the recruitment of some of our Trustees and Independent Members.
Andrew is a Fellow Chartered Accountant and senior partner at Ernst and Young with significant experience working with multinational organisations and government bodies.
He has more than 35 years’ experience in corporate finance and advisory services including strategy, mergers and acquisitions, finance and performance management, data analytics, and IT-enabled business change.
Prior to Ernst and Young, he held senior Finance and Corporate Finance roles in two major FTSE corporations. Andrew is Chair of the Board, having previously held the roles of Treasurer and Chair of the Finance Committee.
Kathryn is a chartered accountant with substantial experience in the third sector, having previously worked at national charities including Cancer Research UK and Comic Relief.
Kathryn is currently setting up a business to support charities, giving assurance to Boards on their financial management and sustainability by enabling organisations to improve their financial processes, planning and reporting. She is also the co-leader of the Manchester branch of the Women’s Equality Party.
Andrew Edwards retired as a chief officer in the police service in 2010 having completed thirty two years’ service in two Welsh police forces. A graduate of the FBI National Academy in Quantico he was also a visiting lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and was responsible for serious and organised crime and counter terrorism across Wales in his last role.
A fellow of the University of Wales Trinity St David, in retirement he helped to establish the Wales Institute for Work Based Learning where he occasionally lectures on leadership and crisis management.
Helen is a partner in Deloitte’s Insurance Consulting practice where she focuses on shaping, leading and delivering insurance regulatory change programmes. Helen has worked as a Project and Programme Management Consultant for over fifteen years and prior to joining Deloitte she has worked in a variety of industries across a breadth of transformation themes, from technology installations to large scale initiatives involving cultural and organisational change.
Debbie Gillatt CBE is a longstanding magistrate, a non-executive director of the Health and Safety Executive and a trustee at Penny Parks Charitable Trust. Previously, she held non-executive roles with Companies House and the Insolvency Service and was the Director of Business Frameworks at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
Within BEIS, she most recently led the teams responsible for the UK’s company law, accounting standards and corporate governance rules, and for corporate transparency and anti-corruption initiatives. She also led on corporate responsibility and boardroom diversity.
Amanda and her family experienced personal tragedy when her brother was fatally wounded as a victim of knife crime in 2018. It’s this personal experience that has made her value and want to take a more active role with a support network such as Victim Support and help to develop the advice and comfort they provide to bereaved families and those who have felt the impact of crime.
In her professional career Amanda is a business lawyer, with nearly three decades of commercial experience. Most recently she was head of legal and compliance for a multi-national consumer goods business. Her significant experience in the key areas of risk, governance and compliance together with being a former trustee of Unseen (which supports victims of modern slavery and human trafficking), ensure that she has a wide and varied level of experience and specific skills to help Victim Support to meet the varied and emerging needs of victims, and to support the drive for victims to have improved rights and feel respected by the criminal justice system.
Roger Harding is the founding Director of a new venture about class and climate launching later this year. The new organisation will pilot ways to highlight how devastating climate change will be for many working class communities in the UK, and ensure there are more working class voices in the debate about how we best tackle this emergency.
After being raised by a single mum in a council house, Roger began his career fighting for social justice at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation before becoming Director of Communications, Policy and Campaigns at Shelter. He is Vice Chair of Victim Support and a member of the Mayor of London’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Group.
Prior to starting work on this new venture in August, Roger was Chief Executive of RECLAIM, the charity powering young working-class people to change the country today and lead it tomorrow. For four years he led their work supporting young people to run award-winning campaigns and creating a programme to support organisations that want and need to be more inclusive of working class talent.
Clarisse is an independent consultant leading a boutique management consultancy that specialises in providing business consulting and managed service solutions. She has over fifteen years’ experience leading complex regulatory change project in the financial services industry, risk management and in more recent years has specialised in helping clients fight financial crime across various industries subjected to Anti-Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing regulations. The real-life implications of such crimes make her passionate about empowering staff and clients to combat these crimes effectively.
Additionally, through adverse life events, she needed the help of Victim Support and was impressed by the passion, dedication and professionalism of the people who guided her through one of her hardest life situations. She wanted to give back to the organisation and feels that her experience as a service user gives her a unique perspective to help develop and improve Victim Support’s services.
Laura works for a Local Authority commissioning domestic abuse and VAWG services, and leading on partnership working. Previously, she has worked for a range of charities that spanned grassroots to global in reach, holding portfolio areas for gender-based violence, human trafficking and modern slavery. This was underpinned by a career in the criminal justice system. Laura’s career has been complimented by academic study which has focused on responses to organised crime such as counter-terrorism and human trafficking.
Laura is passionate about effecting change within social justice movements and moving the marginalised to the mainstream. Laura contributed to the National Commission for Domestic Abuse, Sexual Violence and Women’s Multiple Disadvantage, and champions inclusive workplaces and cultures.
Rachel Onikosi is an elected Councillor in the London Borough of Lewisham and also sits on the governing body of two local primary schools.
Over the past seven years Rachel has managed a portfolio of local politics, consumer and stakeholder advocacy and investigations.
Rachel’s previous role as a consumer advocate with the Consumer Council for Water (CCW) saw her challenge water companies on their customer performance and value for money principles in line with CCW’s Forward Programme.
Rachel’s passion for the water sector encouraged her to become a Non Executive Director of the Consumer Council for Water where she uses her sector knowledge to make a huge difference for water customers. Rachel is also a panel chair with the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s fitness to practice directorate and also sits as a magistrate at two south east London courts.
