Alan Clamp

Lay Member of Regulatory Board and Chair of Appointments Board

Alan has been the Chief Executive of the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care (PSA) since 2018. The PSA promotes the health, safety and wellbeing of patients, service users and the public by raising standards of regulation and voluntary registration of people working in health and care. 

Alan was previously the Chief Executive of the Security Industry Authority (SIA). The SIA is a public body established under the Private Security Act 2001 to regulate private security in the UK. Between 2011-2015 Alan held the post of Chief Executive at the Human Tissue Authority (HTA), an independent regulator sponsored by the Department of Health. 

In addition to his role at the PSA, Alan is a Non-Executive Director at the Parole Board and the Intellectual Property Regulation Board, and a Trustee of the Institute of Regulation. 

Amin Dawuda

Amin is an experienced executive operating at board level in the private and public sectors.

He has held a number of senior leadership roles in financial services organisations, with over 20 years at London Stock Exchange Group.

This included guiding customer facing technology and operations teams, managing risk, compliance and change management in highly regulated capital markets. He also chaired a steering committee that oversaw the performance of LSE Plc’s technology supplier, reporting to the Board and industry regulator.

Amin is vice chair of governors at a primary school, and vice secretary at a youth football club that serve his local community. He is committed to providing development pathways for young people and improving diversity and inclusion, particularly at senior levels within the workforce.

Amy Burrows

Lay member of Appointments Board

Amy has senior leadership experience across the public, private and voluntary sectors; including, most recently, working for The Pensions Ombudsman where she led various cross organisation teams including HR, Finance, Governance, IT and Communications and Stakeholder Engagement.  In addition, this role required building relationships and working with senior officials in the Department for Work and Pension to embed governance processes underpinned by robust risk and assurance frameworks.

Previous roles include leadership positions at the Independent Monitoring Boards at the Ministry of Justice, Department for Education and the Prison and Probation Service.

In addition to her role at ACCA, she is a Panel Chair for the Investigations Panel of the Nursing and Midwifery Council, a lay member of the Regulatory Appointments Committee for the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and a publicly appointed panellist for the Teaching Regulation Agency professional conduct hearings. Amy is also the Safeguarding Trustee for STEP, a high performing multi academy trust delivering education to twenty schools across South London and East Sussex.

Amy is a Chartered Member of the Chartered Institute of the Personnel and Development.

Chiew Yin Jones

Chiew Yin is a barrister with over 25 years' experience in criminal justice and is an experienced advocate with a substantial casework and litigation background.

She also sits as a Legally Qualified Chair for the Police Misconduct Panel in London and the South East region and is Vice President of the National Association of Legally Qualified Chairs.

She is a former trustee of the Cleft Lip and Palate Association and enjoys gardening, cooking and reading.

Elaine Darby

Lay member of Qualifications Board and Chief Examiner.

Elaine is a Chartered Accountant, Senior Lecturer in Accounting, and Director of Undergraduate Education for the School of Business & Management at Royal Holloway University of London. She is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

After leaving professional practice in 2008, Elaine became a Tutor with BPP Professional Education before embarking on a career in academia, initially with Henley Business School at the University of Reading, where she was Programme Area Director for Accounting, and later at Royal Holloway.

In her current role, Elaine has responsibility for the academic quality of the undergraduate degree programmes offered by the School of Business & Management and contributes to the education strategy of Royal Holloway.

In the last 10 years, Elaine has held the posts of Exams Officer, Professional Accreditation Officer, Programme Director, and Senior Tutor and has been an External Examiner for Liverpool University.

Helen Morgan

Elected to Council: 2022

Helen is an experienced finance and non-executive director working in the retail sector for one of the UK’s largest character clothing companies.

She became a fellow member of the ACCA in 2008. Prior to that, she attained her Accounting Technician qualification, first-class Applied Accounting degree, and an MBA through Oxford Brookes.

Helen has experience in a wide range of industries and sectors, including telecommunications, cloud services, BPOs, financial services and charitable institutions. Her roles have ranged from working in FP&A (finance, planning and analytics) and accounting, to director and senior/non-executive positions.

She became an ACCA panel member for the South Wales region back in 2018, and has supported ACCA students and members in the UK and worldwide, including delivering keynote speeches, contributing towards research projects and panel discussions, She has also contributed to podcasts on topics such as ‘Leading the global footprint’ and ‘Accounting for the future’.

Jackie Alexander

Lay member of Appointments Board

Jackie is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and works as an independent Human Resources Consultant and trainer. Her most recent interim role is within the House of Commons Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme. Previous roles have included Recruitment Partner for PricewaterhouseCoopers and Managing Director Corporate Services for LCH.Clearnet.

Jackie also works within professional regulation and currently sits on the Investigation Committee for the ICAEW, Investigation panels for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and the Professional Conduct Committee for the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. Previously she has served on the Appointments Board of the General Dental Council and served as a lay panellist for the Nursing and Midwifery Council on fitness to practice hearings.

Jackie is a non-practising solicitor and a magistrate and also sits on Schools Appeals and Exclusion panels for a London Borough.

Joy Julien

Joy Julien – Lay member of Appointments Board 

Joy is a chair of the Judicial Appointments Commission selection panels and a trustee of the London Legal Support Trust.

Previously, Joy was the chief executive of the Royal Courts of Justice Advice Bureau.  After leaving the legal advice sector, Joy developed a career in professional regulation, audit and assessment. Joy has worked predominantly with healthcare regulators including the Practitioner Performance Advice - NHS Resolution (formerly the National Clinical Assessment Service), the General Dental Council, the Nursing and Midwifery Council, and the Medical Practitioner's Tribunal (formerly the General Medical Council). 

Joy has cross-sector quasi judicial experience that includes sitting as an independent member of the Office of Judicial Complaints and the Parole Board.

Throughout her illustrious career within the not-for-profit legal advice sector, Joy has held various trustee positions which include the Central London Law Centre, the Legal Action Group and Protect (formerly Public Concern at Work).

Katie Bailey

Lay member of the Qualifications Board

Katie Bailey is Professor of Work and Employment at King's College London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Academic Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and of the Royal Society of Arts, and member of the Association for Coaching. She is also Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Employment Studies, and a member of the Involvement and Participation Association (IPA) Work Insights Group, where she was also formerly a Trustee and Non-Executive Director.

Katie was a member of the Renewing Work Advisory Group (ReWAGe), and has held several editorial roles, including as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Management Reviews. She has been on the Senior Leadership Team of four business schools. Katie has won multiple international awards for her research, which focuses on employee engagement, meaningful work and human resource management, she regularly presents keynotes, and has 30 years experience of higher and executive education.

Liz Blackburn

Elected to Council: 2017

Liz has a diverse range of asset management reporting and audit experience, as well as a passion for, and track record of, information gathering, sharing insights, building business relationships and helping businesses and individuals develop and succeed.

Her roles with blue chip financial services organisations (BlackRock, Royal Bank of Scotland, AEGON Asset Management, Standard Life Investments) and Big 4 accountants (PwC, EY) over the past 30 years have given her extensive experience of external audit, review and challenge, risk and control assessments, driving Risk Culture activities, Operational and ESE risk, and exposure to Board Risk Committees. 

Liz was admitted to membership of the ACCA in 2000 and became a Fellow in 2005.  She was elected to Council in November 2017.

Prior to joining Council Liz chaired the UK Financial Services and the Edinburgh & East of Scotland Member Network Panels and was awarded ACCA UK Advocate of the Year in 2016.

Liz now chairs the Accountants for Business Global Forum, a group of 25-30 CFOs from around the world which meets quarterly and discusses a wide range of topics from cyber security, finance transformation, future finance careers through to climate change and Covid-19 response.  Output from the Forum informs the Professional Insights (PI) research, and as such Liz has worked with the PI team and contributed to a number of PI reports.

Liz is an ex officio member of the ACCA Scotland Committee.

Read our interview with Liz.

Lucy Winskell

Lucy has been pro vice-chancellor (employability and partnerships) at Northumbria University since 2022, a full-time role where she has led the development of Northumbria’s relationships with local government and public bodies, shaping its contribution to regional economic, cultural and social development and graduate employment and establishing its Amsterdam campus as part of Northumbria’s Internationalisation Strategy. She steps down from that role at the end of August 2022, having been appointed Her Majesty’s lord lieutenant of Tyne and Wear, but will continue her non-executive roles.

Prior to joining Northumbria University in 2010, Lucy was a litigation lawyer for 28 years. During that time as a lawyer Lucy gained a very deep and rich experience of membership organisations and the regulation of professionals, sitting on the Council of the Law Society of England and Wales, on the board of the Solicitors Regulation Authority and President of Newcastle Law Society.

She has extensive non-executive director experience. Appointments have included Government Office North East, Darlington Building Society, the British Chambers of Commerce, the North East Industrial Development Board and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the last two being ministerial appointments.

Currently she is chair of the North East Local Enterprise Partnership and a non-executive director of North East Access to Finance.

Lucy has international experience as a former UK president of the Union Internationale des Advocats and served as UK chair of the British-American Project, the think-tank and international network for Anglo-US business and cultural relations.

She is chair of Live Theatre and a trustee of Live Theatre and International Centre for Life, both in Newcastle upon Tyne, and became chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund North East Committee in June 2017. She is deputy chair of The Community Foundation, Tyne and Wear and Northumberland.

Lucy was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday 2014 Honours List in recognition for her services to Higher Education and the regional economy in the North East. She was appointed as deputy lieutenant of Tyne and Wear in 2014, and subsequently lord lieutenant in May 2022 and was high sheriff of Tyne and Wear 2015/16.

Michael Guthrie

Michael Guthrie is an experienced executive leader with a background in professional regulation in the healthcare sector.

As Director of Policy and Standards for the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC), he was responsible for policy and standards development across 16 regulated health professions, leading work to bring further professions into statutory regulation. He also held an Executive leadership position with the Australian Dental Council (ADC), where he was responsible for the accreditation of programmes leading to registration in the dental professions.

He is currently Policy Lead in the Centre for Advancing Practice at Health Education England (HEE), a body with responsibility for the NHS workforce, and undertakes this role alongside freelance consultancy assignments for a variety of clients in the regulation, health and charity sectors.

He is a lay member of the Regulation Board of the Academy for Healthcare Science (AHCS), chairing its Operational Registration Committee and is a panel member of the British Psychoanalytic Council’s fitness to practise Screening Committee. He was previously a Board member of the NRCPD, a charity which holds a register of sign language interpreters and other communication professionals working with deaf and deaf blind people.

Paul Layzell

Lay member of Regulatory Board Board and Chair of the Qualifications Board

Professor Paul Layzell is currently principal and chief executive of Royal Holloway, University of London and deputy vice-chancellor of the University of London.  

After completing a degree in Econometrics and Accounting and higher degrees in Computer Science, Paul became an academic at UMIST in Manchester.  As a professor of software engineering and management, his academic work focused on the interaction between IT systems, organisations and people.  After leading an EU project on software maintenance, he worked with colleagues on a BT-funded project looking at the future of software and authored one of the early papers on software-as-a-service and cloud computing.

Between 2001 and 2004, Paul was programme manager for the merger of UMIST and the University of Manchester and after a brief spell as deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Sussex, he came principal at Royal Holloway in 2010.

During his career, Paul has maintained a close connection to education and assessment and for seven years was chair of AQA, the UK’s largest GCSE and A-level exam board.  He is a member of the World Academy of Sport Advisory Board and as education adviser, has assisted the development of professional qualifications for the sports management industry.

Paul has wide governance experience having been chair of Eduserv – an IT services company for the education and wider public sector, chair of London Higher – the representative body of London’s universities, a founding Board member of Jisc – an IT services company supporting further and higher education, and treasurer of Universities UK.

Paul is a keen gardener and in 2017 was appointed a deputy lieutenant of Surrey.

Paul Lewis

Lay member of the Qualifications Board.

Paul is the Chief Operating Officer of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a Royal Charter organisation supporting the work of the global chemical sciences community. 

Paul has substantial experience in the Education, Skills and STM publishing sectors including working at City & Guilds and, Cambridge Assessment. In these organisations, he oversaw the quality of provision and integrity of examinations across numerous teaching and examination centres around the world as well as developing new assessments and learning resources.

Paul has provided international education and training expertise to UK Government Ministers and led the team securing £1 billion of UK education exports whilst on secondment to DIT from PA Consulting. Earlier in his career, he was a Vice-Principal at a London FE college.

Professionally qualified with an BSc (Hons) degree, PGCE and MBA (Distinction), Paul is a graduate of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and a Fellow of the RSA and Institute of Leadership & Management.

Qinxue Mei

Elected to Council: 2024

Major, as he is more commonly known, serves as senior vice president, Group COO & CHRO at Jiawei Renewable Energy Co Ltd, a publicly listed company in China. With over 25 years of professional experience, he has held positions such as CFO, COO, CHO, SBU CEO and other senior leadership roles in renowned public and multinational corporations, including Nestlé, Mattel, and ICI Group. Additionally, he has been a part-time ACCA Lecturer for three years.

He holds a Global MBA degree from Manchester Business School and is currently pursuing an Executive DBA (2022-present) degree from Université Paris-Dauphine - PSL in conjunction with Beijing National Accounting Institute.

Since joining ACCA in 2013, Major has won the ACCA China Advocate of the Year 2018 award. He previously chaired the ACCA Southern China Steering Team, is a member of the ACCA China Professional Expert Forum, and served as an ACCA International Assembly representative 2020-2021.

In 2014, Major established Major's Club, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) dedicated to supporting thousands of ACCA students and members. Furthermore, for more than six years, he has served as an industry mentor for the Accounting Master program at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen).

Sallahuddin (Den) Surfraz

Elected to Council: 2020

Mohammad Sallah-ud-din (Den) Surfraz has been a member of ACCA since 2009 and is also a certified fraud examiner (CFE).  He has more than 30 years experience in the financial services industry and his expertise is mainly in the areas of financial crime investigations, risk management and compliance. An advocate of the profession for the last 10 years, Den is also board member of the Pan African Federation of Accountants (PAFA) as a representative of Mauritius Institute of Professional Accountants (MIPA), and is the vice chair of MIPA.

He is the market head – risk and governance of TMF Group for the region of India - Middle East and Africa. His previous position was with Butterfield Group as head of compliance for Mauritius, with Citco as global operation control and KYC AML Manager.  He has also worked as an investigator at the Financial Intelligence Unit and as a police officer, mainly with the Anti-Drugs and Smuggling Unit (ADSU).

Suzanne McCarthy

Lay member of Regulatory Board

Suzanne initially worked in private practice as a solicitor before joining Manchester University’s law faculty. She continued her career in the civil service first working at the Home Office, where she served as Private Secretary to two Home Secretaries, and then at HM Treasury. She finished her executive career working in the wider public sector serving as CEO of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, as the first CEO of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme and finally as the UK’s Immigration Services Commissioner,

Suzanne’s executive career kindled her interest in regulation and professional standards which she has continued in her Non-Executive Director roles. These currently include as Chair of the Fire Standards Board, the Valuation Tribunal Service and the National Guardian Office’s Accountability and Liaison Board.  She is also a member of the Boards of the College of Policing, the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority and the Fundraising Regulator. She chairs the latter’s Standards Committee and the College’s Audit and Risk Committee. Suzanne also chairs two charities. In addition, she acts as the Independent Appointed Person for the Greater London Authority, is a member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors Transitional Standards Steering Group and a reserve chair for the General Pharmaceutical Council’s Fitness to Practice Panel. Her previous appointments include the General Medical Council, the University of London, the Advertising Standards Authority, RICS’s UK and Ireland Regulation Board and the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust. 

Tom Spender

Tom Spender is currently the General Counsel for the Retail Bank of Lloyds Banking Group plc.

In his career, Tom has held senior positions at both regulated financial services firms and also at the UK financial services regulator. He has a legal background with over 20 years’ experience in consumer protection, litigation, risk management, the use of data and regulation.

Prior to joining, Lloyds Bank in 2016, Tom held various senior roles at the UK Financial Conduct Authority and its predecessors for over 13 years, including senior policy, enforcement and supervision roles.

Tom is a qualified solicitor and has worked in litigation and capital markets in international law firms in the UK and in Australia.

Trush Lakhani

Trusha has been an ACCA member since 1997. Her other qualifications are an MSc Computing from DeMontfort University and B.Com from University of Mysore.

She has also been actively involved in local, national and international panels. She is a former member of International Assembly, is a past chair of the Leicestershire panel, and is a member of the UK Corporate Sector panel.

Trusha is a multi-award-winning business coach and fractional CFO specialising in SMEs, and passionate about business growth, digitalisation, and sustainability.

She has held various roles in a variety of local and international organisations throughout her 30-year career. This has allowed her to move between a variety of roles from standard accounting to IT integrations, to company growth projects, board participation - and today as a business owner herself.

One of her biggest joys is meeting our members and learning about their journeys and their diverse roles.