GGI National NHS NED Development Programme: Peer to Peer Weekly Meeting with Jerry Gould | 8 July 2022

As part of its mission to promote good governance, GGI will host these facilitated, weekly virtual meetings to give NHS non-executive directors an opportunity to share their concerns, challenges and ideas as we rethink the future of health and social care.

The goal is to collectively think about the role NEDs play as part of the controlling mind of their organisations, to discuss immediate safeguarding issues and to ensure we all learn from this experience to assure better outcomes for citizens in the future. If you would like to join this meeting, please email events@good-governance.org.uk.

ABOUT

Chair: Dr Usman Khan, Managing Director, Good Governance Institute

In conversation with Jerry Gould... ‘Financial planning: Right Here: Right Now!’

• Will the assumptions provided by NHSI hold?
• How successfully are ICSs working to a common spreadsheet?
• How are the carrots and sticks of financial planning evolving?
• What are the top tips to make the numbers work?
• About Jerry Gould

Jerry left school at 18 with limited academic qualifications and went to work for an insurance company as a trainee underwriter. Two years later he decided to try something different and became a trainee leisure facilities manager with the London Borough of Camden, starting at the bottom with the mechanical and electrical engineers. Over the years he worked his way up the leisure management career ladder, working for various local authorities, obtaining a masters’ degree along the way and eventually becoming the Leisure Services Manager for a West Midlands local authority.

In 1989 as the Thatcher government pushed forward with its compulsory competitive tendering of local government services, Jerry and a number of colleagues, seeing the writing on the wall, set up a management buyout company and took the Council’s front-line services private. This included not only leisure management but the provision refuse collection, street cleaning, building cleaning and grounds maintenance services. However, 1991 they sold the company and Jerry decided to use the knowledge he’d gained in commercialising services to work as a consultant advising local authorities in how best to both tender out services and, where politically preferred, to optimise their efficiency inorder to retain them in-house.

In 1993 he joined Touche Ross, now part of Deloitte where he continued to advise the public sector focusing primarily on enhancing cost-effective delivery of services and major procurements. By 2011, when he retired as a Deloitte partner, he was the firm’s lead adviser on local authority leisure management issues and was leading a team of local authority PFI specialists. He continued to work part-time as a consultant through his own business until 2017 with his last project saving a West Midlands metropolitan local authority over £20 million on a problematic PFI contract.

In 2012, Jerry was appointed as a Non-Executive Director on the board of Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Trust which subsequently became a Foundation Trust in 2006. At what should have been the end of his term at BCHC, in 2019 he became a NED at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust. However, the new chair at BCHC asked Jerry to stay on as vice-chair for a while. As a consequence, for 18 months he served as a NED on both organisations. He became vice-chair of UHCW in April 2020, chairs its Finance and Performance Committee and is a members of its Audit and Quality and Safety Committees.

Jerry has three children, two grandchildren and when he isn’t working for the Trust, he is an ambitious DIY’er - he once undertook all the work in building a two-storey extension on his house with only a set of architect-drawn plans and DIY manuals for guidance! He and his wife are both keen walkers, members of the Ramblers and the Long Distance Walkers Association and regularly walk in excess of 20 miles. And, he is one of over 400 Cotswold Voluntary Wardens, responsible for keeping the Cotswolds rights of way clear, repairing stiles, installing kissing gates and footbridges, repairing drystone walls, laying hedges, coppicing woodlands and much more.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

This meeting is by invitation and is open to all NHS Non-Executives Directors, Chairs and Associate Non-Executive Directors of NHS Providers. Others may attend by special invitation.

For further details, comments, questions and suggestions please contact: events@good-governance.org.uk