ALARM South Conference 2026

Paul Adams

Risk Management Lead, British Transport Police

No bio provided

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Nathan Ayres

Insurance Claims Manager, London Borough of Sutton

Nathan Ayres is the Insurance Claims Manager for the London Borough of Sutton and has worked for the local authority since 2016. He has been involved in a variety of different claims, from cradle to grave.

Nathan has developed an interest in data and tree-related subsidence, increasing his knowledge and expertise in this area. Currently, the Council handle the majority of subsidence claims in-house from initial mitigation all the way through to liability and resolution.

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Adam Bayliss

Managing Director, Maven Public Sector

Adam has over 22 years of insurance experience, primarily supporting the delivery of a wide range of public sector insurance programmes. Since joining Maven Public Sector in 2018, Adam became Managing Director in January 2025. With his sector experience spanning key areas such as technical underwriting, risk control, and claims management, Adam is well-positioned to oversee the delivery of services to the public sector. Through understanding the unique needs of public sector organisations, Maven has the capability to offer bespoke, flexible, and tailor-made solutions.

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Hannah Beddis

Partner, Weightmans

Hannah qualified in 2003, and joined Weightmans in April 2017 and is a Principal Associate in the Local Government Team. Hannah has extensive experience of handling litigated claims with a strong focus on public sector clients, working primarily for local authorities and insurers. She handles claims across the wide spectrum of local authority risk.
 

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Sarah Chittock

Civil Contingencies Advisor in the Community Safety, CCTV and Resilience Team, London Borough of Merton

After working for over ten years in the private sector facilities management arena, managing British Rail administrative buildings Sarah joined Merton Council as a Safety & Emergency Planning Adviser. Following the development and publication of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, Sarah took the lead for emergency planning, within the team.

Over the years Sarah has led on London wide projects for developing training modules and participated in many of the pan London work programs. Having spent over 25 years within Merton and experienced situations from sieges, fires, floods, and several pandemics, she has built a very reliable team of trained response officers, and they have far exceeded expectations at every instance. Sarah has had the benefit of developing close working relationships with many of the officers who respond to our incidents both locally and across London, which was very beneficial during our response to one of the most challenging incidents Merton has had to respond to within our boundaries.

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Jonathan Cook

Senior Associate Solicitor, Browne Jacobson

Jonathan has spent his entire career supporting local authorities faced with civil claims, predominantly those involving highways, occupiers’ liability, workplace and housing disrepair legislation. He has immersed himself in local authority claims and risk management and is the primary contact for many clients. He also thrives on investigating claims, which brings him into regular contact with local authority claims managers and handlers, as well as employees from varied client departments.

Jonathan is instrumental in the success of the Browne Jacobson ‘Claims Club’, a regular in person seminar where the focus is on risk in the public sector. This affords him the opportunity to meet with colleagues from risk management and claims handling departments of authorities on a regular basis.

Jonathan engages with ALARM, predominantly in the London area, but also at national level.

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Emma Cotton

Head of Insurance, London Borough of Sutton

Emma Cotton is the Insurance Claims Manager for the London Borough of Sutton and has worked for the local authority since 2005. She was involved in bringing claims in-house in April 2009 and since then has been involved in all stages of the claims management process from notification to final conclusion in a wide range of different cases and values. Emma is responsible for ensuring the quality and performance of the claims handling function for eleven councils, in addition to a portfolio of schools, academies, and wholly-owned local authority companies. 

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Paul Dudley

Paul is an experienced, qualified and successful public sector risk manager with a proven track record of achievement in enterprise and project risk management, health & safety, and business continuity management skills. Paul has effective communication skills and demonstrable leadership and management abilities.

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Adam Dudzinski-Short

Head of Downstream Gas & Electricity Resilience, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero

No bio provided

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Joel Durston

Associate, Kennedys

Joel Durston is an Associate in Kennedys Cyber and Data team.

Joel has a wealth of experience in supporting clients of all sizes deal with a variety of cyber and data matters, spanning from providing legal and regulatory guidance where an organisation has been the victim of a ransomware attack, to providing ad hoc privacy guidance on a range of topics.   

In particular Joel takes pride in understanding his client’s values and culture in order to provide a commercial approach to responding to incidents. Enabling clients to navigate difficult cyber incidents with minimal disruption, to help control the narrative around incidents and fully understand their obligations both in the UK and internationally.

Prior to working in the cyber sector Joel built up a number of years’ experience in insurance and commercial litigation, including working on a number of high value and high profile claims.

Particular examples of Joel’s experience include:

• Providing breach response support following a ransomware attack on Customer Relationship Manager, processing data on behalf of hundreds of international organisations and millions of data subjects.
• Acting as breach counsel for a large retailer, whose systems were compromised, impacting data for data subjects for over 140 different countries.
• Provided regulatory and legal support to a well know organisation following discovery of successive data incidents.
• Provided advice and guidance to a number of UK law firms following a ransomware incident to a major IT service provider, causing significant operational difficulties to may across the legal sector.
• Successfully defended 100+ data claims stemming from a single data incident.
• Provided legal advice and guidance to an organisation who had a £6 million payment diverted following a business mailbox compromise.  

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James Fawcett

Partner, Browne Jacobson

James is the head of Browne Jacobson's national technical claims team. He specialises in defendant insurance litigation, with particular expertise in complex personal injury litigation, claims arising from equality and human rights legislation and environmental claims. His large over-arching team includes our local authority team, disease, education and counter-fraud sub-teams and social housing experts. ​

James currently handles a varied caseload of complex, high value litigation, acting on behalf of local authorities, public bodies, educational establishments, as well as commercial and agricultural organisations. He has considerable experience in handling catastrophic injury claims, including cases involving traumatic brain injury, amputation, fatal accidents, disease and stress at work claims. He has also developed an interest and expertise in managing large scale litigation following environmental events, to include catastrophic flooding. ​

James works closely with and is the client partner for a number of key clients, providing tailored training sessions supporting the development of in-house teams and offering bespoke risk management advice across our client base. 

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Chris Keesing

Counter Fraud & Investigations Manager & Chair of London Borough Fraud Investigation Group, City of London Corporation

Chris Keesing has Chaired LBFIG since 2020, he has over 20 years’ experience of tackling fraud in the public sector, both in local government and the Civil Service.

For the past 16 years, he has led the counter fraud and investigation response for the City of London Corporation as its Counter Fraud & Investigations Manager.

An accomplished speaker he has presented at national conferences and regional forums. He also works closely with the Fighting Fraud & Corruption Locally committee and other regional industry groups. Chris was instrumental in championing the NFI London Fraud Hub, with over two thirds of London Boroughs now signed-up.

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Mark Landon

Employment Partner, Weightmans LLP

Mark has over 35 years’ experience, both in private practice and in-house. In addition to his day job, Mark is an Honorary Fellow and a former Ethics Committee member of the Faculty of Occupational Medicine and a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health. He is also a co-author of the 6^th Edition of ‘Fitness for Work’, published by the Oxford University Press.

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Colin Maclachlan

Colin Maclachlan, star of Channel Four's reality TV drama SAS: Who Dares Wins and Channel 5’s Secrets of the SAS, is an operator with over 30 years of security and risk related experience.
Colin joined the army in 1989 and was fortunate enough to have been involved in high profile and daring missions. He is one of the few men who have been involved in hostage negotiations, hostage rescue and been a hostage themselves.

In 2000, he waded through swamps in Sierra Leone to hunt down the West Side Boys, a guerilla gang holding five British soldiers hostage. It was a mission so daring and dangerous, they nicknamed it Operation Certain Death. 

Colin was also the first sniper on the scene when a hijacked Afghan flight with 180 passengers landed in London in the same year, sparking a stand-off that lasted four days - the longest standing hostage siege on UK soil to date.

Four years later, Colin found himself on the other side of a rescue mission after he was taken hostage in Iraq. Blindfolded, battered and stripped naked, he felt a gun pressed to his head and heard them pull the trigger in a mock execution. Colin only survived long enough for British troops to rescue him because the terrorists who held him wanted to film his suffering in a propaganda video before they executed him.

Colin left the SAS shortly after doing an exchange programme with both Delta Force and Seal Team 6. After doing security consultancy for the Saudi Royal Family, A-List celebrities and US media networks, he decided to fund himself through university. Colin is now involved in TV, book, radio and video games and also does a lot with charity: he is an ambassador for the Lee Rigby Foundation, Pilgrim Bandits and NSPCC among others. He has also founded his own charity, Who Dares Cares, that aims to link and support veterans as well as others that encounter stress. 

Having had both an exciting and varied career, Colin is an excellent speaker on a wide variety of topics including resilience, teamwork, leadership, risk, motivation, conflict resolution, change management, negotiation, A.I and elite performance. He is also an experienced presenter and host for events and is co-founder of Stoic Events, a team building organization. His autobiography entitled The Pilgrim came out in 2025 and sold out in 3 weeks.
 

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Steve Mappley

Insurance and Risk Manager, Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead

Steve is Risk and Insurance Manager for RB Windsor and Maidenhead where his role is to determine the Council’s risk management strategy including its risk appetite and key risks along with managing the internal claims handling function. 

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Julia Reffell

Managing Director - Public Sector Practice, Marsh

Julia Reffell is Managing Director, Public Sector Practice at Marsh. Julia leads a specialist team that delivers risk management and insurance solutions for public sector organisations and social housing providers.

Marsh offers a comprehensive range of risk management and insurance broking services, whilst working in close partnership with each client to deliver a programme tailored to individual needs.

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Mark Scrivener

Head of Risk & Delivery Assurance, Kent County Council

Mark heads up the Integrated Risk & Delivery Assurance Team at Kent County Council that develops and implements the risk management framework across the Council. He has over ten years’ experience in strategic risk management and has previously held several business planning, business information and performance management related roles. He has been a member of ALARM for ten years and joined the ALARM South East Committee in September 2023. He is a certified member of the Institute of Risk Management, as well as a Management of Risk and Better Business Cases Practitioner. 

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Richard Skok

Insurance and Risk Management Officer, City of London Corporation

Richard has been working in insurance for 25 years, in local government for 15 years, and at the City of London Corporation for the last five years. He enjoys the diversity and complexity of his job at the City, which covers the square mile, institutions within and without and many other locations beyond, and is currently the co-chair of the South East ALARM committee.

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Chris Walker

Head of Risk Management, Durham University

Chris has experience of working in housing, private sector insurance and is currently the Head of Risk Management at Durham University. With nine years under his belt as an ALARM Director, Chris currently serves as the organisation's Finance Director and has oversight of ALARM's finances. He also leads the ALARM Higher & Further Education Group and the Regions & Sectors portfolio.

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Daniel Whiffen

Claims Relationship Manager, Zurich Municipal

Dan has been working in the insurance Industry for 22 years and joined Zurich Municipal claims in 2006 and has had a number of roles focussed on operational delivery and technical excellence, in addition to managing portfolio of higher value and complex claims on behalf of public service customers. Dan also had responsibility for Technical Training and took a key role in designing and delivering Zurich’s award-winning Licence to Handle programme including the authoring of two CII accredited modules. Dan joined the Zurich Municipal CRM Team in June 2022 and currently looks after customers in London and the South east.

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Corrina Young

Risk and Technical Officer, London Borough of Waltham Forest

An accomplished risk professional with 30 years’ experience spanning across a range of services within the public sector; and nine years focusing on risk management. 

Corrina has a proven track record of developing, implementing, and embedding an effective risk management framework across the Council that’s supports effective decision making and delivery of objectives.

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