South East Thames Branch

I am delighted that my first year of Chair has been such an interesting and exciting year for our branch and for the CIPD as an organisation. It is our centenary year, we have a new(ish) Chief Executive, Peter Cheese and we are looking forward to being part of a fantastic partnership of London branches.

Our members are our most important stakeholders - please do contact us if you would like us to run events, support you on upgrading/membership – indeed anything that will help you develop as curious, creative and credible HR, OD, L&D practitioners!

We focus on providing events with topics that our members have identified as key areas that they would like to debate or hear more about, with excellent speakers and venues. Our recent employment law event was very well attended and we got great feedback. 89% of respondents said that they found our events worth attending. Please let me or Louise Searle, our new Events and Communications Advisor, know if you have any ideas for future events.

We also engage with members on employment policy and feedback to the CIPD Policy Team. We look forward to your feedback on further policy over the next year and Anna Patterson, our long standing Policy Advisor, looks forward to working with you on future policy development. I was delighted to support the CIPD by sitting on an expert panel as an SME HR advisor on shared parental leave and flexible working with Jo Swinson, Parliamentary Under Secretary of Employment. This was followed by attendance at a focus group with the Department of business, innovation and skills at CIPD to further debate the topic and contribute to the consultation. I will update members further as the consultation progresses and please do let me know if you have any views or thoughts that I can feed in.

We work closely with education providers such as Bexley and Bromley Colleges and the University of Greenwich ensuring that the HR profession has a voice in South East Thames. We have been supporting the University of Greenwich’s GET Mentoring Scheme which has been hugely successful.

Our committee is made up of willing, mindful and energetic volunteers – all give their time although they are very busy! Some of our committee have recently left us and I wanted to mention them here and to say thanks for their support – Wendy Cartwright, David Stanley, Simon Morgan, Beckie Barnes, Bex Pape and Pamela Harding. A special mention I want to highlight is to say thank you to John Campbell, our longest serving Committee member. We will miss you.

I look forward to seeing members, friends and colleagues at future events.

Gavin Dunn
Chair, SE Thames Branch