Cat Hobbs
Cat is the founder and director of We Own It, which she set up in 2013 to be a voice for public service users. We Own It makes the case for public ownership and has won many campaign victories for people not profit. Cat previously ran a successful local rail campaign in Bristol before lobbying nationally on behalf of bus and train passengers at Campaign for Better Transport. She has also worked in communications at a sustainability consultancy. Cat studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University. Find her on X here.
Johnbosco Nwogbo
Johnbosco Nwogbo works as Lead Campaigner at We Own It. He got his start in campaigning in the mid-2010s at the University of Fort Hare, South Africa, as part of the Fees Must Fall and Decolonise the Curriculum movements. For the three years before joining We Own It, he has been a campaigner for renters and community rights as part of ACORN the community union. You can follow Johnbosco on Twitter here.
Matthew Topham
Matthew works as a Lead Campaigner for Better Buses in West Yorkshire alongside a diverse coalition, including trade unions and civil society groups. Before joining We Own It, he helped campaign for a green and socially just recovery to the coronavirus crisis and for racial and gender equality in science education and academia.
Hugo Fearnley
Hugo is the Press and Communications Lead at We Own It. Hugo ran his family business for many years before standing for Parliament in his hometown of Whitby in 2019. He has recently worked as a Political Adviser to Jamie Driscoll, the former North of Tyne Metro Mayor. Hugo lives in the North East of England and is a member of the Common Sense Policy Group, based at Northumbria University.
John Kay
John is the Communications and Campaigns Support at We Own It. He has a background as a communications specialist working for a national Industrial and Provident Society and at Oxford University Press. He has also served as a Board Member for West Oxfordshire Citizen's Advice, advising on marketing and public relations. Having retired in 2022 after a 25-year career he felt compelled to join We Own It on the strength of its cause, campaigning, and reputation.
David Hall
David Hall is on our Board. He is Founder and former Director of the Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU) at the University of Greenwich, which researches privatisation and public services worldwide. He works internationally with trade unions and civil society on the problems of privatisation and ways of returning services to the public sector.
Fran Bury
Fran is the Treasurer on our Board. She is a Public Health Registrar in London, and has previously worked in the voluntary sector, local government and for a small consulting firm. She has been a Green Party member and activist for some years and has particular interests in climate change, social justice and making public services as effective as possible.
Tom Schuller
Tom Schuller is the newest member of our Board. Hi’s professional life has been mainly in adult education, as Dean of
Continuing Education at Birkbeck and before that as professor of lifelong learning at
the University of Edinburgh. He chaired the Governing Board of the Working Men’s
College in London from 2008-2018, and recently stepped down after six years as
chair of the Prisoner Learning Alliance. Tom’s latest book - The Paula Principle: how
and why women work below their competence level - was published in 2017.
Liz Peretz
Liz is on our Board. She has campaigned against privatisation in health and social care for over 20 years. She is also a long term campaigner against the unjust system of detaining migrants, indefinitely, without trial. This system has been largely privatised and has become yet another vehicle for private profit. A lifetime socialist, she has witnessed the dismantling of our public services, and is passionate in her fight to get them back into our own hands. She is a retired public services manager, a historian of social policy, and is an associate fellow at the University of Oxford's Department of Social Policy and Intervention.
Our Advisors
Frances Northrop
Frances Northrop is Head of Community Economic Power at the New Economics Foundation, a director of Totnes Community Development Society and a trustee of Annetta’s Trust. She is also a co-founding Director of Abundance which promotes public-common strategies to democratise the economy and support a just ecological transition for everyone. She specialises in how change is created through different means – culture, policy, practice and campaigning – and is experienced in all four areas.
Rosie Collington
Rosie Collington is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in International Political Economy at Copenhagen Business School, where she researches climate governance and ‘green’ finance. She is the co-author of "The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies" alongside Professor Mariana Mazzucato.
Andrew Cumbers
Andrew Cumbers is Professor of Regional Political Economy at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow and researches economic democracy, public ownership and alternative approaches to economic development.
Dan Gregory
Dan Gregory has supported the development of social enterprises, co-operatives and charities for nearly two decades, developing policy at the national level and delivering in practice, at the grassroots. For Social Enterprise UK, Dan has advised governments around the world on the development of social economy, and has also delivered work under the banner of Common Capital for Oxfam, the ILO, UN agencies and others.
Neal Lawson
Neal Lawson is Executive Director of the pressure group Compass and author of the book All Consuming. He writes for the Guardian and the New Statesman and serves on the Advisory Board of the social democracy journal Renewal which he helped found.
George Woods
George works for the Royal College of Nursing, as the Associate Director of its activism and organising department. He has twenty years of experience of organising and movement-building for social and economic justice. His campaign record includes against racism and the far right and for international peace and human rights. As a community organiser, George previously built popular support for public ownership of the railways and against cuts to local train and bus services. He is proud to have been involved with We Own It since 2013 as one of its first board members.
Hilary Wainwright
Hilary Wainwright is a fellow of the Transnational Institute, and co-editor of Red Pepper magazine. She is a leading researcher and writer on how to strengthen democracy in the face of corporate power and on democracy - rather than market - driven strategies for public service reform and the positive role that trade unions and public service users can play in this process.
Sampson Low
Sampson Low is Head of Policy at UNISON where he has supported members fighting privatisation. He previously worked for the Office for National Statistics as a researcher and was the local Branch Secretary for the IPMS (now Prospect) union branch.
Clifford Singer
Clifford is director of progressive design agency Social Spark, and has founded or co-founded a series of online campaigns including MyDavidCameron, False Economy and Who Funds You.
We're also lucky to have Rich Lott from Artful Robot stitching together the technology that runs the website.