Our Board

Jim held the post of Scottish Public Services Ombudsman from May 2009 to April 2017. Prior to that, from 2007 to 2009, he was the Police Complaints Commissioner for Scotland and a member of the Scottish Funding Council from 2004 to 2009. From 1987 to 1995 he was General Secretary for the Educational Institute of Scotland. He is currently a Member of the Scottish Government Panel to Review the Regulation of Legal Services in Scotland.

In his earlier career Jim was a Non-executive Chairman of Logica and ran a management consultancy. He is currently a Trustee of the National Mining Museum of Scotland and Positive Prisons, Positive Futures.  He was awarded a CBE in the 2018 New Years’ honours list.

Morag Sheppard also joins as a new member of the Board. Morag retired from Capita Life and Pensions in June 2015, having been Frameworks Director since October 2012, creating and implementing operational control frameworks deployed in the UK, Europe and India. Prior to that she was Operations Director from April 2008.  Morag has studied at the Universities of Aberdeen, Munich and Edinburgh.

Her background includes corporate governance: implementing organisational change; and operational risk management in a highly regulated sector.  Morag has directed a large complaints function, resolving a variety of complaints from the public and professional advisors.

June Andrews OBE is a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing and of the City and Guilds Institute and a professor emeritus of the University of Stirling.  She graduated in Philosophy and English from the University of Glasgow and holds a master’s degree from the University of Nottingham and a degree in Law from the University of Edinburgh.

June is a registered nurse with over 30 years’ experience in the NHS and the private and non-profit care home sectors. A former Senior Civil Servant and trade union leader, she was the Scottish Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing.

She is the adviser to the Dementia Services Development Trust, an established charity and currently works internationally as a consultant to families, organisations and governments on the provision of care for older people. She works to improve the public understanding of dementia through her books, training and film making.

Niki Maclean has a background in complaints handling, having worked with the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman since 2005, taking on the role of Director in 2010.

Prior to this, Niki worked as a senior HR professional within the field of HR, organisation change and people development across the public and private sectors including the teaching, health, legal and accountancy professions. Niki’s focus during her career has been the improvement and professionalisation of complaints handling.  This has included supporting improvement within Scottish public bodies through a culture of good complaints handling and getting decisions right first time. More widely, across the UK and Irish ombudsman community, Niki led the development of ombudsman wide industry service standards for the benefit of service users.

Niki currently sits on scrutiny forums for monitoring organisation and sector complaints performance in both the health and water sectors and is a member of the UK Administrative Justice Council which has a focus on access to administrative justice.

Jean Grier has spent much of her career in university administration.  In her last role before retirement from the University of Edinburgh she was Head of Investigations and Student Casework.  Jean is now able to spend more time on related professional interests, many of them in the broad area of dispute resolution.  She has sat as a Lay Member on Employment Tribunals since 2005, is an Equality Assessor for the Sheriff Courts in Scotland, and has also served as an Adjudicating Panel Member with the General Teaching Council for Scotland and as a Non-Solicitor Member on the Complaints and Oversight Committee of the Law Society of Scotland.  Jean is Vice-President of ENOHE, the European Network of Ombuds in Higher Education, and continues to work with a number of universities on policy development, staff training and casework handling, especially in the areas of complaint management, student conduct and academic appeals.

John has wide experience in public administration throughout the Scottish and UK public sector. As part of the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman’s (SPSO) Leadership Team, he supported the Ombudsman in determining, and monitoring performance against, the organisation's strategies and goals. He headed up the Improvement Standards and Engagement functions with responsibly for Communications, Policy, Training and supporting bodies under the Ombudsman’s jurisdiction to drive up standards of complaints handling performance.

Previously John was the Head of the SPSO’s Complaints Standards Authority (CSA) where he led on the design and introduction of new legislative requirements in relation to complaints handling in the Scottish Public sector.  He also led on the development and implementation of standardised model complaints handling procedures across the public sector, ensuring that complaints handling became simpler, standardised and more accessible to the service user while also establishing the CSA as a centre of best practice in complaints handling.

As an Inspector in the Benefit Fraud Inspectorate, John specialised in regulatory inspection and reporting to UK Government Ministers to improve the administration of social security benefits by councils and social security agencies across the UK.

Richard is a solicitor in private practice and is currently a partner and the head of commercial litigation at leading independent Scottish law firm, Morton Fraser LLP where he specialises in corporate and commercial disputes, insolvency and professional liability claims. He is a member of the Professional Negligence Lawyers Association. Richard is a solicitor advocate and is qualified as a solicitor (although does not practice) in England & Wales. He is the lead commercial litigation tutor on the Diploma in Legal Practice at the University of Edinburgh, sits on the Lexis Nexis panel of civil litigation experts in Scotland and is one of the editors of Greens Civil Practice Bulletin in Scotland. He is currently the Money Laundering Reporting Officer at Morton Fraser and, in that role, he ensures the firm's compliance with the anti-money laundering regulations and the proceeds of crime legislation.