Margaret Ford, Baroness Ford

Margaret Anne Ford, Baroness Ford OBE is a Scottish business woman and non aligned British peer. She was appointed by Tony Blair as a Labour Peer in 2006, but resigned the Labour Whip in 2009 and now sits as a Crossbencher. She is Chair of STV PLC and New River REIT plc. [1]

Life

Ford was born in Saltcoats, Ayrshire, in December 1957. The daughter of Edward and Susan Garland, she was educated at St Michael's Academy in Kilwinning and Glasgow University. She graduated MA (Hons) in 1979 and M.Phil in 1984.

She married firstly Christopher Derek Ford in 1982, with whom she had two children, Michael and Katharine. After a divorce in 1990, she married David Arthur Bolger later the same year.

Career

Ford is Chair of STV PLC, of New River REIT plc and chairs the Buckingham Palace Reservicing Challenge Board.

She is the former Chair of Grainger plc, of May Gurney plc, and of Barchester Healthcare. Grainger was the first Company listed on the LSE which had an all female leadership team with Ford appointing women to the positions of CEO, CFO and SID.

She has also chaired Lothian Health Board, English Partnerships (now Homes England) and the Olympic Park Legacy Company (now LLDC). In 2011, she was included in the Times newspaper Sport Power 100, entering at number 26.[2] In 2012 she was controversially replaced as chairman of the LLDC by Daniel Moylan, a Conservative.[3]

She has served as a non executive Director of the Scottish Prison Service, of Ofgem, Thus plc, Serco plc, Segro plc, and Taylor Wimpey plc.

Her main executive roles were at BIFU, Price Waterhouse, Scottish Homes, and as the founding CEO of Eglinton Management Centre. She sold Eglinton in 2000 and in the same year, set up Good Practice, the online publisher (which was sold to Emerald Publishing in 2015). Her last executive role was at Royal Bank of Canada as Managing Director (DCM) in the Social infrastructure Division.

Honours

Ford was raised to the Peerage as Baroness Ford, of Cunninghame in North Ayrshire on 11 July 2006. [4] She was appointed as an honorary member of the RICS in 2009. In 2015 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh[5]. She was awarded an OBE for services to business and sport in 2019, and holds Honorary degrees from Napier University and the University of Stirling.

Voluntary

Ford has been Honorary President of the Epilepsy Action since 2008, is Chair of the STV Children's Appeal, a Trustee of the British Olympic Association and a Councillor of the LTA. She was formerly a Trustee and Chair of the Tennis Foundation, prior to its merger with the LTA in 2019.

gollark: Though it's always hard to get new standards to actually be adopted anywhere.
gollark: It might make sense to have home lighting use lower-voltage DC instead of mains AC now, and have a big converter somewhere, to avoid every bulb having to contain expensive and in some cases unreliable and flickery conversion electronics.
gollark: https://hackaday.com/2020/02/16/have-led-bulbs-reached-their-final-and-cheapest-form/
gollark: I've read that they got the cost down by making the power supplies... perhaps excessively simple.
gollark: Incandescent lightbulbs... are still legal basically everywhere as far as I know?

References
  1. "- STV plc". Retrieved 21 April 2017.
  2. "The Times & The Sunday Times". Retrieved 21 April 2017.
  3. Adrian Warner, New legacy chief "shatters" political consensus from BBC dated May 2012, accessed 8 November 2015
  4. "Crown Office". The London Gazette. Retrieved 12 February 2020.
  5. "Baroness Margaret Ford of Cunninghame FRSE - The Royal Society of Edinburgh". The Royal Society of Edinburgh. Retrieved 12 February 2018.
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