
Phil Barton, Chair
Phil is the former chief executive of Keep Britain Tidy, the charity which campaigns for a cleaner, greener England, running environmental programmes including EcoSchools, Green Flag Awards for greenspaces and Blue Flag beaches. Formerly, he worked for the NWDA on regeneration skills, for Defra on rural voluntary sector policy and for Groundwork UK. He established the Mersey Basin Trust as part of the successful 25-year Mersey Basin Campaign to clean the waters of the Merseycatchment. He is also a practising artist studying for an MA at Central Saint Martins in Art and Science.
Sarah Deasley
Sarah is a Director at the consultancy Frontier Economics. She has over 25 years’ experience working as an economist within the energy sector with a focus on environmental policy, network regulation and the energy retail market. She is well known for her recent work on the implications of the move to a low-carbon economy, with a particular focus on smart technologies and consumer energy behaviour.
Joe Perkins
Joe Perkins is a Senior Vice President and Head of Research at the economic consultancy Compass Lexecon. Joe previously worked as Chief Economist at British energy regulator Ofgem, where he was a member of Ofgem’s senior leadership team. He led the delivery of Ofgem’s ground-breaking decarbonization action plan, as well as the analysis behind the setting of the retail energy price cap. Joe headed up Ofgem’s economics profession and was Ofgem’s senior representative on the UK Regulators Network.
Prior to this, Joe was director for regulation, consumers and competition at the National Audit Office, responsible for value for money audits of economic and financial regulation and the competition and consumer protection regimes. He began his professional career as an economist at HM Treasury.
Academically, Joe was a Prize Fellow in Economics at All Souls College in Oxford University between 2002 and 2009, and lectured economics at several colleges. He has a wide range of academic and professional publications. He is a member of the Council of Management of the Regulatory Policy Institute and is chair of the trustees of the journal Oxford Economic Papers.