Magna welcomes new board members

These new members consolidate the strength and expertise on Magna’s Board and committees, and have been appointed following a rigorous and extensive recruitment campaign.

Chair of the Board, Christine Turner said

“We are delighted to welcome Jesse, Rachel, Peter, Nigel and Jonathan to Magna. Their skills and experience will help us to continue our transformation journey and will add considerable breadth to our role as a Board. They have joined at an exciting time, with the recent launch of our new three year brilliant basics strategy, and I am looking forward to working with them over the coming years to help us realise our vision of creating great homes together”.

Chief Executive, Selina White added

“Adding this talent to Magna will help to build a strong Board at a key time in Magna’s development.  Together these new appointments build on our existing skills in areas such as asset management, customer experience, transformation, treasury and finance.  They will play a key role in ensuring we achieve our vision and in helping us to deliver our strategic priorities, whilst keeping our customers at the heart of our work. Our executive team are looking forward to working with our new members and we welcome them all to Magna”.

Profiles

Jonathan Cowie – Independent member of the risk and audit committee

Jonathan is currently the Chief Operating Officer at Vivid Housing and has been with them since March 2019 following three years as CEO of City West Homes in Westminster. His career has had a strong customer service focus including eight years in senior roles with BT and Cable and Wireless. Jonathan has also been an NED with the Institute of Customer Service since June 2017.

 Rachel Crownshaw – Board member

Rachel is an experienced customer services and business transformation professional, having spent 20 years working in roles focused on delivering customer service excellence. Her career spans senior roles in retail, utilities, financial services, and housing, throughout which she has successfully led award-winning customer services teams and significant strategic and service-led transformation.  Rachel brings considerable insight and best practice from the private sector, whilst having a good knowledge of the housing sector gained during her role as  GreenSquare Group’s Executive Director of Customer Experience, and her current role as Managing Director (South) at GreenSquareAccord, where she is responsible for customer services, policy, and insight; repairs and maintenance; and business transformation.

Jesse Meek – Board member

Jesse has a 20-year housing background in asset management and property services. Currently the Director of Asset and Building Safety at One Housing, he is also qualified with Batchelors and Masters degrees in Construction and Real Estate and an associate Honorary Fellow at the University College of Estate Management.  With a focus on our built environment, he is interested in how we address the issue of sustaining assets now, and in the longer term, in order for customers to live well in the place they call home. 

Peter Nourse – Board member

Peter has lived in the South West for over twenty years and is the Director of Assets at Clarion Housing Group which is the largest Housing Association in the UK. In this role he is responsible for the planned investment of Clarion’s housing stock which comprises 125,000 properties. Prior to joining Clarion, Peter ran his own consultancy business and provided interim and consultancy support to a wide range of Local Authorities, ALMOs and Housing Associations. Peter has extensive Non-Executive Director experience and also chairs the Quality of Existing Homes Group at the National Federation of Housing. He is passionate about decent homes and driving improvement in resident satisfaction.

Nigel Perryman – Board member

A qualified accountant with over 40 years experience, Nigel has worked as both borrower and lender in the social housing sector, and before that in two commercial property development companies. His social housing experience was gained in three Housing Associations (Care, Traditional and LSVT) working in finance and treasury before moving to The Housing Finance Corporation (THFC). At THFC he travelled throughout the UK lending £2bn of bond finance and European Investment Bank funding to housing associations.  More recently, Nigel has undertaken a number of Non-Executive Director roles with a Treasury focus and various consultancy assignments, with a bias towards training Board members in housing association finance matters.

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