Gavin Oldham is Chairman and controlling shareholder of Share plc and The Share Centre (www.share.com), the independent British retail stockbroker which provides investment and trading services for c.300,000 personal investors, employees and shareholders. Its operations include a wide range of self-select investor services: Share Accounts, ISAs, Junior ISAs, Child Trust Funds, SIPPs, EIS administration, and Share Incentive Plans. Share plc was floated on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market in May 2008. A partner with Wedd Durlacher Mordaunt before the 1986 re-organisation of the London Stock Exchange, Gavin founded Barclayshare (now Barclays Stockbrokers) in 1985, leaving in 1990 to start The Share Centre, which is based in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. His interest lies both in helping people to achieve their potential and in encouraging individual share ownership: the latter not only to provide a route to saving and investment but also to enable a society more at ease with itself, a more egalitarian and engaged form of capitalism. He led the successful campaign to change the Companies Act 2006 in order to enfranchise nominee shareholders. In 2005 he established a registered charity, The Share Foundation (www.sharefound.org), which operates the Department of Education’s Junior ISA & Child Trust Fund arrangements for young people in care. Using data submitted by local authorities under Statutory Guidance legislation it has benefitted over 100,000 young people throughout the United Kingdom to date, and has recently introduced the highly scalable ‘Stepladder of Achievement’ programme for Looked-After 15-17 year-olds, based on incentivised learning. In 2014 he established Share Radio (www.shareradio.co.uk), which broadcasted on DAB digital radio from November 2014 to May 2017 and is now wholly online and via Apple & Android apps. Its purpose is to help people to become more confident with handling money and investments. Share Radio is based in Westminster and has a sister channel, Share Music (www.sharemusic.me). From 1995 to date he has been an elected lay member of General Synod for Oxford Diocese, and is a Church Commissioner and a member of its Assets Committee. He has also served on the Ethical Investment Advisory Group and the Church Urban Fund. He is lay chair of the Wendover Deanery, and in 2012 established the ‘Resourcing Christian Community Action’ website www.how2help.net for the Church of England. Gavin Oldham was also a trustee of pfeg (www.pfeg.org), the Personal Finance Education Group from 2003 to 2014, until it merged into Young Enterprise.

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