What I would bring to a board that depends on public trust
My contribution to a board
What I would bring to a board is a practised view of the distance between what an organisation tells the public and what the public later experiences. For twenty-eight years I have worked at both ends of that distance in residential development: writing the sales material and price grids, and then answering for them at the handover and through the warranty years. Boards usually see the first end in a marketing report and the second only when complaints or claims have grown large. I can help a board look at the two together and ask management for the evidence that connects them.
I have direct experience of three questions that many boards now face. One is environmental claims, where European consumer law has tightened and the risk tends to sit in ordinary sales sentences rather than in the sustainability report. Another is consent: how an organisation that needs local acceptance, for a site, a route or a facility, consults while choices remain open, and how it reports what it refused. The third is pricing under strain, and what an organisation owes customers who committed before conditions changed.
I would not present myself as a financial expert for an audit committee or as a legal specialist. My natural committee is CSR or sustainability, which I would expect to join for a full year before chairing. On a strategy committee I would contribute knowledge of how households decide and what they later hold a company to. I would also bring a habit from my own work: early on, I would ask to read a sample of what customers write to the company, unedited.
Judgement in practice
01
Telling a board that our own brochure had promised the tram
When complaints arrived from the first Clos-Ferraud residents in 2022, the board's first question was whether the city or the transport authority had let us down. I told the directors that the promise was ours: my team had approved the 2019 brochure, and the tram had never been funded. That moved the discussion from managing a public body to correcting our own material, and the board supported the three-column format and the cost of underwriting two ground-floor units for residents. As a non-executive, I would want management to be able to say plainly when a problem began in its own work, and I would try to respond in a way that makes the next admission easier rather than harder.
02
Pricing the precedent before the committee asked
When I proposed extending the 2023 price cut to earlier buyers, the cost for three programmes was €3.9 million, and our chief financial officer's objection was the precedent. Rather than argue that the case was exceptional, I asked our pricing analysts to estimate what a standing rule would cost across the portfolio over two years and put that range, roughly €2 million to €3 million, in front of the audit committee beside the three-programme figure. It made my proposal look more expensive. It also let the committee decide the real question, which was whether we wanted such a rule, and it adopted one in 2024. On a board I would ask management to cost the precedent a decision creates, not only the decision itself.
03
Accepting the studios without lending our name
In 2023 a private landlord offered Association Seuil Commun forty studios for young workers at a reduced rent, provided the association promoted his new residence under its own name. The rent was attractive and our waiting list was long. As chair of the partnerships committee I recommended taking the studios without the endorsement and declining if he insisted. My concern was that the association's name would become a claim about a building we had not inspected and could not answer for. He agreed to twenty-six studios without it. I would put the same question to any board I joined: what exactly are we vouching for, and could we answer for it later?
My first year on a board
I would spend my first months learning how the company is understood by the people who buy from it or live near it, before forming views on how it should be governed. Beyond the usual board papers I would ask for three things: a sample of unedited customer complaints with the replies sent, the company's principal public claims with the evidence held for each, and any record of local opposition or consultation over the past five years. I would meet the chair, the chief executive, the committee chairs and the heads of customer service and legal, each separately.
Through the year I would follow the full cycle of the committee I joined, from setting its agenda to its report to the board, and I would hold back proposals until I had seen that cycle once, unless I found a claim the company could not support. With the chief executive's agreement, I would visit at least one site or operation without an executive escort.
At the end of the year I would ask the chair for a frank assessment of whether a developer's habits had narrowed my view of a different business, and I would act on the answer.
Conflicts and their management
Valcerne is my employer and my first obligation, and any appointment would need our chief executive's written agreement after a review by our legal director. I would decline a seat at another residential developer, at a builder or materials supplier working for Valcerne, at a social landlord or institutional investor that buys our buildings, at a bank that finances our programmes or our buyers in significant volume, or at any public body with which we negotiate sites. Before accepting, I would set out for the chair my Valcerne shareholding, my directorship at Association Seuil Commun, which works with two social landlords that have bought Valcerne buildings, and any family property interests.
Once appointed, I would raise any new link at the start of the meeting concerned, leave the room for that item and check that the minutes record my absence. If such absences began to recur on matters central to the company, I would offer to stand down. Valcerne's pricing, customer data and site negotiations would stay out of any other boardroom, even as background. The twenty-two days a year I can offer would be agreed with Valcerne before I accepted, with a margin kept for an unplanned meeting.
My independence statement
I am a full-time executive of a listed developer and would remain one. An appointing board should know of my employment and shareholding at Valcerne, my unpaid directorship at Association Seuil Commun and any commercial link between Valcerne and the company, its shareholders or its main suppliers. Whether I meet the independence criteria of the governance code the company follows is for its board to judge once it has those facts; I would not describe myself as independent ahead of that review.
Board and committee exposure
Served as a director
Association Seuil Commun
Board of directors; chair of the partnerships committee from 2023; member of the audit and finance committee
March 2019–present
Unpaid director of a Lyon association that helps young workers and apprentices find a first rented home; chairs the committee that negotiates housing partnerships with landlords.
Presented to the Board or a committee
Valcerne Habitat
Board of directors
2021–present
Presents a quarterly commercial and customer report covering reservations, cancellations, price changes, complaints and defect counts; presented the 2023 decision to extend a price cut to earlier buyers.
Reported to a committee
Valcerne Habitat
Audit committee
2024–present
Reports each year on how environmental and neighbourhood claims are substantiated, including a sampled trail from a published sentence to its source data.
Presented to the Board or a committee
Valcerne Habitat
CSR committee
2024–present
Presented the consultation charter for approval and reports on its application site by site.
Presented to the Board or a committee
Hallevoort Projects
Board of directors
2009–2013
Presented residential sales forecasts and the revised commercial plan during and after the financial crisis.
Governance learning and readiness
IICA Independent Directors’ Databank: Not yet registered
The IICA Independent Directors' Databank is an Indian register for people serving as independent directors of Indian companies. It does not apply to the European appointments I am considering, so I have not registered. Were an Indian company ever to approach me, I would take advice on the Indian requirements at that point.
A programme for prospective non-executive directors of French companies, completed in 2024
Annual briefings from Valcerne's legal director on French and European consumer law affecting environmental and commercial claims
Board service at Association Seuil Commun since 2019, including a committee chair from 2023
A course on reading sustainability statements and their assurance, 2025