EURIM Key Officers - Biographical Notes

EURIM Chairman: The Earl of Erroll

EURIM President: The Lord Renwick

EURIM Secretary General: Dr Edward Phelps

EURIM Deputy Secretary General: Sarah Chilman

EURIM Consultant:  Philip Virgo

EURIM Chairman: The Earl of Erroll
Lord Erroll (Merlin) has worked in IT most of his life as well as spending 22 years in the Territorial Army. He is also one of the Hereditary Peers who was elected to stay in the House of Lords, where he takes a particular interest in ICT, Countryside & the Environment, the Constitution and Scottish matters.

Working on software development in the accounts and agricultural field, he subsequently freelanced, developing  portfolio management, communications and general bespoke databases, ending up as Director of Development at GiroVend, working with electronic purses and  smartcards.  He then moved into marketing and business training and went on to become chairman of an e-procurement consultancy.  In the ICT sphere he is a member of the Global Trust Center International Council and the PGP Business Advisory Board.

Within Parliament, he plays an active role in several ICT groups, especially those looking at regulatory issues involving Communications, the Internet, Personal Identity and Government Data Sharing, linking this with a Local Authority perspective through his work on the board of LASSeO (The Local Authority Smartcard Standards e-Organisation). He sits on the council of PITCOM (Parliamentary Information Technology Committee), is on the board of EURIM (European Information Group), is Secretary of apComms (All-Party Communications Group), Chairman of the All-Party Group on Entrepreneurship, and Treasurer of the All-Party Group on Risk and Adventure in Society. In 2007 he sat on the Science & Technology Select Committee’s sub-committee on Personal Internet Safety and is currently a member of the House of Lords Information Committee.

He is President of ERA (examining the impact of regulation on business online) and also sits on other bodies such as the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) and the Nominet (UK) Ltd. Policy Advisory Bodies.

He has an extensive network of contacts across government, industry and the city, and is a professional public speaker, especially on ICT, security, legislation, the citizen and the state, and the internet, as well as traditional themes.

In a more traditional role Sir Merlin Sereld Victor Gilbert Hay, 24th Earl of Erroll, 25th Lord Hay, 24th Lord Slains, 12th Bt (Moncreiffe of that Ilk), 28th Hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland, 32nd Chief of The Hays takes an interest in charity as a member of the Court of the Fishmongers’ Livery Company, as Vice-President of The Royal Caledonian Ball, through The Highland Society of London and the British Red Cross Queen Mother’s Memorial Fund.  He helps promote Scotch Whisky as a Patron of the Keepers of the Quaich and is one of the founders of Secret Sommelier, a weblog about wine.

He is married to Isabelle, who runs a farming estate in Bedfordshire. They have four children.

See Biography Summary

EURIM President: The Lord Renwick
Lord Renwick was a member of the House of Lords from 1973 until November 1999. His special interests include the processes of innovation and change, informatics and telematics, the application of technology, and space and special educational needs.

When a parliamentary peer he was at times a member of the Select Committee on Science and Technology, the Select Committee on the European Communities and Sub Committee B (Energy, Transport and Technology). He was the Honorary Secretary of PITCOM (the Parliamentary IT Committee) and of the Parliamentary Space Committee and a member of the Parliamentary Scientific Committee and the All-Party Disablement Group among others. He was also a Council member of the National Council for Educational Technology, now BECTA.

Born in 1935, he was educated at Eton and spent his National Service with the Grenadier Guards. He then went on to start a career in the city with Morgan Grenfell in 1957 and then moved to W Greenwell & Co in 1959 where he stayed until 1980, becoming a partner in 1964. He was a Director of General Technology Systems Ltd from 1975 - 1993. He has acted as an advisor to various companies in the UK and the USA.

He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Zoological Society of London. He is a member of the Foundation for Science and Technology. He was also Vice President of the Combustion Engineering Association, Chairman of the Dyslexia Educational Trust and Chairman (now a Vice President) of the British Dyslexia Association.

Lord Renwick is married and has two sons by a previous marriage.

EURIM Secretary General: Dr Edward Phelps
Edward Phelps was awarded his Doctorate by the Sussex European Institute. He is on the Editorial Advisory Board of Representation – the Journal of Representative Democracy and is currently working on a research monograph on generational change in political participation. Edward’s research interests include the impact of a changing information environment on citizen knowledge and political participation; elite vs participatory models of democratic engagement; methodological challenges to understanding electoral change; modelling voter behaviour; internet politics and social capital.

Phelps studied Politics at The University of Plymouth. He moved to Sussex in 1999 completing a Masters degree in Social and Political Philosophy at The University of Sussex in 2001. In 2004 he was awarded a Doctoral Scholarship at Sussex to facilitate an investigation of generational change in political participation, concerned to shed light on the disproportionate decline in voting behaviour amongst young citizens at the British General Election of 2001. His research was amongst the first to provide evidence of and cohort specific explanations for a generational effect in voter turnout. This work has been disseminated via academic journal articles and working papers and has been cited in the Electoral Commission’s Audits of Political Engagement; by The Youth Citizenship Commission and in numerous academic articles and books. Phelps has taught British Political History and Research Methods in Social and Political Science at The University of Sussex.

In Parliament, Phelps worked for two years for a Member of the Treasury and Public Accounts Select Committees during the most turbulent economic period in living memory. He has authored a number of reports to Government including on retail crime, rural poverty and small schools and on various aspects of ICT policy.

EURIM Deputy Secretary General: Sarah Chilman
Sarah joined the EURIM team in 2010. She is a self-employed consultant and events co-ordinator with clients from both Westminster linked groups and business with interests ranging from Europe to space and technology.

EURIM Consultant: Philip Virgo
Philip has been associated with EURIM since it was relaunched in January 1994 . He was the first executive officer to be appointed and has carried the designation Secretary General since 1996.

He was an LCC scholar at Dulwich College, an exhibitioner at Peterhouse, Cambridge (where he read History) and the first graduate trainee programmer for STC's Microwave and Line Division in Basildon. He then moved to ICL where he re-wrote and decimalised the Group Sales Ledgers before they sponsored him on the MSc programme at the London Business School. On return to ICL he ran the tri-partite (ICL-DTI-DoE) planning exercise to produce Computing Development plans for the about-to-be-formed Regional Water Authorities and later served as Comptroller and Business Development Manager for Public Corporation Sector.

In 1977 he moved to the Wellcome Foundation as Corporate Planner responsible for R&D, Export Division and the European Subsidiaries (including exercises on the potential of new technologies for improving health care, including of aging populations). At Wellcome he became involved in national IT Policy issues, helped draft the technology policies of both main parties for the 1979 election and in 1981 was the founding "Industry Vice-Chairman" of the Parliamentary Information Technology Committee (PITCOM).

In 1982 he returned full-time to ICT and joined the National Computing Centre (NCC) to handle National Issues and set up a Technology Assessment Service. Shortly afterwards he was given responsibility for the NCC Microsystems Centre: the flagship "awareness programme" of the day. From 1983-1989 he ran the City C3 Club, bringing together high tech investors and fund-seekers. He was a founding director of the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST), ran the NCC studies into reasons for the IT Skills Crisis of the mid-1980s (and the actions likely to be effective).  He also provided inputs to successive Ministers on how best to advise small firms and encourage investment in innovation. After leaving NCC in 1986 he was retained as an advisor until 1992.

Philip was Finance Executive of PITCOM from 1982-2006 and remains on the Council and Programme Committee. He was an external advisor to the High Tech Unit of Barclays Bank (1983-89), Campaign Director for the Women in IT Campaign (1989-92), IT Skills Advisor to the West London TEC (1991-2, a Specialist Advisor to the Information Committee of the House of Commons (1993-4) and has been Strategic Advisor to the Institute for the Management Information Systems (previously IDPM) since 1993.

He has served on many advisory boards and committees, including nearly 20 years as a directly elected member of the Council of the British Computer Society where he was acting Vice President (Professional) when the BCS Professional Development Scheme was launched. He was a founding member of the IT (City of London Livery) Company and currently chairs the Security Panel.  He has written extensively on the social and economic impact of new technologies and how to handle them, whether from a political or business perspective.  

He is married with one son.