George Ritchie
Non-Executive Director
George has more than 25 years regulatory, competition law and public law experience in the telecoms sector. After an early legal career in private practice and government service, he joined British Telecommunications plc in 1995 as a regulatory, competition and public law lawyer. Since then, George has undertaken the full gamut of telecoms regulatory and behavioural competition law work. He was Chief Counsel Competition & Regulation for BT Wholesale from 2003 to 2009 and for BT Group from 2009 to 2017.
From 2017 to 2022 George was BT’s Commitments Assurance Director, independently monitoring BT’s compliance with its Commitments to make Openreach an separate subsidiary company with its own board of directors and with greater strategic, financial and operational independence. He was directly accountable to the BT Compliance Committee (BTCC), a BT Group plc Board Committee, and indirectly to Ofcom via its Openreach Monitoring Unit. In 2020, Mr Ritchie helped secure BT Board approval to the BTCC taking on responsibility for monitoring BT’s Consumer Fairness commitments. He retired from BT in 2022 after Ofcom announced it was satisfied the Openreach governance arrangements were embedded and sustainable.
In addition to providing telecoms-related consultancy services, George has now developed a broad non-executive portfolio including:
• Independent Member of the Audit and Risk Committee of the Health Research Authority
• Lay Public Interest Council Observer for the Association of Taxation Technicians
• Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service Lay Tribunal Member
• Chair of the Letchworth Garden City Educational Trust