Our People

Mr Graeme Nuttall OBE

Fellow, Visiting Fellow

Research Associate

Centre for Mutual and Co-owned Business

graeme.nuttall@fieldfisher.com

Graeme Nuttall OBE has a career long involvement in employee ownership policy making and research. He is a partner in the European law firm Fieldfisher, an Executive Fellow at Rutger’s Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing, a Fellow of Ownership at Work, a trustee of the Institute for the Future of Work and chair of several employee ownership trust (EOT) trustee companies.

Graeme was the UK Coalition Government’s independent adviser on employee ownership (2012-2015). He was asked to work with the Government to identify all the barriers to employee ownership of private companies and find the solutions to knock them down. Graeme published ‘Sharing Success: The Nuttall Review of Employee Ownership‘ (BIS, 2012), following which various regulatory and non-regulatory measures were implemented to promote UK employee ownership. In particular, as a result of the Nuttall Review, the UK’s trust model of employee ownership received statutory recognition in the Finance Act 2014 in the form of the EOT. Employee ownership is now a mainstream UK business model with almost all new employee-owned companies adopting EOT ownership.

Graeme was a member of the UK HM Treasury Advisory Group (1999-2000) that developed the UK’s tax advantaged share incentive plan (SIP) and enterprise management incentives arrangement. He drafted a successful Private Member’s Bill to democratise SIPs, enacted as the Employee Share Schemes Act 2002.

Graeme helped make the case for public service mutuals by advising pathfinder mutuals and as a Cabinet Office Mutuals Ambassador.

Graeme delivered the Irish ProShare Association’s Jack Fitzpatrick Memorial Lecture 2013 and the Gandhi Foundation’s annual lecture in 2020.

Graeme was the Financial Times 2013 Innovative Lawyer of the Year and has received The Philip Baxendale Fellowship Award (Baxi Partnership and Employee Ownership Association, 2012), the Award for Services to Employee Share Ownership (ProShare, 2016) and the Txemi Cantera International Social Economy Award (Asociación Empresarial ASLE, 2021).

Graeme received an OBE in the Queen’s 2014 Birthday Honours for services to employee share plans, public service mutuals and employee ownership.

Publications include ‘Guía sobre las principales formas de participación de empleados en el Reino Unido’ in Participación de los Trabajadores en la Empresa y Sociedades Laborales’ (Tirant Lo Blanch, 2018) and ‘Gandhi’s Theory of Trusteeship and Its Influence on Employee Ownership in the Twenty-First Century’ in ‘Gandhi’s Wisdom – Insights from the Founding Father of Modern Psychology in the East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

Articles include ‘EO v3.0 – Employee ownership with added Gandhian purpose‘ (Fieldfisher, 2020) ‘How Robert Oakeshott made paritarian governance good practice for employee trusts‘ (OaW, 2021), ‘An introduction to the employee ownership trust‘ (Fieldfisher 2022), ‘Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Nuttall Review‘ (Cwmpas, 2022), ‘How the UK is encouraging employee ownership internationally‘ (Fieldfisher, 2022), ‘On the role of the independent trustee director‘ (OaW, 2023), and Employee ownership as a supercharged ‘all-party’ solution to bolster wealth (Bright Blue essay collection ‘A Wealth of Opportunities’, chapter 15)