Ann Beynon OBE retired as BT’s Director for Wales in July 2015. At BT she led the company’s work to win the Superfast Cymru high speed broadband and Public Service Broadband Aggregation contracts in Wales. She is now Senior Adviser Welsh Affairs for Severn Trent Water; Chair of the Wales Governance Centre at Cardiff University, a non-executive director of the Farmers’ Union of Wales Insurance Services Ltd, and a director of the social media company Cwmni Digidol. A fluent French-speaker, she has helped establish an Alliance Française in Wales. She consults and lectures on leadership and corporate social responsibility. She chairs the Cardiff Capital Region Transition Board. She was Equality and Human Rights Commissioner for Wales from 2010-16.
Ann is a former member of the Welsh Language Board and of the Board of the National Film and Television School. Prior to joining BT in 1998, she was Business Development Director at the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation and previously Head of Political and International Affairs at S4C. In 1999 she was a member of the Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords under the chairmanship of Lord John Wakeham.
She is a former Chair of Business in the Community in Wales and was the Prince of Wales’s Community Ambassador in Wales. Ann was awarded an OBE in 2008.
She is a graduate of Bangor University (first class honours in Welsh) where she was the first female President of the Students Union. She helped found NUS Wales and ran its first gay rights campaign.
Married with two grown-up children and one grand-child, Ann is a first-language Welsh-speaker.
Ann Beynon 