Honours for business leaders who go extra mile

John Maddison Hall, 67, chairman of trustees for Mirfield-based Hollybank Trust, is awarded an MBE for services to children and adults with special needs and disabilities.

He is joined by one of Britain’s longest serving stockbrokers, Keith Loudon, 81, who has been awarded an OBE for services to business and the community in his home city of Leeds, while Adeeba Malik, deputy chief executive of QED Foundation in Bradford, which works with ethnic minorities to eradicate poverty, disadvantage and discrimination, has been awarded a CBE for her services as a British Muslim woman on mainstream public bodies.

With the considerable fundraising efforts of Mr Hall, the Hollybank Trust has been transformed from a small, loss making single site charity to an £11m charity caring for over 100 people. The Trust offers education and residential care for people of all ages who have profound and complex disabilities and needs.

Mr Hall, who’s day job is chief executive of Leeds-based transport products firm Volvox Group, got involved with the charity after his son James was born with severe cerebral palsy, leaving him quadriplegic and needing residential care and education.

“Shortly after James went there it was under threat of closure looking after only around 20 young people and in what was regarded as inadequate facilities,” Mr Hall said. “It was at that time some 27 years ago that I became a member of the fundraising team eventually becoming Trust chairman and we set out on the road to build what we have today.”

Mr Hall spearheaded a plan which effectively rescued the Trust from insolvency and enabled it to relocate. He steered the Trust to expand into adult services so that Hollybank could provide support to residents beyond the age of 18. Each year he organises a dinner which annually raises between £10,000 to £23,000 for additions to the Trust’s site such as a swimming pool and hydrotherapy centre.

OBE recipient, Mr Loudon, has worked at Leeds-based Redmayne Bentley for more than 58 years, and served as Lord Mayor of Leeds in 1993-94. As senior partner at Redmayne Bentley, he has seen the firm develop into one of the UK’s largest independently owned stockbrokers, with more than 300 staff and almost 40 branches.

Mr Loudon said: “I’ve got this honour because of all the people who have supported me in every aspect of my life. They have encouraged me, and I hope I’ve encouraged them too.”

Adeeba Malik, who picked up a CBE, has held many ministerial and non-ministerial board level positions in the last 15 years in diverse organisations including British Waterways, Yorkshire Forward, and the Advisory Board on Naturalisation and Immigration. She was the first Asian woman to serve on most of these boards.

In 2005, she was appointed chairman of the National Ethnic Minority Business Forum based in the Department for Trade and Industry and became a commissioner for the Women and Work Commission set up by then Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

She said: “I am humbled and honoured to receive such a prestigious award and to be recognised for my work which I have always enjoyed.”