I have lived in the wards of Chew Valley South and now Mendip for over thirty years.

Full statement

For twenty five of those years I was a paid-up member of the Liberal Democratic party, and even stood as a Lib Dem candidate in a couple of previous local council elections. While living in the Chew Valley I have brought up three children, worked as an IT project manager, played rugby for Blagdon, tennis at Bishop Sutton, walked my dogs on the Mendips, and worshipped in Ubley church.

Two factors led me to join the Green party:

- The failure of all three major parties to use the banking crisis of 2008 as the wake-up call that business-as-usual is no longer working. Victorian levels of inequality are not just morally indefensible, they are a drag on the economy.

- The failure of all three major parties to develop and deliver a credible plan to meet the multiple ecological catastrophes unfolding before us -climate change, biodiversity and habitat loss, soil degradation and micro plastics.

The solution to these two problems come together in a just transition to a new green deal. Economics and politics are human constructs and we can and should do both of them differently. We are not going to solve the global climate crisis in BANES, but we can play our part. I believe that my thirty years experience of managing multi-million pound budgets, supplier relationships, risk/benefit analysis and delivering to time, cost, and quality means that I could help to run BANES efficiently, effectively and fairly.

One of the buzzwords of yesteryear was ‘subsidiarity’, meaning decisions should be taken at the lowest appropriate level. I believe in subsidiarity. I believe in local democracy.