It's been a privilege to have served you as the Ashford Borough councillor for Biddenden for 28 years now.
I'm happily married to Clair and have three grown up children. I'm very happy to have lived in Biddenden, which I know and love, for well over 30 years.
As Biddenden councillor, I've driven over 30,000 miles to attend meetings in Ashford, attended 300 parish council meetings in Biddenden, sent over 50,000 emails and hopefully met and helped an awful lot of folk with planning applications, housing problems, bin collection problems and more besides.
The current challenges Biddenden face include:
- Pushing back on the relentless drive for more houses
- Calming traffic in the village
- Addressing increasing anti-social activity
- Supporting our High street businesses
- Supporting our fantastic John Mayne primary school
- Improving children's play equipment
And I'm very happy to commit to doing my best to tackling these.
I don't get everything right but I do my best.
Having said that, although we often concentrate on what needs to change, I do think that actually, we already have a pretty lovely parish and a pretty nice set of people who continue to do amazing things for each other.
I'll continue to try to help with getting government and the utilities to do their jobs properly and protect those parts of Biddenden life we cherish.
Although the older I get, the more I think it's a case of chipping away, day in, day out which is more effective, rather than a dramatic "all change" approach.
I do hope you vote for me in this election, I love having the opportunity to meet and help folk and I'd like to think I do a reasonably good job.