Equality, Diversity & Accessibility
Part of my aim in being elected as a Town Councillor (and subsequently during my time as Mayor) was to make St Neots an open, inviting and accessible town that excludes no one, and that we can all be proud of.
Here are three important ways that I have worked to make our community more inclusive and diverse:
1. Inclusive Play Equipment
Last autumn I walked the entire 151-mile length of the Ouse Valley Way. The tragedy is that a parent of a child with disabilities would have to travel that distance to find a play park with inclusive play equipment.
My earliest success as a Councillor was forming a one-person working group to investigate the provision of inclusive play equipment in the town. In this role, together with residents, I formed the St Neots Inclusive Playpark Foundation to raise money to build a state-of-the-art destination play facility for young people with disabilities (and raised money for them as one of my Mayors Charities). To turbocharge that project, St Neots Town Council recently agreed to make a £45k grant towards the purchase of the first three pieces of inclusive play equipment.
2. Pride in St Neots
Last summer, after years of talking about it, I helped to bring together a wonderful group of people who would eventually become “Pride in St Neots“, with the intention of creating St Neots (and Huntingdonshire’s) first-ever LGBTQIA+ Pride event in Summer 2021.
At the January 12th meeting of St Neots Town Council, I tabled a motion on behalf of PiStN, requesting that the Pride flag be flown from the Council flag pole on three dates a year – starting with February 1st for the start in LGBT History Month.
I am proud to say that my fellow councillors resolved unanimously to support my motion, in a show of solidarity with the sizeable LGBTQIA+ community in St Neots. This may seem like a small thing, but it’s the first time that this had been agreed, one of our neighbouring Town Councils recently rejected such a motion.
I continue to work with the group as a member of the organising committee, and despite the setback of the pandemic, we still hope to hold a virtual pride event this year.
3. Youth Council
When I was elected to the Town Council in 2018 I was regarded as being a “young councillor”. I’m probably St Neots youngest ever Mayor, which is absurd because I’m almost 50. One of my largest ambitions as a councillor has to been to try and inspire the wider community to take an interest in council business, and hopefully inspire some of them to stand as councillors themselves.
In the past year, I have led the Youth Council Working Group, which will elect a new Youth Council for St Neots this May, and which will allow young people to have a voice in those decisions that we take as a council that influence them (which is most of them). We decided early on that a credible Youth Council needs to be defined by young people from the beginning (rather than middle-aged people like me). In 2021 we co-opted a group of 12 young people, who are busy defining the purpose of the council and deciding how it will elect a diverse group of people who will represent all of the young adults in our community.
