1. Marathon training/campaigning: What’s been your favourite part of North Yorkshire to run round?
There are so many beautiful parts of North Yorkshire. First, I’d just like to say I actually managed to run 3 hours 34 for the marathon and because of the kind people that sponsored me, we also raised a few hundred pounds towards guide dogs so that’s fantastic news.
In terms of places to run, I’m very blessed with where I live because I actually live very close to the side of the River Nidd, so I get to run down there with my dogs most mornings and of course, well I haven’t taken my dogs across North Yorkshire however, the most glamorous, the area I most liked, was the coastline which is epic. I think our coastline is epic. I can’t get over the awesomeness of the sea.
2. How do you think having an elected Mayor would benefit York and North Yorkshire?
So it would benefit North Yorkshire and York in many ways but let’s talk about students because they are our future. Let’s talk about how it would benefit them.
I know we’ve talked about how beautiful it is, but you want to create a place where people can live and thrive and everybody has equal opportunity and access to things but, as I say, if I focus on students, one of the biggest challenges I think for a student is there aren’t enough what I call career type jobs here or jobs with purpose. So if you become a student, part of your aspiration is to be able to earn enough money to own a home and do all the things you want to do, but we seem to have a plateau of jobs. There are certain high-paying jobs but not enough for all the students that come here and would like to stay. So one of the things that I’m looking at at the minute is how I can help transform the economy so that there are jobs that people can progress through and grow through and therefore there is not the need to leave North Yorkshire and generally head South.
A couple of things that the Mayor can do is create affordable homes around York. Affordable homes to me have two sides: one, you’ve got to be able to afford it, but you’ve also got to be able to afford to run it. We need energy efficient homes where instead of costing £3000 to run, it costs £1000 a year and suddenly your cost of living is reduced and so that will help again.
In terms of public transport, we need to create a public transport system across the whole of York and North Yorkshire. I want to have an oyster card type situation where you just tap in and out. I know we’ve got the buses at the minute where you just tap in and tap out, but actually, when you change service the ticket is continuous rather than you having to pay separate charges when you change services. It will be integrated across rail and bus and again that will help to reduce the cost of travel and also save time buying tickets.
3. As you previously held the position of Conservative councillor, what prompted your decision to leave and stand independently?
So two things: the first one is I had been a Conservative Councillor for 10 years and I made a lot of difference during that time. So when I joined North Yorkshire council, they had no climate change strategy at all, we’re now on our second one. They had never had a climate change champion, I’m the very first climate change champion and I was elected last year.
There were a number of things that I wanted to achieve, and I was achieving them but slowly and surely, over the last few years, the Conservative government in particular have moved more to the right for me, so they’ve become more right wing, which I’m not comfortable with, I’m very inclusive. One of the things I see from the mayoralty is that we can boost benefits for everyone, not just the select few, so that’s something I’m very passionate about.
But over the last 6 months, there’s been some particularly difficult decisions. I also chair Scrutiny of Transport for the North and they scrapped the Manchester leg of HS2 which is not right. For every pound we spent on HS2, we got £8 back in terms of people’s enhanced productivity however you describe that, and therefore creating so much more benefit for prosperity in the North of England.
So HS2 was one, and all the sort of bickering and fighting rather than getting on and producing policies for the benefit of the country. So I just got more and more disillusioned. It’s not something that happened overnight. What happened overnight was I just thought that’s it i’m leaving. And at the same time the mayoralty was coming up and I just thought, I’ve been trying to make a change in local politics and I have not made the change that I came into politics to do, and I wanted to bring about some of those changes for the people of Yorkshire and give them the policies they truly deserve.