Councillor David Jones

image of David Jones

Background:

I was born, raised and educated in Coventry, the only child of a baker and confectioner. After A-levels, I trained with a firm of chartered accountants, but was never successful in passing the final qualifying examination. Having during training discovered a talent for taxation, I moved to Birmingham to specialise in corporate taxation. In 1985, I was successful in obtaining a job in London, and, in 1986, I moved to Houghton Regis with my wife and two boys. 

In 1999, i was elected to the Town Council for the first time and went on to serve for 16 years, stepping down in 2015. I was greatly priviledged to be the Town Mayor in 2012/13. From 2002 to 2015, also, i was a councillor on South Bedfordshire District Council and it's successor authority, Central Bedfordshire Council. 

Why you stood as a councillor:

I stood as a candidiate to become a councillor again in the elections of 2019 for two reasons. Firstly, i was invited to do so by my colleagues in the Liberal Democrats. Secondly, watching from the sidelines for the past four years, I have been dismayed to see the Town Council make a number of what I consider to be doubtful decisions, and to seemingly lurch form crisis to crisis. This may be my perception from the newspaper coverage, but I did see some council papers on various items, and I resolved that, given the opportunity, I would do whatever I could to change that perception. 

What are you hoping to achieve:

In their letter to postal voters before the elections, Susan Goodchild and Yvonne Farrell, our two elected Central Bedfordshire Councillors, wrote "The(then) Town Council under no overall control has managed to lose confidence of Central Bedfordshire Council as a service partner". That has to change. My approach during my previous 16 years as a Town Councillor was always to work as closely as possible with the upper tier authorities. In local government, they generally hold the pursestrings, and, if the Town Council requires funding for projects, etc., we want them to have sufficient confidence in us to spend their money in this town rather than in some other parish/town a few miles away.

If I achieve this, but nothing else, during the next four years, I shall be a happy man. Otherwise, I am simply hoping to restore the Town Council's previous reputation for good and sensible governance on behalf of all it's residents.

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