ABOUT WARWICK LIGHTFOOT
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Warwick Lightfoot |
Warwick Lightfoot
Warwick Lightfoot is passionate about London. He will promote London with imagination and flair and he will bring a practical, professional competence to managing London’s public services. He knows that money alone will not give Londoners the police and public transport they want, without fundamental reform of their management. He is an approachable, compassionate conservative with the experience, energy and drive reform London’s public services.
Councillor in Kensington and Chelsea
He knows Londoners want a safer city with less crime. He is the councillor in Kensington and Chelsea with cabinet member responsibility for police and community safety. Last year he was the Mayor of Kensington and Chelsea and held a series of seminars that examined the future government of London, the success of London’s financial markets and explored the challenge that scientists and policy makers have in tackling Climate Change. He has been a London borough councillor for twenty years. During most of his time as a member of a local authority Warwick Lightfoot has specialised in social services and was politically responsible for building up one of the country’s best 3 Star social services departments.
Professional Economist
Warwick Lightfoot is a professional economist who has worked in London’s international financial markets and in the public sector He is used to working with the media and contributing to the debate about the Conservative agenda for the future. For a long period he was Special Adviser to both the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of State for Employment. He has worked on employment policy, training public spending and taxation. Warwick Lightfoot understands public finance, he knows how to get value for money out of taxpayers’ money and he knows how to control spending. From his time working at the Department of Employment he understands how people living in a rich and prosperous city can get trapped in poverty and unemployment and left behind. And having grown up in a single parent family Warwick understands the challenges that families face and the need to ensure that there are opportunities for all families. Warwick Lightfoot went to a comprehensive school and he knows how important good education is as a ladder of opportunity.
Born in Barnet
Warwick Lightfoot was born in Barnet. His parents separated before he was born and his mother took him to live in a small village in Devon. No single parent has an easy time and his mother experienced the same worries about money, getting a house and childcare as other single parents. Life was transformed when his mother married Ellis Stuttard a professional footballer who was the manager of Plymouth Argyle Football Club. As a boy Warwick did not like school lessons and took no interest in his academic education, until he was 14 at Totnes Comprehensive. He went to Oxford to read law and quickly decided that he was more interested in economics than law and changed to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics instead.
Lived and worked in London since 1982
After short spells working in Paris and New York Warwick Lightfoot came to live and work in London in 1982. His professional work as an economist in the City and his long involvement in national and London local government means that he understands the importance of wealth creation, job creation and cost effective and high quality public services in London.