In addition to all the MEPs, Prime Ministers and Grandees there were also quite a few local Councillors like me in attendance.
The Committee of Regions continued to focus on Local Government issues by mounting a couple of specific interest Fringe sessions.
One regular event is entitled the Liberal Mayors Summit, and despite the poor attendance of Mayors and Group Leaders from the UK ,even when we were in the EU, I’ve fortunately managed to sneak in on a couple of occasions. There were about 20 attending this year, from metropolitan areas across the EU, with representation from well-known cities like Warsaw, Stockholm, St Omer, Bucharest, Split, Budapest, Vienna and smaller less well-known ones from across the EU states. It was good to realise that the Liberal influence is present in so many local authority areas.
The main guest was the very popular Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice President of the European Commission who had delivered a speech about plans to regulate IA.
The agenda included issues about SMEs, and combatting gender-based violence but the item which generated most contributions and took up the majority of time was about The European Year of Skills. Every attendee around the table had prepared a contribution on this subject and I found there was such resonance with issues our own towns and cities are experiencing, I thought it would be of interest to our colleagues here in the UK.
As the discussion went round the table, we heard from every representative about problems that their authority faced in planning for the future. These were an ageing population, a lack of well qualified staff and skilled personnel to fill vacancies, while experiencing an incoming surfeit of unskilled migrants. An interesting example was given of an authority above the Arctic Circle in the North of Finland, which had recognised that it needed to bring in new people if its business and activities were to thrive.
In May, we at the English Young Liberals got massively stuck into campaigning for the local elections! Proving ourselves to be a massive driving force in the locals, we held multiple action days in twenty different locations across the country, with many often happening on the same day. We’d like to thank all the local parties in supporting us setting up these action days, and to give a huge thank you to every Young Liberal that turned up and made the action days a success!
In less frenetic times, 
The loss of World Heritage Status for our City, even though it was expected, is a huge blow to our international prestige and will, without a doubt, affect our tourism and inward investment.
Welcome back to Creeting St Peter, a small Parish in Suffolk’s Gipping Valley…
I am very proud to say that I was elected as a Liberal Democrat councillor in 2017 to serve the residents of Cyncoed and Lakeside at Cardiff County Council. Cardiff, capital city of Wales, is very cosmopolitan, a city that celebrates its diversity, but still fails to represent its population in the make-up of the council chamber and the workforce within the council.
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