The 2004 winner of the Epolitix
Environment Champion Award, Joan Walley MP has long combined her
environmental concerns with a commitment to her native North
Staffordshire.
She was born in
Stoke in 1949, went to Biddulph Grammar School and took a degree
in social administration at Hull University, followed by a diploma
at Swansea. She worked with recovering alcoholics, and in the
planning department of councils in Swansea and London.
Joan was elected Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent
North at the 1987 general election. She soon became shadow
spokesperson for Environmental Protection and Development and then
for Transport, a post that she held for the five years between
1990 and 1995. Prior to the election to parliament, she was a
member of Lambeth Council.
Joan has been one of the key MPs raising the
public and political profile of such issues as climate change,
sustainable transport, alternative energy, and responsible
government procurement. She is honorary president of the
Institute of Environmental Health Officers and takes a keen
interest in public health matters. She also knows that making big
change is achieved through small steps, and works to link the
local with the global. She is the senior Labour member of the
Environmental Audit Select Committee of the House of Commons.
However, her real focus is embedded in the
constituency which extends from Burslem, the mother town of the
Potteries, to Tunstall and surrounding former mining villages to
the rural part of Staffordshire Moorlands. Regenerating the
communities of the constituency is a must. That means working
alongside local people and building local partnerships to deliver
the improvements that are needed as the area undergoes structural
change.
Joan works with, and has helped set up many
local groups. Examples include the Chatterley Whitfield
Partnership (finds new uses for the listed former colliery which
is now recognised by English Heritage as important to the
industrial revolution as Stone Henge is to the Stone age) and the
Burslem partnership which plans the regeneration of the “mother
town” of the potteries.
Representing a former mining area, she has
been active in getting compensation claims out to miners. She
takes a particular interest in citizenship, grass roots football
and is a member of the All Party Football Group.
Her other interests have seen her recognised
as honorary president of Cobridge Air Training Corps and honorary
member of Fegg Hayes working men’s club.
Picture
Source
