About Phil

Phil has over 35 years of experience in local government specialising in Transport and Environment matters. He is currently Portfolio Holder for Environment and Climate Change at Ipswich Borough Council. He has worked in the private sector for both engineering and garden chemical industries as well as spending nearly 20 years in the education department of Essex County Council where he was responsible for data analysis and statutory returns covering behaviour and attendance, special needs and attainment measures.

Phil’s experience in the Transport sector includes serving on the Board of Directors of Ipswich Buses Ltd., one of the few remaining municipal bus companies in the UK, as well as having Committee and portfolio responsibility for transport matters throughout his 36 years as an Ipswich Borough Councillor. He was Mayor of Ipswich in 1996/7, the youngest ever holder of that office.

Besides his work on local bus transport, Phil has made a significant contribution to the local rail network. In 2001 he drew up the plans for the Ipswich Freight Chord and persuaded the Council to reserve the route in the Ipswich Local Plan, several years before it was accepted as ‘deliverable’ by Network Rail. It opened in 2014 and carries freight traffic between Felixstowe, the Midlands and the North without reversal in Ipswich Yard.

In 1992, he persuaded the Borough Council to become founder members of the East West Rail Consortium, an assembly of local councils established to campaign for a direct rail link between East Anglia and Oxford via Cambridge, Bedford and Milton Keynes. After many years, construction is now underway on the western section with route alignments for the central section now at the planning stage.

Phil is also a member of Railfuture. He has written papers on the Mid Anglia Line, The Felixstowe to Nuneaton Strategic Freight Route and is in regular demand as a speaker at public meetings including an address to the Westminster Policy Forum on the subject of East West Rail.

Phil is currently working on a proposal for expanding rail freight capacity in Greater Manchester that uses an alternative route avoiding the notorious ‘Castlefield Corridor’.