house of lords
Peer in the House of Lords, currently involving the establishing an educational charity around political theology on which I will be a Trustee/Director.
If elected, I would hope that experience could also be useful to the Church — including in supporting bishops whose responsibilities in the House of Lords give them an important opportunity to bring Christian insight to national debate.
Since graduating from Durham University, I split my time between Leicester and London working as a Political and Legislative Adviser in the House of Lords.
I worked in Mission & Pastoral, Central Secretariats for both the Church Commissioners and the Archbishops’ Council, the Diocese Commission and Mission & Public Affairs (supporting bishops in the House of Lords on matters relating to marriage, children and families).
Impact of Artificial Intelligence on human relationships and society During a House of Lords debate in June 2026 Archbishop Sarah Mullally’s central argument was that AI must be “pro-human”.
Finally, during the last quinquennium, I asked a total of twenty-one written questions at General Synod ( the equivalent of Parliamentary Questions ) on the following subjects: The folly of closing the churches at the beginning of lockdown; the imbalance of power and resources between diocese and parish when a church is threatened with closure under the existing and proposed Mission and Pastoral Measure ( in parallel, I sat on the Reference Group for the revised Mission and Pastoral Measure ); the eye-wateringly high staffing and refurbishment costs of Lambeth Palace; the paucity of spending on training of new ordinands; the amount of time wasted by bishops in the House of Lords; the ruinous cost and lunacy of trying to achieve net zero by 2030 and the burden, which this places on parishes; the fact that so few dioceses use Total Return Accounting ( thereby increasing the financial burden on parishes of parish share ); the non-validity of the Church’s Vision and Strategy ( it was never voted for by General Synod and yet it is depriving principally rural parishes of vicars and stipendiary boots on the ground ); what percentage of the Church Commissioners’ total assets come from parochial endowments, which were seized in 1976 ( for the first time, the written answer to this question established that it is 19% ); concerns about increasing centralisation of Church governance and control of funding; how significant amounts of money are being diverted away from the parish in order to finance episcopal vanity projects; and seven questions about Project Spire and slavery reparations.
We have developed fruitful links with Parliament through the House of Lords and played a part in wider national rural issues such as farming, ecology, housing, climate resilience and food security.