Name:

Steve Oliver

Where do you live (roughly) in the village?

Park House Mill, Renton Close

Tell us about your immediate family

My mother is from the wrong side of the Pennines and lives in St Helens as does my sister. Although I have to say, the rugby league is good in that part of the world!

What is your professional background?

Former Royal Signals and then left to join a civil service department where I spent thirty-three years moving around and never being in one place for more than around five years. Most of my career I’ve spent working alongside American colleagues both in the UK and in the States. Before semi-retirement, I was in London at the National Cyber Security Centre in Victoria and now consult on Cyber Incident Response exercises both in the UK and abroad.

What particular skills and experience do you bring to the PC?

That’s really for others to say, but I’ve had experience of running very large, technical projects as well as large teams across multiple boundaries and I hope some of that experience will stand me in good stead. Perhaps as part of my American experiences (and perhaps heritage, my Great Grandmother was from Pennsylvania apparently), I also like to ‘just get stuff done’.

Are there particular issues/matters you want to concentrate on?

One of the things for me after coming from Government service was to ‘professionalise’ our Council in terms of our presence, so, moving to .gov.uk government sponsored web addresses and email along with a complete overhaul of our web presence was a small but important step in that direction. For the immediate future, traffic and what we need to do to keep people safe as the village expands seems a very important part of the Council’s remit – I hope to play my part in that.

What do you hope that the PC can achieve for the village?

The PC should exist to do what it can within its resources and remit to make things better for the village and I think we have a really good opportunity to do that with this Council and the breadth of experience on it. It’s important to remember we don’t get paid for this – we’re doing it because we want to make things better and one of the things I think you’ll see from this Council is a greater emphasis on asking the village what it wants and then trying to make it work. The village is a beautiful place to live but we can always do more - it’s a joint endeavour at the end of the day.

You can contact Steve via email