2024 – Present, Lee Williscroft-Ferris, Town Councillor, Hexham, Northumberland
Lee Williscroft-Ferris has represented Priestpopple ward on Hexham Town Council since 2021. After initially being elected as an Independent, he switched to Animal Welfare Party in January 2024. Politically engaged from a young age, Lee has been a trade union activist, a campaigner for equality and an advocate for animals for many years. Having stood in the General Election for Hexham in 2015, Lee was elected to Hexham Town Council in 2021 and has served as Chair of the Community Engagement Committee and Remembrance Events Sub-Committee, placing inclusion and community cohesion at the heart of his work. Lee has led efforts to poverty-proof the council’s work and to ensure that council events are inclusive of harder-to-reach sections of the community. Lee is a passionate vegan and animal lover and believes that animal rights are both central to the future of the planet and the next logical step in the fight for social justice.
PREVIOUS REPRESENTATIVES
2017 – 2023, Jane Smith, Town Councillor, Alsager, Cheshire
Jane is a psychotherapist by training, a vegan, a mother of three boys and a served as a town councillor in Alsager, Cheshire since election in May 2015, representing AWP from 2017 to 2023. She studied at the University of Angers (France) and has postgraduate degrees from Loughborough University and the University of Manchester. Jane runs Compassion in World Farming’s Cheshire Group and her interests include hiking with her two rescue dogs, meditation and spending time in nature.
During her time as a town councillor, Jane focused on animal welfare including securing a ban on goldfish being given as fairground prizes and campaigning against the badger cull in Cheshire. Smith’s 2019 ‘Hedgehog Motion’ stipulating native hedging or wildlife tunnels be mandated for all new planning applications coming before the town council was unanimously adopted and has since been adopted by many councils across the UK. She also lobbied for the resettlement of Syrian refugee families in the area and was actively involved in securing funding for a neglected Bronze Age burial site to be protected and re-planted with native woodland trees.
Jane Smith is also Animal Welfare Party’s Deputy Leader
