Peter Cartwright is an Alderman and Burgess of High Wycombe. He is born and bred in Wycombe and has been a Town Mayor. He served as a Councillor on both BCC and WDC for many years and is currently campaigning for High Wycombe to get its own town council.

I SPEAK as someone who has seen it from the inside and from the outside and strongly feel that High Wycombe should be treat the same as everywhere else.

It is about local people electing local townspeople to represent them at a local level.

At the next Buckinghamshire elections held in 2025, there will be 97 councillors elected for the whole of Buckinghamshire of whom just 13 will be wholly representing the town plus 3 others who will mainly be representing parished area and only a small part of the town.

High Wycombe will have much worse representation than everywhere else in Bucks.

Winslow a small town with less than 6,000 people has 12 town councillors and 1 Bucks Councillor and Chesham, a much smaller town than Wycombe, has 19 town councillors in addition to its Buckinghamshire Councillors.

The devil is always in the detail, and my hope is that town councillors will be able to look at issues in detail and promote issues that benefit the town and its people.

This is not happening at a local level at the moment.

As someone who has taken a keen interest in the town for nearly 60 years I strongly believe that it is totally wrong that the town of High Wycombe is being treated worse than the rest of the County.

I want to see equity and an elected Town Council to address LOCAL issues.

I witnessed the former High Wycombe Borough Council being abolished in 1974 and the new Wycombe District Council taking it over, plus the former Wycombe Rural District Council and Marlow Urban District Council. Marlow then had a town council and the rural areas had parish councils as before.

More recently Buckinghamshire Council has replaced the District Council and the County Council and High Wycombe is the only place in Bucks to have only Buckinghamshire councillors.