John Carson is standing as an Independent candidate for the by-election on Thursday 18 August. His background is in Civil Engineering.
John has worked in all aspects of Civil Engineering both in the UK and abroad. He spent most of his early career with consulting engineers, later joining contractors to gain experience and become a chartered engineer. He has worked as an independent consultant since 1995.
John has extensive experience in the contracting industry where he joined as a trainee and latterly was MD of a major contractor responsible for the team that designed, funded and built the Skye Bridge.
Since 1995, John has worked in Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man where he ran one of Ireland’s largest construction companies involved in Civil Engineering and foundation solutions.
John moved to London in the late 1990’s, initially as Infrastructure Director with one on the largest PFI contractors in the UK. During this time he worked as Bid Director on the English Highways Traffic Information Centre: a project that took live information from the trunk road network and sold it in real time to various users. He headed up a team from this company in a consortium bid to privatise the London Underground Picadilly, Northern and Jubilee lines and, having been successful, then moved onto bidding for the infrastructure contract for the “Zuid” (South) line in the Netherlands: a project that introduced the French TGV trains to Amsterdam.
John was invited to join a team, headed up by Sir Adrian Montague and Iain Coucher, to take British Rail out of administration and turn it into “a not for dividend company” Network Rail. On being successful, John initially became Director of Business Planning and Regulation. He was largely responsible for the first published business plan for Network Rail and later became Director of Maintenance.
His campaign is being run on the main premise that the city council should not proceed with the tram project which he believes was doomed from the start. He has a website and you can follow him on Twitter.
We interviewed him to see how he thinks he is placed at the end of the campaign:-
