Looking to provide care and support to our community
David Ford is a Bradford Council candidate for Baildon at the 2026 local elections 🗳️
I am married with two grown-up boys and am standing with the Conservative team in Baildon alongside the experienced Baildon councillor Debbie Davies and new candidate Alekks Belskis. I hope we can bring our different skills together to provide care and support to our community in Baildon and Esholt.
I served as a councillor between 2000 and 2007 in Shipley and Heaton and during that time I was privileged to be able to support many hundreds of individuals with particular issues and concerns.
This included helping the community with a variety of issues relating to housing, and, in education, I liaised widely with local schools and regularly held on-site councillor surgeries so that parents dropping off their children could raise concerns with me. I also wrote the travel plan for my childrens' nursery and helped contribute to the travel plans of two primary schools.
I am keen to help support Debbie with her work on local concerns such as the former Ian Clough Car Park, Baildon's very own "hole in the ground" and the future of the town's library.
As a councillor, I sat on the then library committee, which was trying to defend library facilities in Bradford, and I wrote an amendment to the council budget in 2006 which created a Book Fund. This amendment was accepted and helped support libraries in the district.
When I took a break from being a councillor in 2007, I opened up a bookshop in Saltaire, which I ran for nine years. As part of this, I organised fortnightly book events – with invited writers – and organised the literature side of Saltaire Festival for a few years.
It was exciting to be able to bring a wide range of writing talent to our city and although it was run on a shoestring budget, we were often very successful. These events included writers going into local schools and an after-school book club for children.
My voluntary activities in recent years have included volunteering at a local food bank – which I have done for three years – and two afternoons a week at a local charity bookshop. In my spare time, I enjoy table tennis in Shipley and at Wesleys, and my wife and I belong to a national dog sitting scheme.
