Martin Horwood

Early life

Horwood was born in St. Paul's, Cheltenham, in 1962. His parents lived first in St. Mark's and then in Leckhampton, where his mother still lives, joining the Cheltenham Young Liberals while still at Cheltenham College in 1979. He then went on to The Queen's College, Oxford to read Modern History in 1981, and was elected president of the Oxford Student Liberal Society and then chair of the party's national student wing, the Union of Liberal Students.

Humanitarian work

After graduating and leaving student politics, he worked first in advertising and then in the voluntary sector. In 1990 he moved to Oxford to work for Oxfam. His teams raised tens of millions of pounds for the poor in developing countries, including £2.5m for victims of the Rwanda genocide.

In 1995 he married Dr Shona Arora. They moved to India for a year, Horwood working for Oxfam and Arora for the UN programme on AIDS and a small charity working on sexual health in the slums of Delhi.

Returning to Britain, he became the first Director of Fundraising at the Alzheimer's Society, the care and research charity for people with dementia and their carers. Horwood led the team that won the charity Tesco Charity of the Year, earning millions for the charity nationwide and £16,000 for the Cheltenham branch alone.

He returned home to Cheltenham in 2001 to work for local business Target Direct which works mainly with charity clients. He became their Head of Consultancy.

Since 2015 he has been director of engagement and impact at Development Initiatives.

Parliamentary career

Horwood stood twice unsuccessfully before gaining election. In 1992, he was defeated by Labour's Andrew Smith in the seat of Oxford East. In 2001, he came third in Cities of London and Westminster.

Horwood was adopted as parliamentary candidate for Cheltenham following the decision by sitting Liberal Democrat MP Nigel Jones to stand down. Horwood was elected at the 2005 general election, winning the seat with a majority of 2,303 over the Conservatives.

He was appointed by his party to the select committee scrutinising the work of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister – now the Department for Communities and Local Government.

In July 2005, then party leader Charles Kennedy appointed Horwood to the Shadow Home Affairs team, before he was promoted by Menzies Campbell to be Shadow Environment Minister, under Chris Huhne, whom Horwood had backed in the party's leadership election. He has spoken in favour of a switch to more green taxation, tougher action to prevent climate change and more investment in bio-fuels and microgeneration.

Horwood was the chairman and founder of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Tribal Peoples. Created in 2007, the APPG for Tribal Peoples is composed of over 30 cross-party MPs and peers with the aim of raising parliamentary and public awareness of tribal peoples. Its secretariat is the international indigenous rights organisation, Survival International. The Group meets two or three times a year and one of its main objectives is to press for ratification of ILO Convention 169 on the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples.

Horwood was also the Secretary of the APPG on corporate responsibility.

In March 2009, Horwood was one of several MPs used as examples by the BBC looking at the reliability of Wikipedia. He urged Wikipedia to crack down upon abuses of the open editing facility and "acts of political vandalism".

In December 2010, Horwood attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancún, Mexico with fellow Liberal Democrat, then Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Chris Huhne.

Despite having secured over 50% of the vote in the 2010 general election, with a 9.3% swing and a 3,920-vote majority, Horwood lost his seat during the national Liberal Democrat collapse in the 2015 general election, losing to the Conservative candidate Alex Chalk. He unsuccessfully attempted to regain his seat during the 2017 general election, although he reduced Chalk's majority by 7.6%.