New council chairman to ‘connect’ with community

A FORMER head of operations in Silicon Valley has become the new chair of Charvil Parish Council.

Stephen Lucas, 52, of Old Acres Lane, is the chief operating officer of Signal AI in London.

He moved to Reading from America 10 years ago after working as a chief financial officer for a software company.

Councillor Lucas had worked in the technology industry since the Nineties and lived in America and Australia, where he grew up, before settling in the UK in 2015 with wife Penny and three children, Sophie, 24, Caleb, 21 and Isaac, 18.

He said: “One of the companies I worked at was bought out by another one and they asked me to move to the UK.

“We’d always been excited about moving here. My wife Penny’s mum was born in Birmingham so we had always looked to come over here and that was our opportunity. We both have family heritage here.

“The UK is quite close to the Australian culture and we wanted our children, who have now left home or are at university, to experience a similar culture.

“When we moved, it was about finding a place that combined access to the schools for our children and being able to get into London for work while being near countryside. Charvil is a small but lovely community.”

Cllr Lucas, who was previously the council’s vice-chair, joined the council in 2023. He said: “It was the realisation that my life didn’t really have much connection to my local community.

“I wanted to engage a bit more with that because my work takes me to London and that was my primary place. I felt like that connection to where I live was missing.”

Cllr Lucas, who grew up in Canberra, will be joining the speed watch monitoring campaign in the village to identify and record speeding vehicles and wants to address challenges the community are facing. He said: “A challenge we’ve got to work through is having sufficient services for a community of our size which is growing as the number of houses is increasing.

“Trying to maintain the countryside feel while there is housing growth is a real challenge for us to manage.

“Our neighbourhood plan is such an important part of what we would like to see the future of Charvil looking like.