Your Hatfield East candidates
- Credit: Supplied
On May 6 all 16 wards will have a seat up for grabs in the Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council elections - with Welham Green and Hatfield South ward having two.
Of the 17 seats up for election, there are 10 Conservative seats, four Labour seats and three Liberal Democrat seats.
The WHT has given each candidate the opportunity to tell you why they are running.
They are listed alphabetically by surname:
Ian Gregory - Green Party
- Credit: Welwyn Hatfield Green Party
Ian Gregory – Green Party
You may also want to watch: I have lived in Hatfield most of my life, including the last 27 years at my house in Oxlease. I joined the Green Party seven years ago but have been campaigning on environmental issues much longer than that. I am a self-employed gardener and keen advocate of sustainable transport and active travel, working through Sustrans, CycleHerts and WelhatCycling, as well as being deputy chair of the Hertfordshire Local A
There were three county council seats within the Welwyn Hatfield area in 2017, each won by a different party, with a margin of fewer than 100 votes.
The Lib Dems won the Haldens seat with 1,595, just 98 more votes than polled by the Conservatives.
In Hatfield East the Conservatives won with 1,078 votes - which was 98 more than Labour, and in Welwyn Garden City South Labour won the seat with 1,403 votes - just 71 more than the Conservatives.
Meanwhile all seven county council seats in Hertsmere are being contested by Conservative, Green, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.
In addition there are candidates from Trade Unionists and Socialists Against Cuts (Borehamwood North), UKIP (Borehamwood South) and independent candidate Rosemary Gilligan (Potters Bar West and Shenley).
Eight out of England s 10 coronavirus hotspots are home to prisons, MailOnline can reveal.
Public Health England data show that the highest infection rate in the country in the third week of February – in the area surrounding a jail in Leeds – was twice as high as the worst outbreak in a non-prison area.
Prisons in Leeds, Hull, Peterborough, Manchester, Birmingham, Dorset, Rutland and Hatfield have all recorded outbreaks that sent local rates rocketing.
Professor Seena Fazel, an Oxford University psychiatrist who works closely with inmates, said crowded and poorly ventilated environments make the virus hard to control, and prisons are porous with staff and inmates regularly travelling in and out.
England s mini Covid hotspots: Cases drop in 95% of council boroughs and number of patients in hospital has fallen to HALF its January peak but infections triple in micro-hotspots in 0.6% of wards
Cases are falling in almost all large local authority areas but rising in one in five of the smallest council wards
Two biggest risers were in Yorkshire, with positive tests increasing six-fold in week to February 9
The rates have tripled in 42 areas out of 6,791 in the most recent week, despite England s total lockdown
Hospital patient numbers are plummeting across the country to around 18,000 from a peak of 39,000