The Charter Trustees of the City of Bath elected the 785^th Mayor of the City, Councillor Andrew Furse, to take office on Saturday 9 June 2012 at their Annual Meeting and Mayor Making Ceremony at Bath Abbey.

The Mayor's theme will be 'NEET Opportunities - the Business of Youth'.  Andrew is an advocate for community and recognises that one of the challenges facing the city, and the whole of the UK, is youth unemployment.  This is shown as a statistic called 'NEETS (Not in Education, Employment or Training)'.

He explains, "I am looking to engage with the City of Bath College and local businesses as we need to ensure young people have the right skills for today's labour market especially in the Bath.  The Council is active in tackling the graduate retention issues in the city and wider district but we all need to give young people brought up in Bath the inspiration to enter employment, education and training.  Those already in education and training need the right tools to enter employment and the independence this brings."

Andy has been a Councillor for 16 years. He previously served the City as Deputy Mayor of Bath in 2009 and was first elected to serve Kingsmead Ward in 1994.  When Bath City Council was abolished in 1996 he was Liberal Democrat Bath Constituency Chairman overseeing Don Foster's 1997 General Election defence and was elected onto Bath & North East Somerset Council in 1999.

As a Chartered Electrical Engineer and Fellow of the Institute of Railway Signal Engineers he has travelled all over the world.  He met his wife Mei-Ling when working on the Taiwan High Speed Rail project in 2006 and she will be his Mayoress.  Andy's employers are Altran-Praxis in Bath and he is currently the Lead Safety Assessor for London Underground's Northern Line Upgrade and Subsurface Railway Upgrades and a re-signalling project in Copenhagen.

He has come a long way since he left school in Bideford to join British Rail and went to college in Reading on a day-release for an HNC in Electronic Engineering.  After studying for a degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering at University College London he worked in South Wales, Bristol and London.  After two years in oil exploration in Tunisia and Chad,  Andy returned to the rail industry in Chippenham and it was this job that brought him to Bath in the late 1980s.

The Mayor of Bath's ongoing charity is The Mayor of Bath's Relief Fund.

Deputy Mayor Cllr Dine Romero 

The new Deputy Mayor will be Councillor Dine Romero, who has represented Southdown Ward for 10 years.  She is particularly interested in the Life Long Learning and has a first degree in Natural Sciences with Biology and a Masters in Science.

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