PRIOR to entering Parliament I was a development banker focusing on industrial and infrastructure projects in the world’s poorest countries. But I came into politics to put my investment and economic development skills to use back in Cornwall and the UK more widely.

I have been honoured to be able lend my time, generally just a few hours a week, to the International Development Committee but, with increasingly difficult to square priorities around growth, equality and effectively-funded public services, the time is right to put my name forward for one of the three vacancies on the Treasury Select Committee.

It is in the spirit of these three competing but not mutually exclusive goals of economic growth, progressive outcomes, and efficient taxation, that I launched my recent parliamentary research fellowship ‘taxation for growth’ - a landmark research offering from a parliamentary office. I am now looking to take this evidence-based approach which, as a trained economic historian and Chartered Financial Analyst with nearly a decade of corporate finance experience, is dear to me, forward to the Treasury Select Committee, and for the benefit for the UK’s public finances.

My international development work will in fact continue but become even more focussed as the Treasury has a significant role to play in these matters, not least on for example the issue of global debt reform, where the role of the City of London is crucial. Together with my continued focus on the World Bank and IMF system, my commitment to ensuring that development finance is strengthened as a force for international development, remains, and through the Treasury Committee, my commitment to using development finance as a tool of domestic economic developments, via institutions such as the National Wealth Fund, will be strengthened further.

I came into politics to get to work our domestic economic development, putting my investment experience to work for places like Cornwall which haven't always shared in the spoils of a growing economy.

I occasionally hear that some - who perhaps don’t appreciate that the scrutiny of the Select Committees are one of the bits of British democracy we should be proudest of – and a chance for backbenchers like myself to speak critically and weightily of one’s own government, say that this work is ‘lofty’. But I think it’s entirely appropriate: We have to apply fresh thinking to tackle real challenges at the top of the economic chain – like the issue of 'Pretty Poverty', where Cornwall’s investment needs have been consistently understated by the treasury who have, under successive governments, failed to see deprivation hidden by picture postcard scenes; and, in parallel, we must realise the benefits of potential opportunities for local people – such as the biggest source of lithium in Europe sitting right under my constituency.

It’s also entirely right that Cornwall, therefore, should be viewed as globally significant, and crucial, since national security is a foundation for our Plan for Change and our plan to make Britain a clean energy superpower.