Tom Oliver

After reading History at Cambridge  where he was President of the Union and Chairman of the Tory Reform Group, Tom worked for 6 years in advertising, latterly for BMP (now DDB London). His clients included Barclays Bank, British Rail and Volkswagen.

In 1997, Tom took a degree in Landscape Architecture and moved to the National Trust, running  the  £7.6m restoration project of Croome Park in Worcestershire, Capability Brown’s first complete landscape design.  

In 2002, Tom started work at the Council for National Parks. Here he was responsible for CNP’s evidence to the public inquiries into the New Forest and South Downs National Parks, and for CNP’s work on the relationship between the armed forces and the National Parks.

Since 2003, Tom has been Head of Rural Policy at the Campaign to Protect Rural England, an environmental NGO established 80 years ago this year.  In the past year, Tom has spearheaded several influential reports, including ‘Your Countryside, Your Choice’,  a vision of the countryside in 2035, as well as campaigning to prevent the closure of key laboratories of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, including Monkswood in Cambridgeshire.

His family owns a small tenanted livestock farm in East Sussex.