ARCHIVE - frc 2011

April 2011 - Forge Magazine

 

Archive - Forge Magazine - April 2011
Getting to know you - Meet the members of FRC Council

Mark Weston joined the FRC Council in July 2006 having been appointed as the British Equestrian Federation’s representative; he is a member of the FRC’s Disciplinary and Finance Committees.
Mr Weston is the British Horse Society’s Director of Access, Safety and Welfare. He is a highly-experienced lawyer, having specialised in local government, highways, rights of way, planning and environmental cases. Before joining the British Horse Society he was a Director of Rossendale Borough Council in Lancashire.
He has been a lifelong rider, pony clubbing, hunting and eventing until he fractured his neck while competing at Solihull Horse Trials, which now means he just hacks out. The late Katie Meacham took his event horse ‘Mad Murdoch’ to Badminton and Burghley.
At the British Horse Society he is responsible for developing the Society’s charitable aims relating to access, safety and welfare. The Society has recently campaigned to preserve the permissive access that equestrians enjoy in many of our forests; and to stop the indiscriminate breeding of horses.
As far as equine welfare is concerned, the Society has launched, and continues to run, the first ever campaign aimed at tackling the issue of equine overproduction of horses and indiscriminate breeding, with the aim of trying to tackle the problem at the source. And it has conducted the first ever nationwide survey into the prevalence of ragwort, collecting the essential evidence needed to fight for the better legislative control that is needed to keep ragwort’s progress in check and to protect our horses.
The Society’s new accident recording website www.horseaccidents.org.uk will help provide the Society and all equestrians with relevant empirical data when lobbying the government and local councils on equestrian issues.
He is a member of Defra’s equine exotic disease core group; a Director of the British Horse Industry Confederation; he sits on the Shropshire Local Access Forum; was a member of Natural England’s Stakeholder Working Group on Unrecorded Public Rights of Way.
Mr Weston says: ‘I am very pleased to be able to serve on Council, and to be the BEF’s representative. Having a lifelong interest in horses and now having a professional interest in their welfare I enjoy being able to offer the benefits of that experience to Council along with my legal experience’.