Profile: Meet the Green councillor who is the newest member of Kent County Council

On April 9, the Green Party pulled off the amazing political coup of snatching a by-election victory for a seat on Kent County Council which many predicted would go to Reform UK.

The winner was Rob Yates, a former Margate mayor, who fell in love with the town and the sunsets over the sea. Local Democracy Reporter Simon Finlay went to meet him…

A few years ago, when Rob Yates’ boss was asked to provide a reference, instead of waxing lyrical about his employee, he wrote a single word: “Stubborn.”

Kent County Council’s first by-election winner of the current, and probably last ever, term of the authority, will have a front-seat, back bench view of what the future may offer.

KCC, under Reform UK leader Linden Kemkaran, is what she calls the shop window for Reform’s ambitions to govern the country.

Recent and usually accurate polling by the More in Common organisation sees the Nigel Farage party with 324 seats, the Greens considerably less. It is a fair guess there are individuals in the KCC Reform group who may well find themselves with parliamentary seats come 2029.

Cllr Rob Yates, already schooled in local politics, may need to draw down on his reserves of stubbornness and tenacity for what he is about to face.

He lives in a bungalow not so far from the sea in Cliftonville. There is Green Party paraphernalia everywhere – leaflets, posters and garden signs.

Even days after his election victory, it is clear that this has been a hub of some considerable activity in the two month-long campaign.

Apart from the energy of the candidate and his eclectic band of activists, the Greens adhered (knowingly or otherwise) to one of the golden rules of underdog politics – be first out of the door.

It was good fortune that the former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas was somewhere nearby to come along to endorse Cllr Yates, before Reform UK had even named Marc Rattigan as the candidate.

There followed a procession of political big hitters to drop by – Dame Emily Thonberry (Labour), Lord Mackinlay (Conservative) and Robert Jenrick (Reform UK).

For Reform UK, who had polled 40% last May, this was a must-hold seat and few observers seriously believed they would fail.

But the Greens seemed to take Bob Dylan’s view: “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

The appearance of party leader Zack Polanski in the WhereElse? music venue on the eve of polling day was, possibly, the moment and the momentum that won it.

Had Nigel Farage been free (he wasn’t) to pop into Thanet for Reform, who knows if it might have been different.

But Margate is changing and so is British politics. Prior to Reform’s victory in 2025, this was a solid, no-nonsense Conservative stronghold for Lesley Game. The idea the Green Party could actually win here would have been fanciful even a year ago (the candidate polled 12%).

Rob Yates was born 39 years ago in Tooting, south London, to parents Alan and Angela, both doctors, but moved north with the family including his older brother, Chris, to West Yorkshire when he was four years old.

He attended the fee-paying, all-boys Leeds Grammar School, where academic attainment was everything.

“It all felt like a bit of a game,” he reflects, “It was rather less a place where you went to learn but a place to achieve – the school was there to help you pass exams.

“I wasn’t one of the cool kids. I hung around with the outsiders…the cool kids were always doing their hair or checking their appearance.

“Having doctors as parents, it was all results, results, results. After my GCSEs I told my mum I thought I hadn’t done very well and she said ‘That’s all right, Rob, we still love you’.”

He’d actually passed them all with top grades.

After securing three good A levels, it was off to Aston University in Birmingham to study management and strategy.

It included a year’s placement and after five months in market research he quit (“it was so boring”) and managed to get an internship with Lord (John) Taylor of Warwick, whose distinction of becoming the Black Conservative peer was somewhat overshadowed by being jailed for fiddling his expenses.

“I wasn’t at all political back then but I badly needed a job and that was interesting… I got to see a side of politics that was different. It also taught me a lot of things that are wrong with our political system.”

It is also when he learnt a valuable lesson in life: “Never ask ‘So, what do you do?’ You should ask ‘What keeps you busy?’ It’s more subtle and gets a more interesting response.

“Can’t remember who told me that but it wasn’t Lord Taylor.”

Cllr Yates left Aston with a 2:1 and embarked on a career within the renewable energy sector, an industry that had long fascinated him. Fifty job applications later and he landed a customer management role with Enercom in Cambridgeshire, travelling from the Orkney islands to Cornwall during his four years there.

And it was up in the Scottish isle that the best performing wind turbine was located, running at full capacity most of the time.

Cllr Yates then spent two years at a Swindon-based utility company RWE, then to London Array which has an offshore wind farm in the Thames Estuary and supplies power to East Kent.

It also brought him to Margate to live, firstly in Arlington House, the 18-storey, Brutalist monolith that rather divides local opinion – but he loved the place.

He recalls: “Arlington House has a really diverse mix of people living there – think tank experts, university academics, famous artists and then there were people with COPD drinking six cans of Stella every day.

“During the five years I was there, there was only one lift working so the lift that did work became a community experience and you got to know a little about everyone’s lives during those short interactions. You realise that politics is everywhere.”

But perhaps, more importantly, was that the sun set within view of his west-facing flat, a sight that changes with the complexions of the seasons and one he has yet to tire of.

The councillor loves a local saying, which he feels sums up the Margate mix: “Each to their own.”

Cllr Yates became active in the local Labour movement, using his Arlington House flat windows to fashion a protest slogan “BLOCK BREX.IT” in 2018, which made a point and headlines.

At the time, he described it as an “art installation” which he hoped would make people “think and realise the conversation isn’t over.”

Later, stubbornly, he says he defied Labour pleas not to protest at the transfer of asylum seekers from accommodation in Cliftonville to the Bibby Stockholm floating migrant accommodation in Portland, Dorset, earning some notoriety in the pages of the Daily Mail.

He was elected to Thanet District Council (TDC) in 2019, holding cabinet and shadow cabinet finance roles – with one achievement he is proud of being the creation of a hardship fund for people in council tax arrears.

Having got a taste for politics and sensing he wanted more, he stood for the parliamentary candidacy against the favourite, Polly Billington, for the 2024 general election.

It was to be the start of the parting of the ways. By the time he applied to become Kent County Council candidate in May 2025, he claims he was told his selection failed because he had not campaigned vigorously enough for Ms Billington.

The Green Party membership beckoned but not until he was sure that Zack Polanski would be leading it.

Cllr Yates is a thoughtful individual, with friends holding a variety of views, including one who supports Reform UK.

Further afield, he admires footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaign to fight child food poverty while he has watched the emergence of US Democrat Zohan Mamdani, the Mayor of New York, as someone who “is not afraid of taking risks and getting stuck in”.

Asked if he fancied a tilt at being an MP, he hesitates before saying carefully: “My focus is local problems and local people. I want to fully understand KCC and TDC so I can best serve the residents of Thanet. That’s where my energies are going to be spent.”