Daniel Moylan

Daniel Michael Gerald Moylan, Baron Moylan (born 1 March 1956) is an English Conservative politician and a member of the House of Lords.

Moylan was born in Birmingham on 1 March 1956.

He was educated at St Philip's Grammar School, Edgbaston.

In 1975 he went up to the Queen's College, Oxford, where he took a degree in German and philosophy.

He was president of the Oxford Union in the Michaelmas term, 1978, and in November secured Richard Nixon as a guest speaker.

Moylan joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in December 1978.

After some time in the FCO's Central and Southern African Department, he undertook Afrikaans language training and was posted to the British Embassy in South Africa as Third Secretary, reporting on the progress of South-West Africa to independence as Namibia.

In 1982, Moylan left the FCO and joined County Bank, the investment banking subsidiary of National Westminster, and stayed with them until 1986.

At the general election of 1983, he stood as the Conservative candidate in Birmingham Erdington and lost to Robin Corbett by a narrow margin.

In 1986, he joined Security Pacific Hoare Govett as a Vice-President and left them in 1987 to set up Egan Associates, a business providing training courses to financial institutions.

Moylan was elected to the Kensington and Chelsea council for the Queen's Gate ward in May 1990, and became its deputy leader in 2000, after having tried to become its leader.

As a councillor he specialised in environmental matters, including waste, environmental health, parks, transportation, and planning.

These resulted in a redesign of Kensington High Street soon after Moylan became deputy leader of the Council in 2000.

One aim of this was to rationalise street furniture and create a more pedestrian-friendly environment, and to achieve this Moylan had to reject professional advice and transfer the risks of the project onto himself and other councillors, after detailed consideration of the public safety risks.

From 2006 to 2009 he chaired the London Councils Transport and Environment Committee.

Plans for a similar improvement of Sloane Square in Chelsea proved controversial and were shelved in 2007, after a campaign against them, but a clutter-free redesign of Exhibition Road, in London's museums district, was achieved in 2012.

In August 2008, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, appointed Moylan to the Board of Transport for London.

In February 2009 he became deputy chairman, in which position he served until 2012 and again from March to May 2016.

In 2009, Boris Johnson appointed Moylan to chair the Mayor's Design Advisory Panel, with responsibility for delivering the Mayor's vision for the public realm as set out in his "Great Outdoors" policy statement.

In 2010, the London Evening Standard described Moylan as "one of London's most powerful and colourful politicians".

Moylan was responsible both for bringing the organisation's finances back into order and for terminating the public-private partnership initiated by the Blair government, brought to a close in May 2010 with TfL's acquisition of Tube Lines from Ferrovial and Bechtel.

In May 2010, Johnson gave Moylan the responsibility for promoting this scheme.

In 2010 and 2011, working with Transport for London officers and with City Hall, he oversaw the publication of a major report in two parts called A New Airport for London.

In April 2011, he resigned from the Kensington and Chelsea council's cabinet in order to concentrate on his work as Deputy Chairman of Transport for London, although he did a second attempt to become leader of K&C council in 2013, when he came equal second.

In 2011 Moylan was appointed as Chairman of the London Legacy Development Corporation, a Mayoral body created by statute to own and manage the Olympic Park, heading it for the duration of the London Summer Olympics of 2012 and the Paralympic Games.

He replaced the Labour peer Lady Ford, and was formally opposed by the Labour/Green majority on the London Assembly.

He made significant changes to the leadership of the organisation, which were not welcomed by the longer-serving Board members.

Until he left these roles in June 2012, Moylan oversaw many improvements to highways and parks around the capital, including the restoration of Piccadilly and St James's Street to two-way traffic.

In September 2012, Johnson himself took over as Chairman of LLDC, so that Moylan could focus on promoting their policy on a new London airport.

Moylan was the Airport Aide to Boris Johnson as Mayor of London and worked to promote the Mayor's concept of a new or expanded multi-runway hub airport to the east of London, which would replace the existing Heathrow Airport.

In September 2012 the Government announced the establishment of an Airports Commission, chaired by Sir Howard Davies, to review options for new airport capacity.

In August 2013, Moylan was appointed to the board of Crossrail as a non-executive director, replacing Sir Mike Hodgkinson as the Transport for London nominee.

In September 2014, he was appointed to oversee City Hall's work on the Crossrail 2 project.

In July 2015, as the Mayor's adviser on the project, he stated that "delay should not be an option," as London is growing at the rate of two inhabitants an hour, and that by 2030 would have a population of ten million.

He remained a non-executive director of Crossrail and a member of the TfL Board, until the mayoral election in May 2016, when Sadiq Khan became Mayor.

Within London, Moylan has promoted new approaches to streetscape drawn principally from the Dutch "shared space" concept developed by Hans Monderman.

The 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in Kensington and Chelsea took place while Moylan was a member of the council.

He stood down as Kensington and Chelsea councillor in May 2018.

Before being created Baron Moylan in September 2020, he had been a diplomat, a merchant banker, and a member of Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council.

He had also served as chief airport adviser to Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, advocating a new hub airport to the east of London to replace Heathrow, as Johnson's principal adviser on Crossrail 2, as Chairman of the London Legacy Development Corporation, as deputy chairman of Transport for London, and as co-chairman of Urban Design London.