OXFORD’S next Lord Mayor has said he will make it his mission to meet and help all the city’s ethnic minority populations.

Lib Dem Alan Armitage, currently serving as deputy mayor, said he wanted to reach out to all of the city’s residents.

Mr Armitage, 61, said: “Recent statistics show that 20 per cent of the people in Oxford were born in another country.

“I am one of them, and the new Deputy Lord Mayor Mohammed Abbasi is another.

“About 20 per cent speak something other than English as their first language.

“I want to meet large numbers of people in different communities.

“I was amazed as Deputy Lord Mayor to meet the Filipino community, and to find out that it numbers some 3,000 people in Oxfordshire and 2,000 in Oxford city.

“My interest is in finding out about all these communities, seeing whether they interact with each other, and if not, then finding ways for that to happen.”

He added: “The first thing I want to do is get as much information as I can about who we have in the city and their various communities, whether they have community organisations which work with them and if we can help them.”

The North ward councillor said he also wanted to focus on provision of English courses for people who speak a different language and extend services to help people across the community.

Mr Armitage will take over from Oxford’s first Green Party Lord Mayor, Elise Benjamin, in May. The dad-of-two said he had not yet decided his Mayoral charities for the year, but he hoped to support Arts at the Old Fire Station and an asylum charity.

His daughters Alice, 28, and Nell, 21, will serve as consorts for events during the year.

Mr Armitage added: “I want to show a willingness to engage with people and organisations.

“People might find me rather more formal, particularly than Elise. Going by bike is not really my thing, so the council driver will be happy.

“Since the mayoral car is environmentally friendly, I won’t worry too much about that.”

And he committed himself to attending repatriations at Headley Way, saying: “As Deputy Lord Mayor, I have done quite a lot of these. It is very important to show our appreciation.”

Mr Armitage was born in Nigeria, where his father was working as a civil engineer.

He worked for 30 years in the IT industry, spending a lot of time in Europe, before being made redundant a decade ago.

He currently serves on the Immigration & Asylum Tribunal, hearing deportation cases against convicted criminals.

He served as a Conservative councillor in Aylesbury from 1989 to 1993, before leaving the party in 1996 over its Eurosceptic stance and calls for ID cards.

After a spell in the short-lived Pro-Euro Conservative Party, he joined the Liberal Democrats in 2001, and was elected as a city councillor in 2002.