Councillor Onnalee Cubitt is a Cabinet Member for Major Projects and Regeneration for Basingstoke and Deane and represented the borough as Mayor in 2021/2022. She grew up in Weston Patrick and has spent most of her life in Basingstoke. She has been a borough councillor since 2008.  

After leaving school, Onnalee was a voluntary worker in Sri Lanka for a year with Project Trust, teaching English and Mathematics in Jeevani, an orphanage in Moratuwa. Onnalee holds a joint Anglo-French BA Hons degree in European Business Studies and a Diplome d’Ecole Superieure de Commerce de Reims, ESC Reims.  

Onnalee joined Standard Chartered Bank as a graduate trainee in 1988 and spent the next 14 years based in London in international finance, where she also worked for a couple of other banks. Onnalee returned to Standard Chartered Bank in 1997 to be Head of Loan Syndications, running a multi-national team covering Africa, the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent and Europe. In 2001, Onnalee and her family came back to live in Basingstoke and Deane and founded a local building company specialising in restoration and extensions to period properties in Hampshire, Berkshire and London.  

Onnalee has been extensively involved with fundraising for a number of charities over the years, including St Michael’s Hospice, the Army Benevolent Fund and the children’s cancer ward in University Hospital Southampton, where she and her daughter Summer spent three years being treated for T Cell Lymphoblastic Lymphoma. 

Onnalee was a board member of Loddon Social Enterprise Ltd for over 12 years. She was a local education authority governor of Dove House School and more recently a local governor of Ashwood Academy where she successfully helped with the transfer of the Academy to Chiltern Way Academy. 

In her spare time, Onnalee is a portrait artist specialising in charcoals but she also loves painting in oil.