Last Friday afternoon, I held a first public meeting about regenerating Waterlooville where Councillor Alex Rennie announced that Havant Borough Council is creating a Waterlooville Regeneration Reserve which will be available to help develop the vision. This is extremely helpful as we need a plan in place to leverage other money, including the funding I am working on obtaining from the government. This will pay for officers’ time, design work, and public consultations.
We will be having more public meetings to listen to everyone's views, so please look out for them if you are interested. I will publicise them here as well as social media and directly in Waterlooville, as I did with this one. I am extremely grateful to St George’s Church for hosting the meeting, and thank you to all the residents and businesses in Waterlooville who took part.
I had other interesting visits too including one to Busy Bees pre-school in Bishops Sutton where I toured its forest school, in the woods of one extremely kind benefactor.
This was followed by a visit to a constituent who had fallen down the stairs and is now paralysed. It is horrendous how lives can be turned upside down in a flash with a massive impact on a family.
My team works extremely hard to help people in very difficult circumstances and I am so grateful that I have such amazing staff working with me as we have helped a huge number of people. I then went on to the specialist dental service in Petersfield which looks after people with special dental needs including home visits too. We had a long chat about dentistry and the future and I will be talking to Ministers about this.
It was a mixed week in Parliament and I was hoping to make a contribution to the debate on Gene Editing on Wednesday but it was truncated as we had a motion on the train strike beforehand.
To fill some time, I sat and listened to the opening remarks by the Secretary of State for DEFRA and was pleased that he agreed with most of what I was going to say. I will be following this Bill carefully as I agree that we must be using science to help protect animals and plants. For instance, we could help provide more resilience for cattle against Bovine TB and develop crops that can cope with climate change and pests. Having less pesticide spraying our crops would be a great achievement.
Gene editing has been developed slowly over centuries but we now have the capability to speed that up and I think it is a good thing. For those that are concerned, it is only altering the genes within the organism, not adding anything new to them. We are leading the way in this technology in Europe, which is now looking to bring in legislation on this too.
I had a work experience young person with me on Tuesday. I love showing young people what we do in Parliament and I hope to see some of them as politicians of the future. I do recommend having another job outside politics. It is important to have experience to bring when formulating legislation. My summer camp is now full and eight young people will be working with me at the end of July
I attended a service to commemorate the end of the Falklands conflict 40 years ago. I spoke on this in parliament on Monday too. I remember the conflict so clearly as a student as several family friends were involved in different capacities.
I visited the Falkland Islands in 2016 with the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme and we visited all the battle sites and cleaned all the memorials that have been erected next to where the battles or sinking of ships took place. It was a very moving visit. We must always defeat unprovoked aggression, including in the Ukraine.
On Tuesday, we had an interesting Delegated Legislation Committee. DLs happen every day and we vote on tiny bits of legislation rather than bringing them to the main chamber. It is one of the reasons that the Chamber is so often empty as we are working hard in other committee rooms.
This one was on Hovercrafts and pollution. As we only have one hovercraft route in the UK between Southsea and Ryde in the Isle of Wight, I was curious and asked the Minister what impact this legislation is going to have. Very little, seemingly, as this legislation does not affect internal hovercraft journeys but that might change and we have to put this in place in case. We have Griffon Hoverwork Ltd who make hovercrafts in Porchester so I hope that I will be able to visit them.
The Times Commission on education launched their final report this week basically agreeing with everything that I put in my policy document a couple of years ago. Now we have to convince Ministers and I will be working on that over the next few months.
Sadly, rail strikes are due to take place next week on June 21, 23 and 25. I hope the RMT union will reconsider and reach a deal with the train operators and Network Rail. I can see no winners from this dispute. The rail system needs modernising and the proposals do not compromise safety. Passenger numbers have not recovered from the pandemic. My fear is these strikes will drive more away. South Western Railway will be running a very skeletal service on the strike days, and on the days in between strikes there will be a reduced service. More information is on the SWR site here.
Lastly, I had a significant birthday yesterday, a new decade has arrived. Having lost many friends to cancer and other illnesses, I feel very blessed to have got this far and see no reason to slow down. I have just put my name forward to play netball in Parliament………
Have a good weekend.
