This is a good budget for Portsmouth people. The personal allowance moving to £10,000 means that 8286 Portsmouth people will be taken out of tax completely in 2014, and 86,732 Portsmouth people will benefit from the tax cut – the majority of our working population. Hard working people will be £700 better off each year. This is important as bills for energy and food have gone up and this should go some way to helping us.
Thank you for all the people who have responded to my survey so far. I am hoping to write to everyone that has written to me but it will be a slow process as we have received over 2000 responses. We are also analysing all the data at the moment and I will put it on the website very soon.
The biggest issue for nearly everyone is the National Health Service which I can understand as health affects everyone. I am really pleased that Healthwatch, the public’s watchdog on the NHS, is now active in Portsmouth and I am on the interim board.
Cllr Luke Stubbs and myself will be putting a motion to the City council meeting in June to ask that a new road should be named after Margaret Thatcher.
With the funeral for the late Margaret Thatcher taking place on Wednesday, Conservatives in Portsmouth are calling for the city to permanently honour the memory of the late Prime Minister by naming a road after her.
Today I attended the Memorial Service for the victims of Halabja which I have done every year for the last 5 years since getting to know the Kurdish community in Portsmouth. This year was the 25th anniversary of the massacre at Halabja on 16th March 1988. It was not the only atrocity heaped on the Kurds by Saddam Hussein but has come to symbolise much of their suffering.
The Portsmouth News kindly printed this letter today responding to their article of 29th March about the Ofsted report on Portsmouth’s Education Authority.
Ofsted have just sent the report of their findings of Portsmouth education to Portsmouth City Council. They don’t make good reading for a city council run by the same political party, the Lib Dems, for a generation of schoolchildren. A whole generation of young people who have been let down due to the lack of political vision of education by our local authority.
I am deeply opposed to the closure and merger of children’s centres in Portsmouth for the following reasons. There is no education or training for becoming a parent which is one of the most important and difficult jobs and it is extremely important that parents are supported from the start whatever background you come from.
