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The Labour Party’s annual conference officially kicks off tomorrow morning and, as with all parliamentary candidates, I will be attending. While each of the major political parties has an annual conference, there are big differences between them, not least with how big a role members play. On the one extreme there is the Conservative Party…
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Although it comes up less frequently since I stood down as a county councillor, road safety issues tend to regularly feature in councillors’ inboxes. In some way or another, many of these emails tend to suggest that there is a risk of loss of life or that West Sussex would be forced to act if…
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Labour have released data from FOI requests showing the waiting lists for adults and children waiting in A&E for mental health treatment, as calls grow for the Government to address their failed handling of mental health services across the country. Since 2010, the Conservative Government have cut one-in-four mental health beds across the country, as…
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With interest rates at 5.25%, there are currently 15,000 families in Crawley who are facing an average £260 increase on their monthly mortgage payment. What residents in Crawley, and across the UK, desperately need is a Government plan to ease the hit from soaring mortgages and to halt repossessions. This lack of action can be seen…
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Attention around school buildings is understandably currently focused on the issue of deadly concrete in schools. As already covered, in West Sussex there are 114 local authority maintained schools (we have no data on the condition of free schools or academies within the county), which potentially contain Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete. The problems with RAAC…
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Over the summer, Loughborough University, in partnership with the End Child Poverty Coalition, released their latest annual report looking at child poverty in the UK at the constituency level. As ever, the delay in national statistics being made publicly available means that the report focuses on the year ending March 2022, prior to the start…
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I have previously written about how, for all the negativity the town sometimes receives about being a ‘concrete jungle’, Crawley actually contains one of the highest levels of urban green space in the country. In fact, our level of ubran green space is five times the national average. What might come of more of a…
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The House of Commons Library has recently released a data dashboard breaking down data around GP and patient numbers by constituency. It highlights that the biggest mismatch between doctors and patients is most heavily concentrated in the UK’s geographical South East. To some extent this isn’t a surprise. As a general rule population density in…
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A few days back, I ran across a spreadsheet detailing council grant funding, spending and core spending power since 2015 across English local authorities. Of these, the most significant figure is core spending power, as it outlines what the government expects a council’s total funding will be. There are several problems with core spending power…
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One year on from the Tories’ disastrous mini-budget, new analysis from Crawley Labour – building on a StepChange survey for BBC Money Box – reveals a staggering 18,166 Crawley adults have to cut back on essentials like heating and electricity to keep up with debt repayments. 29,974 are in financial difficulty, and 11,354 have changed…
Peter Lamb for Crawley 