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With the final recommendations of the Boundary Commission published in July, we now know on exactly what boundaries the next General Election will be contested. While a new boundary scheme had been expected ever since the 2010 General Election, the political instability of the United Kingdom during the last 13 years of Conservative Government meant…
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Following the announcement that the Department for Education had instructed schools to close any building made with aerated concrete, Peter Lamb–Labour candidate for Crawley—has led calls for West Sussex to quickly identify schools in the county at risk of collapse. Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete was used in the construction of schools and colleges from the…
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I was speaking with a lady in Broadfield at the weekend and amongst other topics, the proposed Gatwick expansion came up. As it is now back in the news, I thought it might be useful to explain a bit about exactly what is being proposed and how it will be decided. Background Gatwick Airport was…
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Monday 4th September 2023 The Rt Hon Gillian Keegan MP Secretary of State for Education Sanctuary Buildings Great Smith Street London SW1P 3BT Dear Secretary of State, We are writing on behalf of our community to express the deep concern many people feel with your department’s handling of the potentially lethal issue of crumbling concrete…
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For many people in Crawley and across the UK, the rising cost of energy made last year’s heating bill hard to afford. With many households already struggling to make ends meet, Crawley took the unusual decision to provide warm spaces in public buildings to try to ensure residents had at least somewhere they could avoid…
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A few weeks back, I was out speaking with residents in Pound Hill South when one of the Labour councillors I was with–who had grown up in the neighbourhood–happened to comment that both Clive Way and Parham Road were named after the man to whom the land had belonged and that the land was subject…
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An analysis of ONS data reveals soaring inflation has left the average worker in Crawley a staggering £1,049 worse off since 2021. In 2021 the average wage in Crawley was £31,046. Real pay has since fallen 2.6% in 2022 and a further 0.8% in 2023. The falls come at a time when taxes are at…
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I recently came across a House of Commons Library data dashboard looking at armed forces statistics for every UK constituency, providing figures for the numbers of serving personnel, reservists and veterans for the town, with a map showing the proportions of veterans at the neighbourhood level. As ever, the neighbourhoods they use aren’t the town’s…
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New analysis – based on IFS research – from Crawley Labour reveals the huge impact of the Tory Mortgage Penalty. One in five adults are set to spend at least a fifth of their family income on their mortgage if rates remain at present levels. 1.4million are set to lose a fifth of their disposable…
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Amongst the various data apps Tom Forth periodically posts to Twitter was a tool for measuring the size of population within a circle around a point https://tomforth.co.uk/circlepopulations/. So, at 5km around Crawley we essentially have the Census count for the town. At 20km we cover the Gatwick Diamond of Reigate in the North, Burgess Hill…
Peter Lamb for Crawley 