-
New figures reveal a crisis of public computers cuts across the South East. 624 computers have been lost from libraries in the South East since 2010, and 57 Job Centre computers have been cut in Southern England since 2014. This is a digital exclusion double-whammy that punishes the poorest in our society, especially as Universal…
-
Crawley Borough Council’s Cabinet has agreed to implement measures to improve social mobility across the borough. The recommendations were agreed after the Government’s Social Mobility Commission highlighted the borough as one of the poorest local authority areas in the country for social mobility in their 2017 report. Ranging from the development of social housing to…
-
While most residents will have had leaflets through already and many will have had a doorstep call, yesterday marked the official beginning of this year’s Crawley Borough Council elections. Crawley gets more than its fair share of elections. In three of every four years a third of Crawley Borough Council is up for election, with…
-
Councillor Peter Lamb has backed Labour’s pledge to protect private renters in England from eviction with new ‘indefinite’ tenancies, based on rules currently in place in Germany. The change would revolutionise the private rental market, potentially benefitting 10,759 of Crawley’s households (covering approximately 22.6% of all 47,576 properties in Crawley). German tenancies last, on average,…
-
For the last five years, Crawley Borough Council has worked hard to show we can maintain services, despite cuts from Government. While West Sussex County Council provides less and less for more and more council tax, our local NHS has gone into financial Special Measures and Crawley’s Police can’t afford the officers they need to…
-
How does a man come to the point of planning and carrying out the murder of 50 men, women and children peacefully praying in places of worship? For many the answer is easy: the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque killings was evil or just a lone madman, but that answer is both simple and wrong.…
-
A new report by Independent Age reveals that the quality of care homes has worsened in the last year in more than a third of English local authorities. Independent Age’s figures show that 22.1 per cent of West Sussex’s care homes are failing – down 4.8 points in just a year. Crawley Borough Council Leader…
-
Last weekend I was a guests on Sunday Politics South East, alongside Sussex’s Police Commissioner, the MP for East Worthing and Shoreham and the Leader of Medway. Being up against three Conservatives might seem a little unbalanced, but four years on West Sussex County Council provided plenty of experience standing up for our area in…
-
I’m A Celebrity star and world silver medallist diver on hand at the K2 Crawley for the free family Open Day on 16th March. Singer and songwriter, Fleur East, will be at the K2 Crawley from 10:30am to meet and greet the public and help showcase the centre’s fantastic facilities. Fleur East, X Factor 2014 runner-up,…
-
Representing Crawley at national events, I get the chance to speak with mayors and council leaders responsible for running local services across the country, with funding council services during Austerity being one of the most regular topics of conversation. Through all these conversations I’ve yet to find another authority which, despite annual cuts from Government,…
