Change you can believe in

Please find below my Politics Column for this week’s Whitehaven News.

Change. That’s what we need after 14 years of Tory government. They promised the earth to places like West Cumbria to win votes and then abandoned us without delivering. Now they’re doing the same again and expect you to believe it’ll be different.

There is no greater example of this than the failure to deliver new nuclear.

In the 2017 Copeland by-election, the Tories promised to deliver Moorside and its 21,000 jobs. Parliamentary Questions I had submitted recently reveal that when that deal fell through the government not only did nothing to intervene, they did nothing to assess the impact on our area. In two subsequent general elections, Tories made the same promise on new nuclear. And they are now at it again. 

Yet, when they are in government, they’ve done nothing but drag their feet over new nuclear. Even when presented with a credible, privately funded £6 billion plan to build small modular reactors on a site near Sellafield – a plan which would generate cheap local energy and create 600 local jobs – they’ve come up short. 

All we get is government by press release, announcing yet another report or consultation that gets us no closer to the new nuclear we so badly need.

I’m not going to take the Tory route of promising you I can deliver new nuclear. The commitment I make is that I will fight tooth and nail to get it over the line. And I’m optimistic we can get it done.

On day one in the job I will write to the new Secretary of State and Great British Nuclear making our case and asking for an urgent meeting. I’ll be pushing for changes to the timescales for decisions about sites and designs, which have dragged on for far too long. And I’ll be demanding that government lift the block on the sale of land near Sellafield and instruct the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority to allow it to be sold to make way for new SMRs to be developed there quickly.

You can have confidence that I’ll deliver because that’s what I’ve spent a career doing outside of politics. As a teacher, as the CEO of a national charity, and as the chair of a landmark independent review to reshape how we support vulnerable children and families in England. 

Read more about my plan for West Cumbria at joshforwestcumbria.co.uk/myplan.  

That’s change you can believe in, and I hope I can earn your vote so that I can help to deliver for Whitehaven and Workington.