Ben Bradley
Main Page: Ben Bradley (Conservative - Mansfield)
Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)
It is a pleasure to rise to speak in this final debate before the House adjourns for the recess. I am very much looking forward to getting out and about in my constituency in a way that has not been allowed in recent months. I want to visit every corner of Mansfield, getting back in touch with residents, and I know that colleagues here will be doing the same.
I want to take this opportunity today to raise a few local priorities and talk about the progress that has been made since I arrived in this place in 2017. I know the Minister will be keen to hear about progress in Mansfield because it is at the heart of the Government’s levelling up agenda. I can see the Minister nodding his assent, which I take as a hugely positive sign.
Coronavirus has been a challenge for the whole country, but particularly for communities such as Mansfield, where the levelling-up agenda is so important because, already, we are falling behind the rest of the UK. One of the challenges going forward will be supercharging that agenda to ensure that we catch up and fill that growing gap. I want to put on the record my thanks to the many people who have worked incredibly hard over recent months to get us through this crisis. I could name individual jobs and roles and everybody who has been involved, but, inevitably, I will be accused of missing somebody out, so, to anyone in my constituency who has played a positive role in recent months, I thank you for everything that you have done.
One of the key priorities in the recovery will be the skills and retraining agenda, which is something that is very close to my heart. I have talked a lot about that subject since I have been in this place. It is something that we have focused on since 2017, when I set up an education working group in my constituency, which brought together local partners—Nottingham Trent University, West Notts College and the local authority—to look at how we could have a positive impact on educational attainment in an area of great disadvantage. We have made some incredible progress, not least in the creation of a formal partnership between West Notts College and Nottingham Trent University, which is where I graduated from, so I am really proud to be able to work with it to do something positive in the constituency. Perhaps the most obvious example of the benefit of that partnership is that, for the first time, we will be delivering, through Nottingham Trent University, degree-level nursing qualifications from the college campus in Mansfield from September. That will give a huge opportunity to local young people, so few of whom have been able to access higher education, to be able to do so from home and to be able to get involved in a hugely rewarding and promising sector. The NHS is our biggest employer locally, so it really is a great opportunity for young people.
I was pleased to be appointed a further education ambassador by the Department for Education, enabling me to feed directly into that skills agenda and into that shift from pushing so many young people towards university to highlighting the benefits of further education, skills and apprenticeships, which will be hugely important in the coming months. I look forward to being closely involved in those discussions.
Sticking with the levelling-up theme, I want to raise the issue of the regeneration of town centres. As I have said in this place a number of times, one of the most striking signs—or perhaps the biggest symbol—of the decline of market towns in particular is seeing those empty shops and the tumbleweed across the centres and it really gets my constituents down. We have some big opportunities in the coming months to invest in that regeneration and to take positive steps to improve our town centres. In the past few weeks, we have been pleased to submit to the future high streets fund. Hopefully, we will secure a positive response from the Government—up to 25 million quid—to transform some elements of the town centre, including a shift towards delivering services from the town centre, where retail is hugely challenging. For instance, I would like to bring council services into the town centre to increase the footfall around our shops. I would like us to have a community hub with a health and skills office in the town centre, as well as more residential buildings. That would help to bring in visitors and increase footfall in the town to help support our shops. We have the chance to do that. We will also submit proposals in the autumn for the town deal. We have been very fortunate to secure this funding from the Government. Again, we will have opportunities to recover some of what we have lost and to bridge the gap. I would like to see us replace the Warsop sports centre, which closed last year, and ensure that, in an area with huge health inequalities, we are delivering the services and facilities that constituents in Warsop most desperately need.
Finally, in the last few minutes before I finish, I want to touch on local government reform, which will be hugely important to us and a local priority over the coming months and years. Following the coronavirus pandemic, local government finances are perhaps more challenged than ever and the system of two-tier authorities in Nottinghamshire seems more unsustainable than ever. In many ways, we have seen the best of local government through the crisis, with so many public servants, as they often do, stepping up to serve during times of great difficulty. This is not a judgment on any member of staff, but we now face the choice of having to raise taxes and cut services to make ends meet or rationalising our system of local government to do something more effective and more efficient, by having one instead of eight chief executives, 70 instead of 350 local councillors, and getting rid of some of the duplication in those services and doing things more effectively. I wanted to get on record my wholehearted support for delivering that for Nottinghamshire and for Mansfield in the next year or two.
With that, I draw my remarks to a close, but let me end by thanking the House of Commons staff for all their work in keeping us safe and keeping things going in recent months, and by wishing colleagues in the House a pleasant summer in their constituencies.