Christmas Adjournment

David Johnston Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[David Johnston (Wantage) (Con)]

Let me I start by commending the hon. Member for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins) on what she said in her speech. I got to know her a bit through the armed forces parliamentary scheme. I know it will have been a difficult thing to talk about, but it was powerful and an important message to people to check themselves for cancer, because it can affect any of us.

I must start with a note of sadness on behalf of the local community that I represent, because last week we lost Hasnath Miah, who was a sort of champion or local hero in the Didcot area where I live. He had been homeless for part of his life and had been helped by the Didcot community, including through free meals, to get back on his feet. He swore that if he was ever in a position to help other people, he would do so. He had a hugely successful restaurant called Indian Dream, and in the pandemic began giving free meals to key workers, the homeless and young carers, just in the way he had been given food. In total he gave away more than 10,000 free meals. Very sadly, after a stroke two weeks ago, he died at the age of just 49. There has been a huge outpouring of grief for him in the Didcot community. I send my condolences to his family—may he rest in peace.

I will pick out a couple of greatest hits from the subjects I always talk about in this Chamber. The first is the lack of GP surgeries. We have had huge population growth across my constituency, particularly in the Didcot area. GP surgeries are always promised, but never arrive. It is a total failure by the local council and local health leaders: they say they are committed to more surgeries and they keep promising them, particularly in the run-up to local elections, but they never emerge. Meanwhile, our existing GP surgeries work flat out all year round and are now closing their books because they simply cannot cope. They do not have the buildings to be able to take on more patients, never mind the doctors and so on. We have to make progress on the issue, which I will be talking about even more next year.

This month marks 58 years since Grove station—or Wantage Road station, as some prefer to call it—closed under the Beeching cuts. We took part in the bidding process for new stations; the Department for Transport was impressed with our bid, but we were not successful this time. I will keep going until we are. Our area has had huge population growth, so the station makes economic sense, social sense and environmental sense. I am absolutely determined that we will get it reopened.

Sticking with the environmental theme, I am the lead sponsor of the Local Electricity Bill, a totally cross-party initiative that now has the support of 314 Members—tantalisingly close to half the Members of this House. If any hon. Members listening have not yet supported it, will they please take a look? It is a complete no-brainer. Our local communities would very much like to generate more renewable energy, but the start-up costs are far too high at the moment. Essentially, the Bill would remove start-up costs so that energy generated can be sold to the local community.

We have worked hard with the campaign team and with officials in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to change the nature of the Bill. It is now much more about local energy and renewable energy sources acting as “sleeves” for bigger suppliers and teaming up with them for metering and maintenance purposes. It would mean a flowering of renewable energy, which lots of people would like to see locally. I am hopeful that we can make progress with the Government on the Bill next year, particularly in relation to the Energy Bill.

I did a couple of things for the first time this year. I held a crime summit locally, because I was increasingly getting reports of all sorts of crimes, from business break-ins to drug dealing. The theme that probably came out most strongly from people who attended the event, which I held with Thames Valley police, was antisocial behaviour. We have a tendency to underplay antisocial behaviour: if it does not involve great violence, murder or someone’s house being robbed, we do not take it as seriously as we should. For people who are not used to it, in an area where they have not seen it before, a sudden increase in antisocial behaviour is very unsettling. I will be doing more work on the issue next year with the police, whose response I was pleased with: they are going to go away and look at how they handle these things.

This year I also started a work experience campaign with local employers—partly because that was what I did in my previous life as a charity chief exec, but also because work experience had all but disappeared during covid. I encourage hon. Members to do that sort of thing, if they are not doing it already, because it is clear that as a result of covid many employers now have a lot of staff working at home and have simply got out of the habit of providing work experience. They sometimes offer virtual work experience, which is fine—it is better than nothing—but it is not the same as being in the workplace. I was really pleased with all the employers that got involved: Rebellion, Hachette, Astroscale and lots of others.