This time last year I wrote about the prospects for achieving peace in war torn areas around the world and asked how we would cope in those situations living in daily fear for the lives of our children and ourselves. Progress is a difficult concept to gauge in these circumstances and the only issue which is certain one year later, is that wars continue to rage and the innocent continue to suffer.
Christmas is a time for reflection and resolution, providing us with the space and peace to dwell upon our lives and the lives of those around us with a view to understanding how our lives can be improved in the new year to come.
There is a huge amount of work to be done here in Copeland in 2009 and in addition to the expected focus I will fetch with regard to improving our schools, health services and local economy, there are two other issues in particular which I will be focusing on with specific regard to our area - child poverty and unemployment.
Child poverty in our midst is a scandal which shames us all. At the beginning of the 21st century in one of the world’s largest and most prosperous economies, the notion of children, in our streets, on our estates and in our villages living in or close to poverty is sickening.
Labour has lifted 600,000 children out of poverty since 1997 - a superb feat - and we have now pledged in law our commitment to eradicate child poverty in Britain by 2020. I fully support this, but I believe that concerted local action by the right organisations can eradicate child poverty in Copeland long before 2020. That is why I have formed a new child poverty action group, fetching together local children’s service providers, health professionals and others with the aim of wiping out child poverty in Copeland before 2020. I have asked the Howgill Family Centre to lead the formation of this group and it will meet early in the new year to begin its work. With few exceptions, I believe that if every MP in the country brought this level of attention to this issue then we could eradicate child poverty through local action long before 2020.
Related to this of course is the issue of unemployment. We are in uncertain economic times, yet unemployment in Copeland has fallen by over 60% since 1997 and has rested at the level of 3.2% for some time now.
In the New Year, I will be introducing a Bill, written by me, to the House of Commons designed to tackle local unemployment wherever possible by placing a duty upon local companies to assess the available skills base in their local area before simply hiring – usually temporary – workers from other parts of the country. This isn’t meant to be anti-competitive, restrictive, or unduly burdensome upon companies. It certainly isn’t intended to force companies to hire people for whom they have no role or use. However, it is meant to act as a means of growing local economies and the strong societies which they then underpin. To comprehensively understand the potential impact of such a Bill, remember that less than half of the £1.3 billion annual budget for the Sellafield site is actually spent locally
So in 2009 the work goes on; new schools, new health facilities, new nuclear investments, new universities and more – building a new West Cumbria for us all.
Happy Christmas.