It has been a fortnight where several campaigns of mine have come together alongside several local issues.
My work experience campaign has been a great success and I’m very grateful to all of the employers who offered placements to local young people this year – including Rebellion, Nuvia, Elementa, Taylor & Francis, Newton Europe, Oxford Sigma, Hachette, Diamond Light Source, Astroscale, ELS, Evotec, Oxford Instruments and Immunocore.
I visited a number of the young people participating while they were on their placements and they had all enjoyed their time. They found the workplaces friendly and felt they had learned new things. The whole point of this campaign was that work experience placements had dried up as a result of Covid and lots of people working from home – but they remain a vital way for young people to learn the skills the workplace needs.
Last week it was standing room only in Westminster for the first meeting of the Community Energy All Party Parliamentary Group, which I chair and which is sponsored by Power for People. As readers know, I am the lead sponsor of the Local Electricity Bill, which is designed to remove the barriers to local generators of renewable energy selling that energy to local people.
The bill now has support from 311 MPs, within touching distance of half of the House of Commons. There was a great atmosphere in the room with people having come from as far as Scotland to attend! The bill has changed significantly as a result of conversations between the campaign team and civil servants and we remain hopeful of seeing it incorporated into other legislation.
Another issue I have campaigned on is anti-social behaviour. In my first couple of years, most of the complaints I received were about anti-social behaviour from unauthorised traveller camps. This is something I raised in the House of Commons as it was frequently accompanied by local people being subjected to abuse, theft and damage to their properties.
In the past few months, I have received increasing complaints about broader anti-social behaviour and crime, including drug dealing and business burglaries. I have made visits to businesses that have been burgled – sometimes repeatedly – and I am now holding a crime summit on 10th November 2022 in Wantage at the church of St Peter and St Paul, OX12 8AQ. You can sign up to attend on my website.
We also saw Back British Farming Day last week. I am a regular visitor to the constituency’s first-rate farms – and a regular consumer of their meat and dairy products! – and I see first-hand how hard our farmers work. We should do all we can to support them, not least by buying local wherever possible.
