Letters - Monday, February 7, 2022

Yet again plans have been passed for more housing to be built in Catterall.

How many more will be passed? Where is the infrastructure for us?

I am not objecting to houses being built as everyone needs somewhere to live but we need a doctor’s surgery, chemist, dentist etc.

We have overflowing schools and now I read today in the Post that Garstang Medical Practice is to have a £26k facelift with money provided by Anwyl Homes for yet more houses to be built in Catterall.

We were advised that plans had been passed for a doctors’ surgery of our own on Cock Robin Lane – where is it? Is it ever to be built?

When we go to the doctors in Garstang, the car park is full.

The doctors’ is not on a bus route from Catterall and to walk to it from the centre of Garstang you need to get over the canal bridge – not an easy task for elderly people with mobility problems or anyone feeling poorly!

Surely with the number of houses we now have, we deserve facilities of our own here in Catterall, not just in Garstang?

M Dashfield

Catterall Resident

LEVELLING UP

People of Blackpool deserve better

As the old saying has it ‘if wishes were horses , beggars would ride’. And by the time you have glanced at or even read through the Government’s Levelling Up White Paper, with its 330 plus pages and 12 ‘missions’, you might expect whole stables of Grand National hopefuls ready and saddled up.

But there aren’t any. There is little or no new money - most of it has been previously announced by the Treasury. The targets are years away - only to be achieved by 2030.

So full marks to the Gazette, as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove had their whistle stop round Blackpool to promote all this, with photo-op visits to the tramway (with its fully modernised track, stations and a new fleet of trams funded under the last Labour Government) and the Winter Gardens (which along with the Tower was bought for the town in 2010 with joint funding from that same Government and Blackpool Council), for raising the issue of the existing Levelling Up fund with the PM.

Three weeks ago, the national Centre for Inequality and Levelling Up, under its head Professor Graeme Atherton (incidentally a Blackpool man, born and bred ) laid out a detailed analysis across the country as to where the money from that fund had gone .

Despite Blackpool heading up the list for the Index of Multiple Deprivation in 2019 , this showed the town has not received ANY money from the Levelling Up Fund.

Graeme Atherton and the Centre followed this up a week later with a publication entitled Levelling Up - What is It and Can it Work?’ Supported by the All-Party Group of MPs for Left Behind Neighbourhoods, the contributors (of which as a former Shadow Skills Minister I was one) stressed that the outcomes from Levelling Up post pandemic need to deliver higher wages and job security, improved public services, childcare, health and education across all ages and a green economy and environment for towns like Blackpool.

In my piece I drew on my experiences with groups and individuals (both as a Blackpool MP over two decades and a Shadow minister from 2010 onwards ) to argue that we need urgently to have major new initiatives to support new skills and training - to retrain those adults whose jobs have become obsolete or to have good careers in the new world of climate change and the green economy. That requires both far more rapid timescales than the White Paper envisages and an urgent concentration on the families, individuals and disadvantaged groups that are not currently getting a pipeline to those new skills.

I mentioned young carers, care leavers and young veterans and armed forces leavers in my references to Blackpool. But there are other categories as well - such as families needing two or sometimes three part time jobs to make ends meet, often in inadequate housing and low wages, and the challenges of transience.

That’s why it was right for your reporter Shelagh Parkinson, to remind us recently of the letter that Blackpool Council’s leader Lynn Williams sent to Scott Benton setting the record straight about the effects of the Government austerity cuts over the last decade to the town of £1.2bn, a figure and lost consequences that can never be made up for by this White Paper.

That’s also why the White Paper should not be just handed down by Michael Gove and meekly accepted. It must be fully discussed, and challenged by all counicls, institutions, charities and businesses.

There must be involvement from the places, like Blackpool, that need it most .

We simply cannot wait any longer. Government is talking in the White Paper about starting ‘Skills Pathfinders’ of which Blackpool might be a pilot, with promises of Whitehall and different departments working together with local bodies - but again no target date for it .

Meanwhile exploding inflation, record increases in gas prices, and rising interest rates are affecting more and more people in Blackpool.

Students and graduates here will be hit by new Government regulations freezing the student loan repayment threshold. And there is no timetable to address the unfair funding disparities in England between health services (a key issue for Blackpool with extra pressures from a large ageing population and transience but no additional funding).

No wonder policy experts, organisations and the general public will be underwhelmed by this White Paper. The people of Blackpool deserve better - and it will take more than a day trip to the seaside by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to convince them.

Gordon Marsden

MP for Blackpool South

1997-2019