Coming back this week from meeting local council leaders from across the country gave me plenty of opportunities to reflect on the state of it.
And it wasn’t positive, sadly. Nothing is working, least of all this current Government. The Tories have broken everything. Look at most of our public services. The long waits and difficulties accessing the NHS, dentistry and GPs. The growing numbers forced to access food banks to make ends meet despite often working full time hours.
Look at the major utilities, making massive profits on soaring bills while delivering poorer services. You may have seen reported locally, a major new business couldn’t move into Metcalf Way because of insufficient energy supply infrastructure at County Oak.
We’ve had water neutrality – massive and economically damaging planning restrictions on expansion – because we don’t have sufficient water infrastructure. When was the last time a reservoir was built?
It almost begs the question which next of our utilities are not going to be able to deliver, because of their chronic failure to properly invest.
And it’s important to stress, we aren’t some backwater. We’re a major economic centre in the South East next to one of our national airports!
Then there’s food inflation, rising prices on everything despite falling energy prices. The care sector is in trouble. There’s a housing crisis, with the private rental sector increasingly unaffordable, driven by a national failure to protect and invest in council housing to meet that need.
Transport, after years of the trains being disrupted by delays and cancellations from a privatised industry hiking up passenger fares, they’ve just announced nearly every railway ticket office in England will close.
Councils, starved of finance for 13 years now, local services are stretched despite our best efforts.
We need to build a better Crawley and a Better Britain. I am convinced a Labour Government will build that Better Britain.
But it’s taken the Tories time to pull everything down, it will be no shorter time to build it back up again. The Tories crashed the economy, we will have to fix inflation and interest rates.
Cllr Michael Jones
Leader, Crawley Borough Council