It’s been a lovely sunny week and I hope you’ve all be able to get out and about and enjoy the weather.
Sadly, for me it was mostly indoors this week as line by line scrutiny of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill continues – it’s important work, but it wasn’t half hot in that committee room!
On Monday the Boundary Commission published it’s initial proposals for new parliamentary constituencies. Suffice to say they’re ‘interesting’ in places, not least so locally.
The Commission’s proposal is to split Middleton in half, placing Alkrington and Rhodes into a new Manchester Blackley seat, whilst the rest will remain with the current seat and some more of Rochdale will be moved in to compensate.
Personally, I don’t think this is right and I’ll be writing to the Commission with my concerns, I’d also like to encourage you to do the same. I’ll be putting up a survey this week to make it easier to have your say.
This week I’ve also met with the development team behind the Mayfield regeneration project in Manchester to understand how they went about getting funding and investment in such a big brownfield project. We have lots of brownfield here in Heywood and Middleton which could be turned in to valuable mixed-use areas and even more green space (as they’ve done at Mayfield) – I have to say I’ve come away with some valuable insights.
Also this week I met with representatives from the travel industry as the sector is a major part of our local economy and I wanted to understand the challenges facing them as we ease out of lockdown.
Later on my team and I trained to be Dementia Friends with the Alzheimer’s Society. Supporting people living with dementia is really important and the more people understand about it, the better able we are to help those living with it to live fulfilling lives.
Finally, this week, I met with the Welcome Trust to discuss how we go about supporting vaccine roll outs in developing countries. Whilst we’re in the fortunate position to have both the resources and the expertise to develop and deploy a mass vaccination programme, other countries are a lot less able.
By helping to support them in their programmes, we’ll reduce the chance of new variants and speed up the return to normality for everyone.
Enjoy the sun while it’s here and as always, take care.
