Michael Meacher*
Labour Party
Oldham West and Royton Constituency
Address
7 Healds Green
Chadderton
OL1 2SP
Don't let Oldham lose everything it's gained
The central issue in this election is recovery from this banker-generated recession, a public sector-led programme of job creation to slash unemployment, and protection of key public services.
We need tougher and stronger action on all these three fronts. The banks should be more vigorously held to account for their greed and recklessness which so nearly brought the whole economy to its knees if strong and decisive Government action hadn’t been promptly taken, without which joblessness would have been far higher and overall damage to the economy far more damaging.
But the banks should now be made to pay in full for the havoc they’ve caused and should be split up so that casino investment banking can never again threaten the jobs, the homes and the incomes of the rest of society.
The Government has already spent billions on providing training and employer incentives to get many more young people back into work, as a result of which youth unemployment is now much lower. But it is still not enough. Because private investment has declined markedly, we need a major job creation programme led by the public sector as the quickest and most effective way of reducing the banker-caused national deficit and getting people off benefit and into work and paying taxes. That job creation should concentrate on house-building, desperately needed in Oldham to reduce the 6,500 families on the waiting list, but also on the new green digital economy on which the future of the nation depends.
The third necessity at this time is to protect our public services. Our Tory opponents have promised to cut these drastically — in terms of redundancies, pay cuts and pay freezes, and short-time working — as the main means to cut the deficit. We strongly reject this. It will kibosh the recovery back into recession. And it’s brutally unjust to make low-paid nurses, teachers, dinner ladies, hospital porters, and council workers pay the penalty for the arrogance, greed and selfishness of super-rich bank executives who’re still awarding themselves bonuses running into millions of pounds. The real way to deal with the deficit is through public investment in jobs, economic growth — and putting a permanent levy on the banks till they’ve repaid all their ill-gotten gains.
Nowhere is it more important to protect our public services than in Oldham. The gains to this borough over the last 10 years have been staggering. Take health. Government spending on the NHS in Oldham has far more than doubled — from £179 million in 2002 to a stunning £425 million in 2010.
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Biography
A Labour MP for Oldham since 1970, he served as a government minister in three different departments in the 1970s and was Environment Minister from 1997 until 2003. The 70-year-old is married with four children.
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In 1997, people waited 18 months or more for treatment needed urgently, and often died waiting. Now, thanks to the brilliant work of Gail Richards and her team in Oldham PCT, it’s no more than 18 weeks. Almost all (97 per cent) of Accident & Emergency patients are now seen and treated within four hours. Now 95 per cent of cancer patients in Oldham are seen within two weeks, and the new target this year will be within a week.
The extra health facilities in Oldham are unprecedented. There are four new GP practices in Hollinwood, Fitton Hill, the town centre, and Coldhurst catering for 25,000. There are five new NHS dental practices now up and running catering for 3,000 patients. Altogether there now an extra 600 doctors and nurses working in Oldham since 1997. And the capital programme of new Health Centres in Oldham is without parallel — £100 million in all.
There is the huge new £22 million Integrated Health Centre, including a walk-in centre, in the middle of town. The Royton Health Centre will open in June at a cost of £9 million. The Glodwick and Moorside Health Centres are already completed, and the building of the Werneth Health Centre starts in June. In addition, key hospital developments have included a new diagnostic and lab centre at a cost of £17 million, plus four more acute wards creating 75 new beds at a cost of £30 million, plus of course the brand-new Christie’s cancer diagnosis and treatment centre at the Oldham Royal.
The investment in Oldham’s schools has been scarcely less as a result of Labour’s enormous expansion of both quality and quantity in public services. A new primary school has been built every year in Oldham since 1997 at an average cost of £6 million per school. Two fine new secondary schools have been built at Radcliffe and Failsworth at a cost of £56 million, and following on from those successes the £220 million programme of Building Schools for the Future is now being launched in Oldham.
Then there’s the 10 new children’s centres built and funded by Labour in Oldham over the last decade. All told, Government revenue for education funding has been increased in the town by 6 per cent every year since 2000, with all class sizes reduced to below 30. In addition, nursery provision has been extended to every child over the age of three, and Government Playbuild Grant has replaced and renewed play areas throughout Oldham.
Housing remains the area of greatest social need in Oldham today. But even here the Labour Government has poured in vast sums to renovate and refurbish old, overcrowded, degraded, damp housing. The Decent Homes funding (£86 million), the PFI 2 money for sheltered housing (£120 million), the PFI money for major renovations at Clarkwell, Crossley, and Primrose Bank (£140 million), the Major Repairs funding (£59 million), and the ALMO grant (£30 million) add up to nearly half a billion pounds invested by Government in Oldham’s housing over the last five years — though this will now be lost in future as a result of the housing stock transfer to FCHO as a semi-private organisation. Even this ignores a further £200 million ploughed into housing investment in Oldham over the last five years from Housing Association Grant and Housing Market Renewal funding.
Crime figures show burglaries down by 50 per cent since 2002 and car crime down by 55 per cent over the same period. There are now 100 more officers on the beat in Oldham, and in addition Labour has introduced Community Support Officers (there are now 80 in the borough). We have also promised in our manifesto to establish a 24 hour/seven day a week response team to combat anti-social behaviour. I could go on. Metrolink, Labour’s free bus passes and winter fuel allowances for pensioners — Oldham residents have received over £60 million for cavity wall and loft insulation under the Warm Homes scheme.
And Oldham’s recycling rate, which was 2 per cent in 1997, is now a highly successful 43 per cent,
My central point is to plead that we do not wreck this once-in-a-lifetime transformation of our borough by drastic cutbacks in services, pay and jobs. That’s what our political opponents have pledged to do — with half a million cuts in public sector jobs nationally, a pay freeze throughout the public sector, cutting working and family tax credits which form a central part of many families’ income, slashing benefits, paring back services across the board. Oldham simply can’t afford to let the Tories back in power – just think of what Oldham was like under the Thatcher regime and compare that with now.
It has been the greatest privilege of my life to represent this borough in Parliament over the years. I have always tried to do so with honesty, integrity and commitment. I have been hugely assisted by an extremely able and dedicated team in my Oldham office led by Shirley Buckley and Peter Dean. I am greatly indebted to them, as I know are thousands of Oldhamers. I ask no more than that we should be empowered to continue to offer this same service and commitment to the people of Oldham in whatever are the tasks that lie ahead.
